According to the latest NIC MAP Market Fundamentals Data report, occupancy rates across assisted living and nursing care facilities have been on an upward trend for the eleventh consecutive quarter.
With persistent demand continuously outpacing the industry’s ability to meet them, assisted living directors are looking for groundbreaking ways to cut expenses, optimize operations, and bolster their growth.
And the answer could be right within their reach: healthcare automation.
What Is Healthcare Automation?
Healthcare automation uses technology and processes to make healthcare delivery, administration, and management more efficient, accurate, and cost-effective with minimal human intervention.
Software technology Jotform explains that while automation in healthcare can take many forms, most tools focus on streamlining the repetitive, time-consuming, but vital tasks healthcare staff must complete daily. In the care home industry, such tasks include documentation, scheduling, medication management, inventory, and resident monitoring.
Here are a few popular healthcare automation tools:
- Electronic Health Records (EHR) Software
- Pharmacy Automation Software
- Medication Adherence Applications
- Medication Dispensing Robots
- Patient Engagement Platforms
5 Ways Automated Health Systems Can Elevate Your Assisted Living Facility
Integrating automation and technology into your assisted living facility can transform your quality of service, enhance resident experience, and ultimately drive your organization toward sustainable growth. Here are some of the ways it can do that:
Optimize Medication Pass
Automated medication dispensing systems that are integrated with their pharmacy’s software help ensure precise and timely delivery of medications. Designed to organize and package the correct dosage at the scheduled time, it significantly reduces the risk of medication errors.
Automatically dispensed and pre-packed in multi-dose compliance packaging, the medication comes in clear dose cups with detailed labels, high-visibility font, color-coded schedule indicators, and tear-away med sheets—all of which help optimize med pass and increase medication adherence.
Intelligent medication carts and storage devices can also contribute to care home automation by integrating the premium compliance packaging with medication verification systems, making med pass more organized, convenient, accurate, and time-efficient.
Medication management applications, like the MyDoses app, also automate reminders and alerts to help ensure patients and their caregivers adhere to medication schedules. The app works hand-in-glove with smart medication storage devices like DoseBank and DoseMinder, significantly improving resident medication adherence.
By streamlining the medication pass process, automation not only enhances the accuracy of care but also saves a large chunk of your staff’s time, allowing them to focus on other essential aspects of resident care and ultimately improving the overall quality of care in the facility.
Read More: How MyDoses Increases Your Med Pass Efficiency
Streamline Resident Management
Investing in a robust care home management software—one of the most impactful automation tools for residential care facilities—can help you achieve efficient and accurate control over all the resident management activities that occur within care homes.
An assisted living management software like CareCatalyst allows you to add residents’ demographics and patient data into the HIPAA-compliant system, which helps you organize all your resident information in one place. It features fully customizable forms that help you automate the process of taking in new residents—from application forms and general questionnaires to consent forms and medical assessments.
CareCatalyst also provides real-time bidirectional integration with certain pharmacy software. This helps you get rid of all the manual work involved in gathering and updating information on your residents’ medications, routines, and med pass times. Your software can automate all that for you.
Enhance Communication
While not all care home management software offers communication features, premium brands like DosePacker’s CareCatalyst specialize in fostering clear communication and collaborative care among care home teams, pharmacies, and healthcare providers. It allows you to generate automated resident, medication, and inventory updates for the appropriate teams.
Medication management applications like MyDoses also automate in-app notifications, which help ensure care home staff administer doses to the residents at the correct time. Application users can set up reminders and notifications to alert the provider, caretaker, resident, or even the resident’s family when it's time for med pass.
Secure Data and Stay Compliant
HIPAA-compliant care home technology helps you speed up time-consuming processes, manage patient records, and automate complex workflows while keeping your facility’s protected health information secure. Using cloud-hosted servers for your technology, for example, allows you to automatically (and regularly) back up your data and store it in secure data centers so you won’t have to worry about losing it.
To help ensure maximum compliance, automation tools also typically come with a comprehensive reporting module that can generate custom reports you need for regulatory audits and inspections.
Reduce Medication Waste
Investing in automated medication packaging not only enhances the patient experience and improves the quality of care, but it also drives your organization toward environmental sustainability.
An automated drug inventory allows you to keep precise track of the medications you purchase, dates of purchase, and, if it’s integrated with a pharmacy robot, the number of drugs dispensed. By ensuring your stock matches supply and demand, you can drastically reduce the number of leftover medications your care home has to dispose of.
Automated dispensing and packaging also protect capsules and tablets from light, moisture, and air that degrade their quality, extending their shelf life and reducing the amount of expired medication.
Read More: How to Reduce Hazardous Pharmaceutical Waste With Compliance Packaging
Harness the Power of Automated Health Systems with DosePacker
While many people fear automation and technology will one day completely replace them, that couldn’t be farther from the truth.
Alibaba Group founder Jack Ma says, "Automation enables people to focus on tasks that require the human touch."
Automation modernizes the quality of care and services in the care home industry. And it’s not by taking jobs away from healthcare workers and caregivers but by allowing them to channel their time, effort, and focus toward giving patients and residents genuine care.
Leverage the power of automation for your care home’s growth and success. If you’re not sure how to do that or where to start, DosePacker can help you out with its extensive suite of automation solutions specially designed for care homes and assisted living communities.
From robust care home management software and innovative medication management apps to technology-enabled compliance packaging and intelligent prescription storage devices, DosePacker is ready to equip your facility with the technology it needs to grow and succeed.