Improving resident safety and employee well-being in senior living communities and other long-term care residential settings through technology is the goal of research getting underway at the University of Colorado College of Nursing and School of Medicine on the Anschutz Medical Campus.
The team will create and test decision support technologies that provide resident and condition information to help long-term care providers make care decisions. The research is funded by a $1.35 million grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, part of the US Department of Health and Human Resources.
Assisted living will be a setting of the first phase of the study.
“Poor quality of care and safety in long-term care facilities — particularly for persons living with dementia — leads to preventable falls, emergency visits, hospitalizations, injuries and even increased mortality,” Mustafa Ozkaynak, PhD, who is leading the investigative team, said in a statement. “It was made even more obvious to the public during the COVID-19 pandemic, so we need to work in this area and disseminate foundational knowledge to improve care.”
The three-part study will occur over three years.
In year one, the researchers will analyze policies, rules, procedures and work culture to understand how long-term care employees work in their communities. The investigators will hold workshops with residents and determine how to use decision technology — alerts and predictions — to improve care.
Decision support technologies will be implemented at the end of year two, and the researchers will evaluate how staff members use them.
Ozkaynak said that those decision support technologies have been shown to increase patient safety and decrease staff member burnout in hospitals and primary care settings, but limited research exists on how they could address the unique challenges of long-term care facilities. The research will begin this fall at two assisted living communities in Denver as well as at a nursing home in rural Wyoming.
“Long-term care facilities in the United States are in crisis. They’re facing low resources and high staff turnover,” Ozkaynak said. “With high turnover, all the training investments for employees are gone if that employee leaves. Then, those trainings become very limited, which is a problem. So resident outcomes and staff outcomes are intertwined.”
