Staff Scheduling in Assisted Living

PALs software has an even more robust and comprehensive staff scheduling component thanks to our users who offer suggestions.

 A user has recently requested a new report showing actual staffing costs based on individual staff salaries entered, rather than the average cost based on the staff person’s position, e.g. aide position = $12 per hour. This report is below.

Staffing Costs for Work Schedule

Staff Work Schedule

To review; PALs puts a system in place to ensure profitable operations.

1. PALs has a  service pricing tool to compute your full cost of providing 15 minutes of service (includes staff salary, ROI, payroll fees, and Shift Productivity).

2. The cost of 15 minutes of “aide” time for example is easily figured from staff per hour salaries.

3. Shift Productivity = Total resident service hours / staffing hours from PALs scheduling component.  For example, a staff person working the AM_1 shift with 6 hours of direct care during an 8 hour shift has a 75% shift productivity (6/8=76%). The cost of the 25% non-productive time is added into pricing in step 1, so all your staffing cost is paid. This eliminates “service creep”, since staff providing additional time to residents, without reporting it, are working harder, but not costing more!

PALs will work through the above computations for you, so you can schedule staff to meet resident-needs and regulatory requirements, while ensuring profitability.

For more information on PALs, please visit our website and download our free trial.

Best Practices in Assisted Living: California

At PALs we are constantly looking for ways to better support practitioners in providing the highest quality of care. For this reason, I  googled, "Best Practice in Assisted Living" and came upon this report developed in California. Click HERE for link. This report, just released in February of 2014, compares California's regulations with 11 other states and makes recommendations.

Section II, Care Standards was of most interest to me. Here they talk about California's pre-admission appraisal. The appraisal is easily entered into PALs Assessment Templates for application to all residents. Based on this appraisal, and resident preferences, a service plan is personalized for each resident specifying services to be delivered, how they will be delivered (personalized for the resident), and related costs. This plan is to be reviewed at least annually, and when there is a change in the resident's condition.

PALs will assist the above, by developing this service plan for resident's signature and create the documentation forms and invoice. In addition, nursing notes will prompt staff when a plan review and physician orders are due.

Section III, Staff Training and Staffing Levels.

Looking at PALs resources in this area, PALs will document staff credentialing, staff training and will create a staff work schedule. Related reports will alert when staff training is due and if the work schedule does not include sufficient hours to cover resident service plans.

Section IV, Resident Rights talks about "person-centered" care, which is one of PALs three main themes: (1) Person-centered Care; (2) Regulatory Compliance; and (3) profitability (relates revenue to staffing costs and work schedules). More about these later.

PALs is well positioned to support not only California providers, but providers in all states in providing assisted living services to meet "Best Practices".

Consumer-Directed Attendant Care (CDAC) Daily Service Record

This form, CDAC, is required by the Iowa Department of Human Services (or at least preferred by some of their surveyors), for residents receiving payments under this program.

A PALs user in Iowa asked if we could generate this form. We were happy to comply, and created the following form, following closely to the format used by the state's form.

Click here to view CDAC Form

At PALs, we're happy to do it your way!

Mn Individual Abuse Prevention Plan (IAPP)

Vulnerable Adult Assessment Related -

Minnesota's Home Care rules, which apply to Assisted Living settings, requires that:

"Client has an Individual Abuse Prevention Plan that is current and includes an individualized assessment of the client’s susceptibility to abuse by other individuals, the person’s risk of abusing other vulnerable adults; and statements of the specific measures to be taken to minimize the risk of abuse to that person and other vulnerable adults."

PALs offers a couple of ways of dealing with this. Please view the following video to review the PALs approach.

Assisted Living and Home Care Software Combined

PALs could always be setup as either Assisted Living or Home Care, but not both on the same installation. That is now changed.

So now communities using PALs that wish to provide visit-based home care in their neighborhood, or for prospects on their waiting list, or for past residents, or for current residents needing additional care, can now do so using their current PALs installation.

