BVM Dec 2015 - page 83

Business View - December 2015 83
five years ago. Every facility that we have does IV therapy,
now. We have a wound-care nurse, who is wound-care
certified by the Board of Nurse Practitioners. She’s only
one of thirteen in the state. She circulates around our
nursing homes to help them with their wounds. We’ve
had a dramatic reduction in our in-house wounds and
we’re able to take more complex wounds from hospitals,
now, because we have her on staff.”
CCI has also taken a leadership role in the use of ad-
vanced data systems and diagnostic technologies. “We
were one of the first nursing homes in the state of Loui-
siana to have electronic medical records,” Richardson
notes. “We felt that was really necessary because it en-
ables us to look at the quality of care that’s going on with-
in our facility from a central location, and have multiple
consultants going through the charts, looking for things
that stick out, or that need to be corrected.”
CCI now employs a new software platform that, accord-
ing to Richardson “does better intake assessments and
develops care pathways for our residents so that we may
track their care all the way through their care setting. And
we also developed, and are using, software which does
electronic vital-signs capture, much like you’ll see in a
hospital, which allows us to do that within our nursing
homes. It uploads into our electronic medical records,
instantaneously, so we know that the documentation of
the vital signs is not only accurate, but instantaneous.
And it also allows us to have an electronic record of varia-
tions and patterns in vital signs measurements.
“We also installed in our nursing homes, two years ago,
electronic medication dispensing units that will commu-
nicate with our EMR (Electronic Medical Records). It al-
lows us to dispense emergency medication 24 hours a
day, seven days a week, so that if we run out of medica-
tion, or have a new admit, we’re able to get that medica-
tion from our electronic dispensing system.”
HEALTHCARE