Infection Management: Keeping it Simple and Safe

COVID-19 was a true wakeup call for everyone – most especially senior living communities. For senior living owners and operators, rapid response was critical. To maintain a high standard of care and to protect the health of staff, residents, and third parties, the industry desperately needed a comprehensive tool to identify, track, and monitor infection rates across individual facilities and entire portfolios.

In response, Atria Senior Living and the product development team at Glennis Solutions, developed a dedicated platform to track infection outbreaks in real time which help inform response measures. Built in to the Glennis Care solution, the industry recognized Glennis Community Infection Management System (CIMS) monitors potential outbreaks for any type of illness, vaccination status and more for both residents and staff. Let’s explore how this innovative solution works.

Efficiently manage and monitor outbreaks.

Who is presenting symptoms of illness and who has been tested? Are they residents or staff? When did this all start? The Glennis Care CIMS tracks all of it – and more.

Whether it’s COVID-19, gastro-intestinal viruses or the flu, the Infection Tracker can monitor and help control the spread within a single community or across an entire portfolio. The system groups residents and employees by potential outbreak, and assigns each person enrolled their own case profile which displays key information including:

• What was the date the potential infection was reported?
• Did we contact the family? Their physician?
• Did we give this resident a test? If so, when? What was the result?
• What were the symptoms and the date of first onset?

The system tracks any type of infection with related data points, such as temperature readings and hospital visits. The CIMS helps you keep a close eye on cases as they’re resolved and accurately trend other important health indices in community populations.

What about keeping those who need to know in the loop? The system allows you to set automatic notifications to be sent to staff and management when certain thresholds that you set are met. For example, you may decide that if 2% of the occupancy becomes ill, you want to be notified so that certain safety protocols or PPE use can be implemented. The system is completely flexible and allows you to determine when notifications are sent and to whom.

Track compliance – of most anything.

The Compliance Tracker feature enables you to stay on top of vaccination status for your residents, staff, and even vendors if you choose. Further, this tool is configurable to align with the differences in vaccination statuses between state and/or country, for both consent and receipt of the vaccination.

Of course, third parties – vendors and care providers – also enter the community. You may choose to create a repository of third-party care providers for each community so you can get a comprehensive picture – including vaccine and testing status – of every person who visits.

Beyond tracking vaccinations, the CIMS’ flexibility extends to tracking the status of other things such as updated Medicare cards or the currency of Medicaid for residents – even staff e-learning progress. You’re able to create as many compliance trackers as you want, while updates to the information are quick and easy.

Prepare for tomorrow.

The most successful senior living providers are – and will be – those who effectively and innovatively manage technology to overcome and understand the complexities of the resident care experience – and Glennis is helping to lead the way. Combined, ACCUflo (Glennis’ eMAR system) and the Glennis Care Community Infection Management System deliver an end-to-end solution for managing resident care – from infection management and tracking to medication management, care delivery, and incident reporting.

Infection management technology like the Glennis CIMS is critical to serving seniors both now and in the future as the senior demographic rapidly grows over the next decade.

Technology so innovative, it’s award-winning.

During the recent McKnights Excellence in Technology Awards, Atria Senior Living and Glennis Solutions won Silver in the “Innovator of the Year” category for our Community Infection Management System (CIMS) tracker, as well as Gold in the “Building Bridges” category for our resident and family app. The CIMS also received the Innovations That Work award from NIC. 

“It’s such an honor to have these prestigious awards right out of the gate, so to speak, as a startup company in senior living software solutions,” said Brad Frasher, executive vice president of Glennis Solutions. ”We look forward to providing the same benefits offered by the app and the CIMS to other senior living providers to enhance the quality of life for seniors everywhere,” he added.

Want to find out more? Watch a demo.