Passive health monitoring is a system of interlocking technologies that provides more timely response to crises. In doing so, passive monitoring improves health outcomes for residents. Additionally, this system will allow senior living communities to experience a wide variety of business outcomes by increasing resident retention and occupancy.
Continue reading “Improving Retention & Occupancy with Passive Health Monitoring”
By their nature, traditional nurse call systems are reactive. Not only do they only respond to an incident that has already occurred, these systems require residents to take specific action during a crisis (when their abilities might be diminished).
Monitoring via environmentally embedded sensors takes the notion of resident care, safety, and caregiver alerts to a whole new level. In passive health monitoring, AI is employed to gather and analyze information on a range of health indicators. Residents do not need to activate the systems. Staff can be entirely hands-off until an alert is registered. Just as information is collected automatically, AI software uses it to continuously create a dynamic picture of a resident’s vital information, analyzing data over time in order to learn the patterns indicative of wellness and those that may signify potential danger.
Given the powerful potential of this technology, there are many benefits to the resident, staff, family, and operators. However, the biggest win may very well be better clinical outcomes. With its potential for preventive care, passive monitoring offers the possibility of keeping residents out of the hospital and helping them to remain independent in their residences for longer. Continue reading “Preventive Care with Passive Health Monitoring”
Senior housing operators for many years turned to buttons, pull cords and other nurse call systems, as effective, but rudimentary, solutions to address seniors’ increased fall risk. Although workable in some ways, these systems have continuously fallen short in many important areas, including timeliness, capability, and productivity. Continue reading “Who Benefits From Passive Health Monitoring?”
“As the population ages and people live longer in bad shape, the number of older Americans who fall and suffer serious, even fatal, injuries is soaring.” As fall numbers continue to climb, each year, 2.8 million older people are treated in emergency departments and approximately 800,000 older people are hospitalized for fall injuries. Adjusted for inflation, the direct medical costs for fall injuries are $31 billion annually. Hospital costs account for two-thirds of the total.
While Timed Up and Go is valued in part for its ease and simplicity, that ease is also responsible for limitations in its predictive value. The limitations of Timed Up and Go beg the question of whether viable alternatives or supplements to TUG exist. Medical professionals have in fact developed other means of assessing fall risk.
A key aspect of fall prevention is fall risk assessment, and the gold standard in fall risk assessment in recent decades has been the Timed Up and Go (TUG) test. The TUG test has the virtue of being a quick and simple assessment. It simply entails timing a patient as he or she rises from a chair, walks three meters (10 feet), and returns to a seated position. The time it takes to complete the task (assuming the patient is able to complete the test at all) has been correlated to fall risk in some studies. Depending on the source, cutoff times ranging from 10 seconds and up, to 30 seconds and up, indicate a patient who is at high risk of falling.
