Nov 11, 2015Episcopal Senior Communities has been expanding its real-time location system (RTLS) deployment at its five campuses. What began four years ago as an emergency-call system for residents at a single community has expanded to operate at all Episcopal locations, along with a wander-management function. Most recently, the organization has installed temperature sensors for its refrigerators and freezers used for storing food and medications, and updated the RFID pendants worn by its residents and is installing the RFID tags on walls. The technology is provided by Stanley Healthcare.
Episcopal Senior Communities provides residential and aging services for senior citizens in northern California. The company emphasizes a home-like environment at each of its campuses, and for that reason encourages residents to move freely around their home area. With that philosophy, the need for security becomes more complex, because if a resident were to need help, he or she might not always be near an emergency pull cord, or might have moved to another location by the time help arrives.
All of the communities are managed independently, and each had its own emergency-call system, according to Chris Dana, Episcopal Senior Communities' VP of IT. "Each safety and security program was implemented separately," he says. Consequently, the company sought a way in which to standardize and manage the systems organization-wide.
Episcopal Senior Communities already had a robust Wi-Fi-based infrastructure in place at all of its facilities, so it began looking for a solution that would leverage that system for such functions as emergency calling, door access control and wander management. Dana says the organization sought what he calls a "Swiss Army Knife" solution that offered all necessary services using a single software platform. "We felt the data we could pull out of a system should be driving our decisions across the entire organization," he explains.
The company began working with RTLS technology provider AeroScout prior to that company's acquisition by Stanley Healthcare in 2012.
About four years ago, Episcopal launched a pilot of the technology at its St. Paul's Towers community. At that time, the company offered an AeroScout Wi-Fi pendant to about 50 residents. Each individual's name was paired to his or her pendant, which transmitted a unique identifier via a Wi-Fi signal that was then received by the campus' existing Wi-Fi network. AeroScout MobileView software, residing on a local server, determines the tag's location based on the signal strength (as received by the facility's Wi-Fi access points), as well as on triangulation. If a resident pressed the button on his or her pendant, an emergency transmission was sent to the system indicating that the individual needed help, along with that person's approximate location.
The residents liked the system, the organization reports, and the facility found that its staff members were able to respond to calls quickly, and that the system could capture a record of those responses as employees—carrying Apple iPods running Instant Notifier, the MobileView software's mobile component—followed prompts to indicate they were responding. The facility has since expanded the system to all residents who request it, with a total of 224 out of the 252 currently living at the facility currently using the pendants. (Those who don't tend to be in the health-care center and, therefore, are typically confined to a bed.)
"We saw value in the platform and wanted to roll it out," Dana says. Since then, Episcopal Senior Communities has adopted the personal emergency solution at all five of its communities, along with wander-management functionality. The organization not only provides pendants to be worn by residents (the Wi-Fi tags are also available in the form of a wristband), but is installing pendants on walls as well, so that residents or personnel can quickly press the device's button if a pendant on a lanyard or wristband is unavailable at the moment that a crisis occurs.
For wander management, Episcopal has installed exciters at doorways. If a pendant or wristband tag receives an exciter's signal, it transmits that exciter's ID number, along with its own. The MobileView software then determines whether the individual associated with that tag is permitted to be within that vicinity. If he or she is unauthorized to be there, the system triggers an alert that workers in the area can receive via their iPods. (An audible alert is not sounded, in order to ensure that residents aren't distressed by unexpected noises.) "It gives us a graceful way [to learn of an incident] without having an alarm going off," says Karen Kemp, Episcopal Senior Communities' project manager and systems analyst.
During the past 12 months, the organization has also been installing Stanley Healthcare sensor tags to control temperatures within refrigerators and freezers. If a sensor detects that a designated temperature threshold has been exceeded, it issues an alert to the appropriate employees' iPods.
According to Dana, Episcopal is now looking into ways to use the system to better understand if a resident requires assistance, even if that individual has not requested it. For instance, if a resident shows an unusually low or high activity level, data indicating that status can be captured by the MobileView software and analyzed by the staff.
The important point for Episcopal, says Steve Elder, Stanley Healthcare's senior marketing manager, is not to introduce new layers of infrastructure as its RTLS use expands, but rather to leverage the data already being gained with the system. "It's not so much that more hardware will never be required," Elder notes, "but the next step for the industry [as a whole] is to leverage the location data for not just reaction to a problem, but to understand residents better. It tells them a lot about mobility and can act as an early-warning indicator for changing behavior, like wandering or becoming sedentary."
The latest update of the system is the introduction of Stanley Healthcare's new P10 pendant at the San Francisco Towers, which is being piloted at that location. The P10 is designed to be easier to push and more comfortable to wear, according to Pamela Stitt, Episcopal Senior Communities' physical therapy director. "It has a softer feeling," she states.
With the new pendant, personnel can only turn off an alert by proceeding to the wristband or pendant itself and deactivating the alarm at that location. In that way, the system can ensure that workers do not turn an alert off while failing to actually respond to that resident's request. The technology does not require a health-care facility to use the technology in this way, Elder says, though such an option is accepted as best practice within the industry, he adds. The data provides a historical record of that response for the communities as well. For instance, Kemp explains, if a resident's relative reports that the resident claims to have pressed the pendant 10 times without response, management can simply refer to the records to confirm whether that perception was accurate.
