Why Redstone Chose ReturnSafe to Safeguard their Nursing Homes

Overview

Nursing homes were probably the hardest hit during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Seemingly, every day there were horror stories on the news about outbreaks at nursing homes. However, once the industry realized the level of contagiousness, guests were quickly banned from visiting and the number of employees entering each day was locked down to minimize transmission. During this difficult time, forward-thinking elder care facilities, like Redstone Presbyterian SeniorCare, turned to technology to not only mitigate the risk of an outbreak but also give their residents, employees, and families peace of mind that the facility is a safe and healthy place to be.

Challenge

Scalable solution to return to full capacity

Their initial response to managing who was allowed inside the facility was a very manual process. Employees needed to sign in and answer daily survey questions with pen and paper each day. Not only was this not scalable as the team needed to return to full capacity, but it was also a daunting process for the employees as they would not be able to do their daily health screening until they arrived at work. This manual process made compliance reporting painful and resulted in long lines at the front entrance during shift change.

Results

A user-friendly solution to minimize risk and stay ahead of compliance

“Working with the ReturnSafe team has been phenomenal,” says Loucks, who has been managing the implementation for Redstone. “The team has been so quick to customize the app to fit our needs. For example, in Pennsylvania, if people visit certain states, they need to quarantine for 14 days upon return. We were able to set up a new question in our screener app that pulls these states right from the Department of Health website, as those states are changing sometimes daily. This ensures that we always have an accurate list on our app to remain in compliance.”

When asked about the rollout to their employees, Vicki Loucks, the Chief Operating Officer was excited to say, “The feedback from the employees has been really positive. The employees really like the fact that they can do this at home before they come to work. And I keep hearing how user-friendly it is and how much they really enjoy it. We didn’t even make it mandatory during the pilot, and we had people jumping at the opportunity to use it.”

As the President and CEO, John Dickson is also looking at the big picture from an organizational point of view. “One of the added opportunities with a product like this is on the risk management side. [Our screening app] gives us a head start in lowering our risk profile as an organization. This product offsets our risk because it identifies issues up front instead of allowing [an infected person] to come into our environment. Capturing the risk before it comes through our front doors is a great benefit.” All in all, the team at Redstone is taking an innovative approach to a difficult situation and we are proud to be their technology partner.

What's Next

Overcoming vaccine hesitancy

Redstone originally expected 40% of their residents and staff would get vaccinated. However, as the first round of vaccines concluded they were able to increase participation to over 80% of employees and 99% of residents! Three pillars were crucial to their success: being a trusted source of information, establishing a safe and inclusive culture, and building trust with employees and residents by establishing proactive health safety measures.