Friday, December 23, 2016

Assisted Living Software for Maryland

A gift, just in time for Christmas, for assisted living providers in the state of Maryland. PALs now includes the forms required by the state of Maryland including, but in no means limited to, the following:

Manager's Assessment
Level of Care Scoring Tool
Comprehensive Nursing Assessment
45-Day Nursing Assessment
Weekly Care Notes
Fire Drill Form

PALs is the most feature rich software available for assisted living providers. A BEST VALUE using the formula: Features / Cost ($5 per active resident).

Download your FREE TRIAL today.

Monday, September 26, 2016

Labor Challenges in Assisted Living

The Senior Living Executive magazine, in their September / October 2016 issue, highlighted “The biggest threat to the senior living industry over the next 12 months and beyond will be labor; its costs, supply and quality.”

PALs can help you manage through this period by utilizing the following features:

Labor Costs – see blogs below related to shift productivity. PALs will track service hours and staff hours to compute both shift and staff productivity. By using this information when developing the staff work schedule, staffing costs can be managed without compromising resident care.

Labor Supply – again, by managing the shift productivity, you can get more “bang for the buck” and “right size” your staffing. You don’t need as many staff if you use your current staff more efficiently.

Labor Quality – PALs will keep track of staff evaluations and training, and along with acknowledging individual staff productivity and attendance tracking, you will know your “top performers” and be able to acknowledge and reward them appropriately, thus improving staff retention and quality, while building a community culture of excellence.

Worried about your labor challenge – call us to learn about the PALs Advantage.

Saturday, February 27, 2016

Shift Report - Old School

I had an interesting call from a long time user. She wanted PALs to create a Shift Report for paper-pencil entry!

As a developer, I am always trying to provide more automation, think eMAR, eSAR and Electronic Health Record. But now I'm asked to make a simple form to be complete by pencil. I offered to give staff the option of computer input, but no, she wanted it to be paper based and simply 3-hole punched in put in a 3-ring binder.

Specifically, she wanted one page per resident per week; with room for all three shifts to make entries, and room on the bottom for general comments.


The above form was quickly created and added to PALs. Thank you for this idea, even though it wasn't very technically challenging, if it helps a user, it is good for PALs.

Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Staff Productivity in Assisted Living

We have blogged before  on Shift Productivity and how PALs will calculate this based on the Staff Work Schedule. The simple formula is to divide the direct care hours by the hours in the shift. For example, 6 direct care hours in an 8 hours shift is: 6/8 = .75 * 100 = 75% shift productivity. The direct care hours are “planned” based on the service plan, not the actual hours of care provided.

Shift Productivity example

While the above is fine, it reflects the “Planned” Shift Productivity. What about the “Actual” Shift Productivity meaning what are the actual direct care hours and actual hours worked and by whom? We recently added a new Assisted Living community, and they asked this question. Could PALs calculate, not the Planned Shift Productivity, but the productivity for the staff person working based on actual time spent with the resident and payroll hours?

Since PALs has a built in Time Clock and eSAR (electronic Service Administration Record, similar to the eMAR), we were already setup to gather the data needed for an actual staff productivity report. So by accumulating the time spent with each resident when the staff person clicked on “Done” for a service, summed for all services actually provided and dividing it by the actual time as document from the Time Clock data, the following report was generated.

Staff Productivity example

PALs prides itself on following our users lead, and is thankful for this suggestion.

PS: By factoring in the “Productivity” when pricing your services, you can ensure profitability since you know your staff costs per hour, overhead and ROI. See our blog on “7 steps to Profits” for more information.