End-to-End Nursing Home Management Portal Automates & Improves Resident Care
Eisenstein Flaherty digitizes nursing home consulting practices with low-code to deliver high-quality, compliant care
Senior living facilities require tight controls around operations and providing patient care. With 70% of adults who live to age 65 needing long-term services and supports (LTSS), Nursing Home Administrators and Directors of Nursing have a significant opportunity to provide the high-quality care that this vulnerable community needs. Eisenstein Flaherty, a US-based senior living management firm, supports the senior living industry by providing consulting services to operators and owners of nursing homes. Using low-code, they developed a web-based portal for their customers to monitor the delivery of high-quality care, patient well-being, and compliance.
The Challenges of Delivering High-Quality, Compliant Care
Delivering high-quality, compliant care in a nursing home is a significant undertaking. Administrators, owners, and department heads juggle a dizzying array of tasks, from compliance requirements set at the state and federal level to ensuring their patients are safe and the buildings themselves receive regular maintenance. In many cases, the systems that manage these activities involve sticky notes, Word documents, or live inside an employee’s head – none of which is repeatable or scalable. For example, suppose there is an incident between patients. In that case, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS) require a report outlining the incident in question and any necessary follow-up actions. This process was often done ad-hoc, with administrators calling various employees to find out what happened and how the issue was resolved. In the unfortunate event that employees did not formally report the incident, the CMS and state regulatory agency will send representatives to review the facility and its condition – further adding to the many tasks expected of administrators, owners, and department heads.
From In-Person Consulting to a Web-Based Portal
The Eisenstein Flaherty (EF) founders, Bob Eisenstein, Patrick Flaherty, and Matt Muratore, began consulting with nursing homes in 2018 to help bring order to this chaos. The EF team includes top industry professionals with deep experience in efficiently running nursing homes, implementing infection control practices, and complying with industry regulations.
Mike Nickolaus, Partner & Chief Executive Officer at Eisenstein Flaherty, and Patrick Flaherty, Founding Partner, focused on building an online version of these services by exploring a proof of concept to digitize their consulting expertise. After discovering that white-label solutions didn’t fit their needs, they turned to Mendix to custom build a solution. Working with Mendix Expert Services, who help guide implementations, EF built a development team to turn their vision into reality – “EF Ally.” The team included:
- The Project Manager, who is responsible for a successful Mendix engagement and ensuring the team builds the project using best practices
- Tech leads, who advise the project development team, define the application architecture and liaise between EF and the rest of the group
- The UX expert who leads the design of the EF Ally experience
- Developers who implement core functionality and features to deliver on the project requirements
After eight months, EF and the development team built EF Ally, a web-based healthcare solution that provides compliance standardization and operational management services. With low-code, EF can scale the 100+ years of combined experience their team brings to their customers. By working with the Mendix Expert Services team, EF can leverage experts in Mendix development while focusing on delivering functionality based on their deep industry expertise.
The Keys to Delivering Compliant Care
The Eisenstein Flaherty leadership team enables Administrators and Directors of Nursing to spend more time on what matters most: their residents and staff. Instead of administrative paperwork and reporting headaches, EF Ally’s customers can manage compliance and facility operations in real-time through a central web-based solution. This is made possible through 2 core functions: regulatory compliance and facility management & operations.
Regulatory Compliance
Nursing homes are regulated at both the state and federal levels. The team’s deep industry expertise has built institutionalized processes into EF Ally. The solution standardizes processes related to compliance requirements, including templates and recommended steps to avoid and, when necessary, remedy a problem. Reminders for state deadlines, contract expirations, and credential renewals are sent to EF Ally users through electronic notifications.
Responses from both the CMS and State agencies are managed in the EF Ally portal, leading to fewer in-person visits from regulators. EF Ally simplifies nursing home management and eases the burden that Administrators and Directors of Nursing face while maintaining compliance.
Facility Management and Operations
Each facility is unique within the regulatory framework and requires specific procedures to keep smoothly running. These day-to-day activities are too often held as “tribal knowledge,” living in isolation with a single employee. EF delivers automated processes for documenting, handling, and resolving issues with EF Ally. The platform codifies best practices according to the individual facility and its needs and can easily be scaled to provide consistent service across a portfolio of properties.
High-Quality Patient Care Made Possible with Low-Code
At the core of EF Ally is process standardization to ease the burden that Administrators and Directors of Nursing face. Key to “helping our clients standardize their process,” Patrick Flaherty explains, “is by putting our playbook into [EF Ally]… all the features and how this was built caters to how our group does things.” EF can institutionalize its deep expertise into a scalable product by using low-code.
Patrick Flaherty explains that “most low-code solutions are inward-facing… EF is building an outward-facing product.” The Mendix platform enables the team to build outstanding customer experiences by improving collaboration between the actual developers and experts in nursing home management. As Flaherty describes, “[EF Ally] was built by people who run nursing homes, who are day-to-day in the trenches.” This collaboration is critical to delivering the excellent customer experience that EF Ally provides.
Investing in Technology to Improve People’s Lives
EF’s success with the platform can be boiled down to a straightforward yet essential concept: “the program itself is amazing… but it was the people that enabled us to hit above our weight,” Flaherty explains. When describing the Expert Services team, Flaherty continues: “I could see how [they] were working to be a partner” of EF’s, rather than operating as a transactional relationship. Outstanding technology is never void of an incredible team behind the scenes, and EF Ally is no different. Flaherty continues, “I am very excited about bringing this to life… I get to be part of this really fun project that ultimately helps to take better care of people.”