Assisted Living Software Decisions Play a Key Role in Emergency Preparedness

If software hasn’t figured into emergency preparedness plans for your assisted living, memory care, or independent living communities, we need to talk. Assisted living software decisions play a key role in ensuring your community can recover and respond to crisis. The choice to use cloud-based software could make the difference between interruption, or seamless continuation of service to residents in case of emergency.

Picture this: you’re evacuating your facility – on a deadline. Local law enforcement has advised that you must vacate the property within hours. You have residents with immediate needs to relocate. Are you thinking about tape backups or removable hard drives? Or are you focused on getting residents to the bus?

Florie Kuperman, R.N., Chief Executive Officer of Roseleaf Senior Living & Memory Care, is responsible for three communities in Northern California. She knows firsthand what it’s like to respond to emergencies and natural disasters, and how technology can help. According to Kuperman, Roseleaf made a commitment to “go digital” early on, and all their records and business operations are electronic except where paper backups or forms required by law.

Roseleaf’s adoption and daily use of ALIS software allowed them to seamlessly maintain operations during two separate evacuations in 2017.

Having the cloud-based software fully integrated to daily operations at their assisted living communities made it easier to respond quickly when one facility was forced to evacuate due to the potential failure of the Oroville Dam last year. Their emergency plan called for relocating residents to a sister facility in Chico.

“If we hadn’t been all digital, we’d have had to take two to three more trips to the vans [to get paperwork and files.] Because everything is managed in ALIS and other cloud-based software, we just loaded up and didn’t have to look back,” said Kuperman. Roseleaf’s care plans, medication administration records, face sheets, and charts are all maintained in ALIS. Once relocated, the team only needed to update the resident profile with a new location, associate staff members to residents, and continue day-to-day operations.

Cloud-based software is “really, really important in [the senior living] space because your data is inherently distributed and backed up,” says Timothy Manning, President and CEO at Berglind-Manning L.C. and former Deputy Administrator for Protection and National Preparedness at the Federal Emergency Management Administration. He describes the advent of cloud-based computing as having done “more for business continuity than all the [emergency preparedness] consultants and advisors ever did.”

If you’re choosing assisted living software, it makes sense understand how that software supports your business continuity and emergency preparedness plans. It also makes sense to think about how assisted living software can make your business more efficient day-to-day.

To learn more about preparing your community for a disaster, check out the website for your state regulatory authority or click here for tips from American Healthcare Association.

To learn more about the features and benefits of ALIS assisted living software, schedule a demo!