9 Ways An Intranet Can Improve Your Senior Living Community

Working for, managing, or promoting a senior living community is an all around tough but rewarding job. The tenants are dependent upon their community for not only primary care and needs, but also comfort, entertainment, and more. Their families want to be certain that their loved ones are being housed with the utmost care and quality. Providing 24/7 care for tenants whether scheduled or unscheduled, ensuring every aspect of the home – from food, to cleanliness, to medication knowledge – are up to the highest standards, and building relationships with tenants and their families are all a part of the job.

With so much going on, teamwork and communication from staff members is a must. An internal employee portal acts as a strong and secure organizational tool that consolidates all tasks in your community and is intuitive for employees to utilize. Here are nine ways an Intranet can improve the workflow of your senior living community.

Scheduling purposes

With a calendar and customizable employee tab, an Intranet is fully equipped for anything you may possibly need to schedule. Keep the work schedule on the Intranet to let employees to keep track of where they need to be. Allow staff to request days off, trade shifts and make other changes through the Intranet. Utilize a calendar to make mandatory meetings or reserve a room. Reserve rooms or other spaces as need be for senior services such as exercise and wellness.

Emergency preparedness

There are a number of emergencies that can ensue across your retirement communities. Whether you manage one facility or several, having an organized plan and continued staff awareness will ensure a much smoother recovery and tenant safety should anything happen. Keep a customizable emergency preparedness page on your Intranet. Here, you can create various plans-of-action unique to each emergency possibility. Use action sheets, emergency action wizards, incident command systems and more. Upload supplementary content to this page to go along with your plans including emergency training videos and RSS feeds to local agencies and weather resources. Quickly alert staff of any changes, and post about mandatory or recommended training sessions.

Quick communication

Communication is the backbone of any community. An healthcare content management system acts as your prime source of communication across the workplace tying together multiple locations and staff in various locations. The homepage alone can act as a newsfeed to post organizational updates that can reach staff, physicians and stakeholders. In addition, Instant message other staff members, keep blogs with information specific to your department, or retrieve directories of employee’s contact information or emergency vendor directories.

Ticket Management

Many long-term care organizations manage multiple facilities, retirement villages and communities. With the many facilities there can be tasks that need to be maintained and managed. A long-term care Intranet has a built in ticket management system to help staff manage facility requests across multiple locations. Many users can easily create help desk tickets to support the technical requests across multiple staff. Easily learn what tickets have been resolved with email reminders and alert appropriate staff who must take action.

Creating fun events

Your tenants are living in the community to be taken care of, but they also need to have fun and have a change of scenery every so often. Grilling, shows, classes – the possibilities are endless. Keep these events organized, sign up volunteers to work events on the Intranet and manage all dates and details. Easily expire events, set up recurring events, and manage attendee lists on your Intranet. Create employee committees that will take care of each event—use collaboration pages to store information dedicated to that event, and start blogs or chat rooms for these committees to easily discuss and plan.

Tenant contracts or files

There is a lot to know about your tenants – specific needs, medications, allergies, etc. Keep this information updated, organized, and easily accessible via the Intranet. Restrict certain files to only be seen by certain staff members to ensure patient privacy.

Simple navigation and robust search

Your Intranet will have a myriad of information on it. Although organized, it might be challenging at times to find a specific piece of content, file, document or staff contact information. An Intranet contains a smart, integrated search engine that will allow staff to easily search by keyword, policy number or staff name to find information easily. Simple navigation structures places information into the hands of your staff, physicians and management quickly.

Built-in policy and contract management

Long-term care organizations are forced to manage an abundance of policies and hospital contracts on a daily basis. With an Intranet that has a built-in policy management system, your organization can easily manage approvals, reviews, and archives of past policies in one, centralized location. Indexing and reporting on active policies can be done with a simple search. Physician contracts and hospital contracts or business associate agreements can all be maintained with the policy management system as well for easy approvals and automatic contract expiration notifications. Simple email and on-screen reminders can alert the appropriate staff of actions they must take on select policies. Read acknowledgement features provide staff attestation for newly updated policies or onboarding new hires.

Connect external partners

Many long-term health organizations have homecare and hospice partnerships that need to have access to organizational communications as well. By using a secure login framework, you can extend publishing, editing and viewing privileges to separate partners or affiliates. Easily extend access to information to select staff or entire companies.

No matter your circumstance, Intranets are equipped to meet your organization’s needs and to make your workday easier. Contact us for a demo to learn more about how our solutions can improve workflow at your long-term care community. Learn more here.

For information on HospitalPORTAL products and how we can work with your organization, schedule a free demo or request a quote today.