Welcome to the 21st Century, it’s Really Not That Scary in Here

A big theme in this quarter is technology, I don’t know if it was specifically designed that way, but sometimes these things have a habit of just falling together nicely.

It all began this spring at the OANHSS Conference in Toronto when someone from a facility in Cornwall dropped by the booth. I did my usual spiel about the magazine and why we were at the show which included a request for interesting or unique things that their facility might be doing.

Sometimes I get the polite “yeah sure thing lady” nod and other times I get the “Hey! You know what! I have something for you!” type response. Luckily Tony gave me the latter.

“Sure thing!” he said and proceeded to tell me about how he has a whiz kid of a former co-op student working with him who wrote them their own preventative maintenance/work order program that everyone at Tony’s workplace is just in love with.

Okay so he didn’t say the in love with part, but you catch my drift. It was like a juicy meaty article of my dreams had just landed smack on my dinner plate.

I furiously scribbled notes on the back of Tony’s business card: wireless work orders, designed in house, feature article… and then his card lived on my desk for the next several months.

Technology is one of those oddities in life where people either really love or would much rather do without it. I’ve yet to meet someone who loves new gadgets and the latest “i” whatever that that company named after a fruit seems to churn out every eight months but chooses to do without.

You either rely on the stuff every day, or you don’t. But the same can’t be said for senior care facilities, at least the ones that I’ve come across.

There seems to be this industry wide longing and desire to become more technologically adept, a general “yeah we’re really hoping to join the 21st century by the end of the next decade,” but moving beyond computers for emailing and writing reports feels like it could still be just a little bit scary.

They recognize the need for paperless patient files, wirelessly transmitted work orders with built in tracking and followup, electronic management of medications and so on, but I think people become too overwhelmed with where to begin, the jargon involved is too incomprehensible or these dreams get relegated to the “someday-when-we-have-more-money” folder.

It really doesn’t need to be all that scary, complex or ex- pensive and the time, money and energy spent on purchasing, installing and learning new technology can be recouped in: staff productivity, employee retention, job satisfaction, resident well- being, and yes, even the bottom-line.

The benefits far outweigh the negatives. As Tony mentioned to me, sure it cost his employers around $50,000 just for the initial wireless infrastructure, but that expense has proven to be the best thing they could have ever done for the future of their senior care facilities.

Not everyone can work with the same budgets or even have the same requirements that need fulfilling, you might not even have a resident computer programming whiz kid, but there are already a number of off the shelf applications specifically designed for managing and directing senior care facilities and numerous other applications that can be adapted to meet the industry’s needs through a little tweaking.

Embrace the possibilities that new technologies can bring into your staff’s working lives, and your residents’ day-to-day lives. The possibilities really are limited only by your imagination.