For healthcare providers with multiple facilities, onboarding and placing new residents can be a complicated and tedious process.
One senior care company is hoping it can use digital solutions to provide for a more efficient and streamlined intake process.
Long-term care, rehabilitation and respite care provider Blupoint Healthcare has opened a central intake center at its offices in Whitinsville, MA, the company recently announced.
The center will use electronic medical records, referral portals and real-time bed board technology to help place residents and patients at one of its four facilities.
“After analyzing [customer relationship management] data and reviewing lost and denied referrals amongst all of our facilities, we noticed that, what one facility had to deny due to clinical capabilities, another facility could have admitted,” Blupoint spokeswoman Michele Morin told McKnight’s.
Bedboard digital platforms, which show available rooms within a facility or network, are an underused tool, Morin said, with many places still using physical whiteboards, writing and erasing placements by hand.
In those instances, staff members must contact each facility to identify availability and possible fit, a suboptimal way of making real-time decisions, Morin said.
Blupoint uses PointClickCare to manage its health records; the platform is able to manage a variety of tasks, including referrals, bed availability and document retrieval.
Using electronic systems to help centralize the intake process has been identified as a tech innovation for care providers since just before the pandemic. Several other companies that have adopted bedboard platforms over the past few years include Stonegate Senior Living in Texas and Ernest Health, which operates in 11 states.
“We knew when we launched this initiative we would be asking people to step out of their comfort zone. It was a bold move,” Morin said. “Buildings were used to having an admission person onsite and now they had to trust the process. But it works and they have embraced it.”