With a simple click of the mouse, a resident is added to the home care client list; or vice versa to add home care clients to your Assisted Living list. Both client demographic information and medications are transferred. Print the 485 form as your plan of care and physician orders, and assign services to individual staff, rather than a shift as done in the Assisted Living setup. Print staff and client schedules and monitor for compliance.

Staff can document visits either electronically (depending on internet access at the client's home) or using paper forms for latter entry into the computer.

Interested... please call for more information and a demonstration.

PALs Training Videos

We have just completed creating 30 new training videos explaining almost all features of PALs (we need to leave some features for you to discover!).

These videos can be downloaded as needed then fast-forwarded, repeated, whatever you need to do to learn the information. In addition, we've added an every Thursday online support meeting to answer any questions on the videos, or anything else.

Other support includes unlimited and free, phone and "GoToMeeting" support from 7 am to 7 pm 7 days per week.

For more information go to www.PALsSoftware.com

Jail Medication Management

Isn't a jail just a specialized "assisted living" center? So why not use PALs Medication Manager for administering medications?

That is exactly what a county jail in Alabama did. And PALs worked "out of the box". We didn't even have to change the room numbers to cell numbers.

PALs Software will work with you to creatively use it software. What would you like to do?

Staff Texting

PALs now enables staff texting. When entering staff information, you now can enter the staff's cell carrier, and with this information, plus the cell phone number, you have the ability to automatically send a text message to one or all staff members.

So now when you click on "Send Email" you also have the option to "Send Text Message". This may come in handy when you want to fill a shift, send a meeting reminder, or simply send a text message to someone working, without having the interruption of a phone call.

Where Is My Data!

When moving software to "The Cloud", from your C-Drive or server, are you losing control of your data?

When the data is on your C-drive or server, you can always get to it. You invest a lot of time and energy into entering the data, so you hate to see it leave your computer, and your control.

When PALs is hosted on "The Cloud", your raw data is only a click away. You can download data from "The Cloud" to your computer whenever you wish. You can even filter the data, select specific fields to export, or download selected or all data files. The files are zipped and downloaded automatically, and they become available to you on your computer for further data-mining using tools such as Crystal Reports or Excel or to design a merge file for a Word document.

So having your data on "The Cloud", need not result in you losing access to your data.

Planning Tool for Assisted Living Providers

We have the best users! They are definitely the leaders of PALs development team.

Shortly after adding our Dashboard (see previous blog), a user called to say thanks and that it was helpful to see what they did in the past. But what about changing it to a forecasting tool!

GREAT IDEA. Yes, by giving users the option of editing the data, they could project "What If" scenarios to guide their future coarse. So now, you can edit any month to see what effect a change would make. Or edit a month to ask, what if we raise staff salaries by 10%, what effect would that have on the overall performance. Similar for Resident fees. Or if we change the shift productivity ratio (care hours / staff hours) what effect would that have.

Once the scenario looks like the future you want, make it the agency's goal, for example, by instructing the staff scheduler to create the future staff work schedule to reflect the new shift productivity ratio. If you can measure it, you can change it.

Thank you users for your contributions in making PALs software the best software of its type.

Dashboard for Assisted Living Providers

PALs has just completed a new Dashboard to present Key Performance Indicators for Assisted Living providers.

With a simple click, up-to-date data is retrieved from throughout PALs showing trends for the past 6 months. No additional data-entry is needed.

By watching this Dashboard, and in combination with our "7 Steps to Guaranteed Profits", an organization can easily direct their pathway to profits.

For more information, please see our website at www.PALsSoftware.com and call for a guest pass to experience PALs Software firsthand on "The Cloud".

Send Text Message to Staff

I was talking with a new PALs user yesterday, and when reviewing the Staff Information section, he asked if it was possible to sent a TEXT MESSAGE to all staff. It was not a feature, but because we agreed it was a good idea, today it is a feature.

This is one of the many reasons why users prefer PALs; if something seems like a good idea, we add it NOW! This is also why PALs is the most comprehensive software of its type; we listen to our customers and view them as part of our development team.