Having basic information about their current health, past care, medication, vitals, etc., at their fingertips, patients will be better able to make their own health and long-term care decisions.

By Pam McDonald

Part 2 of this series (which you can read here), introduced CareCommunity™ from MatrixCare®, (a Senior Housing Forum partner), and described its three principal breakthroughs as follows:

  • It offers a single health information access point to seniors and their families as well as their entire health care team – physicians, nurses, pharmacists, therapists, senior living providers, etc.

  • It displays care and treatment information regardless of the setting in which it was delivered; whether it was a hospital, clinic, skilled nursing facility, senior living or life plan campus (CCRCs), or a private home with or without the support of home health agency personnel.

  • Its incoming heatlh care data is deconstructed from within the EHR into small, separate bits of information and then reconstructed in a variety of at-a-glance templates, thereby eliminating redundant data entry as well as the need to copy, fax, email, and manage multiple pieces of paper.

But that’s just for starters. CareCommunity™ is packed with additional unique features including the following:

It puts the patient in the driver’s seat when it comes to their health.

MatrixCare® Senior Product Manager Maria Moen says, “This is a statement of what healthcare as a whole knows is true, that patients actively engaged in their own health management will lead the charge to reducing overall health costs.

“By having basic information about their current health, past care, medication, vitals, etc., at their fingertips, patients (and their family advocates) will be better able to make their own health and long-term care decisions.”

Maria points out that patient engagement in treatment and planning for chronic disease management involves

  • Learning about their illness

  • Understanding choices for treatment and care

  • Talking with family and healthcare providers

  • Participating in the documentation of these choices and monitoring of progress  

It connects with hundreds of tele-health and wearable monitoring devices.

Maria states enthusiastically, “This is honestly one of the most innovative and appealing aspects of CareCommunity™, and I’ve listed a few so that’s saying a lot!  

“Due to our partnership with a third-party platform, we have full integration with over 400 devices and wearables, including e-scales for weight, e-blood pressure cuffs, Accu-Chek glucometers, MyFitnessPal, Fitbits, and the list goes on.”

Maria says the connection is easy to facilitate with a very light touch. Once connected, readings come into CareCommunity™ automatically, identified with a descriptive name source tag.

Maria believes, “It’s a wonderful way to bring users’ busy lifestyle into the platform and eases entry of information greatly. If you weigh yourself on your e-scale, the weight is there, without any additional effort on the part of the user, for review by his or her entire team.

This sets the person up for success as they manage their chronic condition path toward wellness; it allows comparison against the treatment plan by reporting status of vitals and progress with set tasks. 

It makes it possible for individuals as well as care providers to easily message or contact each other at several points within the system. Various types of communication between seniors, family members, and/or providers are facilitated in the platform. These messages are secure and can be routed to the physician’s workforce, as delegated by the MD, to allow for timely response to questions and outreach from the patient, their family members and/or other members of the virtual care team.

It has a telemedicine component for its variety of users – patients, families, or care team. Maria explains, “Our partnership with Microsoft allows us to deliver tele-health remote visits or consults and saves them on the platform. Microsoft itself has done a wonderful job of ensuring the templates necessary to facilitate the remote visits are easy to find and use.”

The remote communication will also facilitate distance contact between seniors and their family members, which, Maria says, “is an important aspect of connecting the community of seniors to their support systems.”

It has the ability to send REMINDERS and ALERTS

Maria states, “There are a number of ‘triggers’ that can initiate the sending of different types of messages to users. For example, it can send Medication Reminders by email, secure text, or a message to the communication board inside the platform.

“Other reminders can be sent: an appointment is due, a medication needs to be refilled, or a weight was needed today and hasn’t been recorded yet. This allows individual patients or their caregivers to be closer to a successful completion of established tasks and events.”

Maria notes that alerts work in the same manner, and are typically triggered from different events, such as an out-of-range vital reading or a full day of medications unmarked as taken on the Treatment Plan, to name a few possibilities.

It is cloud-based, and accessible 24/7 via smartphones, tablets, other mobile devices, and computers.

Maria states with a twinkle in her eye but in all seriousness, “CareCommunity™ was born in the Microsoft Azure cloud, and we’ve built it so it can be viewed on any device you wish – from computer to mobile phone. Its responsive design gives users the ability to view it on any browser with no limitations or differences in how it looks.”

For more information, call (866) 469-3766 or click on the logo below to visit its website.

 

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MatrixCare® currently is the platform of choice for over 12,000 facility-based care settings, offering purpose-built software systems to effectively and efficiently manage resident care as well as operational and administrative functions for skilled nursing facilities, senior living providers, life plan communities (CCRCs), and home health agencies.