A cloud-based technology developed at the University of Notre Dame is having profound impacts on resident satisfaction, family-to-staff engagement and occupancy gains for the senior living providers deploying it.
The SmileTM solution from CarexTech aims to alleviate transition-of-care problems for both assisted living residents and their families by strengthening the relationship with facility staff members.
Developed at Notre Dame’s Innovation Park accelerator, the software-as-a-service platform provides assisted living communities with a cloud-based solution, through which they can send and receive communication from families via text massages or emails from any computer or mobile device.
The technology also facilitates the planning of actives tailored to residents’ individualized needs and assists staff in furthering social engagement by allowing them to create groups of residents based on shared interests.
“Through tools such as lead management and best practice sharing across internal caregiver teams and across communities, Smile provides for a distance competitive advantage in the market,” stated Sarv Devaraj, a chaired professor of Management at Notre Dame and co-founder of CarexTech.
Providers who have already rolled out Smile have reported a “fivefold increase” in family satisfaction and occupancy hikes of 10%, CarexTech noted.
“Too often when we do immediate outreach to families we are imparting some negative news, so it is a gift to be able to use this tool to let families know about birthdays, activities and the good times mom is having,” stated Sharon Risser, managing owner of Waterford Crossing, a community located in Goshen, Indiana.
CarexTech intends for the Smile tech to help serve the 41% of the 1.7 million Americans in assisted living communities who do not get a weekly family visit, the company stated in a release.
A research survey conducted by CarexTech revealed that out of 120 families who were in the process of choosing an assisted living community for a loved one, 94% said the availability of some kind of family-staff engagement technology would be a factor in their choice.
“In addition to the obvious advantages to residents and their families, assisted living communities benefit from Smile through greater satisfaction, higher retention of residents and repetitional advantages in attracting new residents,” stated Devaraj.
The SmileTM solution has been implemented in several pioneering communities and CarexTech is now marketing the technology nationally.
Written by Jason Oliva
Companies featured in this article:
