By: Reid McDowell—
Muncie, IN—Its efforts to improve collaboration with post-acute providers helped Bethel Pointe, a skilled nursing facility in Muncie, IN, win Gold in the Safety category in the Skilled Care track of the McKnight’s Excellence in Technology Awards competition.
Since safety is a cornerstone of excellent care, the community was looking for ways to improve in that area. It chose Olio for a collaboration platform that allows health systems, physicians and post-acute providers to communicate and connect in real time on a patient’s condition in a single digital environment. Olio enabled Bethel Pointe to collaborate with each other and staff at the hospital to ensure each staff member has up-to-date information on each patient and their progress.
A key element is an “escalation” feature, which allows skilled nursing staff to “escalate” a resident via a digital alert to the resident’s physician team so they can intervene on the resident’s behalf.
“Our experience is leading to better patient outcomes,” administrator Derek Gibson told McKnight’s Long-Term Care News. “Our facility takes extremely sick patients, sometimes with more comorbidities (the simultaneous presence of two chronic diseases or conditions in a patient) than we can handle. When this happens, we can now communicate with the acute-care provider immediately as to what is happening with the patient and collaborate to see if the patient was possibly discharged too early or if there is something more we could do to prevent a re-hospitalization. We fully expect the relationships with our acute-care partners to flourish for many years to come.”
