“there’s No Going Back”: What Parker Health Group Has Learned About Finding Vendors

It’s fair to say that Parker Health Group has seen it all.

Which makes their continuous quest for the best partners all the more relevant.

Since opening in 1907, the New Jersey-based senior care provider has delivered its mission of making aging a natural, wonderful part of life by partnering with the best in the business: more than 1,000 dedicated and passionate employees, caregivers, volunteers, thought leaders, researchers and educators.

That kind of team building takes time: evaluating vendors, finding potential new partners, vetting, connecting, seeing if the fit is right. Not just a mission fit, but an EHR fit, too. Partners must be able to integrate with Parker’s EHR PointClickCare without manual exporting of data and costly customization.

Parker offers assisted living, skilled nursing and adult day care across its five locations. The vendor volume is massive, likely exceeding the ability of any normal-sized team of evaluators. To continue providing the highest quality care, the team at Parker understood the value in investing in technology solutions to replace time-consuming manual workflows in their communities.

Instead of a piecemeal process of evaluating vendors, Parker turned to PointClickCare’s Marketplace, which offers one place to view and evaluate more than 400 solutions that all already integrate with PointClickCare. This lets Parker reclaim time for high-quality resident care.

“When Parker is looking for another partner, Marketplace is our starting point,” says Carol Garcia, Parker’s Director of IT Services. “We want to make sure that the vendors we’re looking at are actually vetted PointClickCare partners. That’s critical for us to confirm.”

Inside the numbers: the Marketplace difference

Garcia and the team at Parker quickly discovered that using Marketplace to identify vendors and partners was a simple way to sift through the nuances of product integration without spending excess time determining the right fit for their organization.

The correct fit also included the ability to easily activate integrations, without costly and time-consuming manual implementation involved.

“Ever since the first time we integrated with a PointClickCare-vetted vendor, we knew it was the route we wanted to take 90% of the time,” Garcia says. “Now, every time there’s a decision to replace one system with another, we use Marketplace integration to weigh our options. We can browse a list of other applications that are already talking to PointClickCare without worrying about the cost of developing custom solutions to facilitate that integration with the resident chart.”

If a vendor is listed on Marketplace, integration can be enabled in a matter of one to three days. “We just turn on that integration like flipping a switch,” she says.

One such example: recording vital signs. Parker moved to Medline for its vital signs gathering, with outstanding results:

• 99% reduction in errors
• 96% faster response time to vitals outside thresholds 
• About 80% reduction in time to chart vitals

Other integrations include telehealth, Ditech for dining and a new nurse call system.

“The nurse call that we had before did not even integrate with PointClickCare, so our nurses now have the ability to dedicate more time to resident care instead of correcting mistakes,” Garcia says. “They now just review what has been entered. This all will probably result in a higher quality documentation for us.”

Compliance is better, too. “The complaint we used to hear is that nurses spend more time on the computer than they do with residents,” Garcia says. “We rarely hear that now.”

“There’s no going back” — how Marketplace delivers for Parker

Marketplace offers the largest ecosystem of integrated partner solutions available for the senior care continuum, allowing Parker and other PointClickCare customers to easily evaluate connected third-party vendors and services.

That means that while Parker uses Marketplace to replace vendors, they have also found that simply using Marketplace opens them up to new ideas for vendors that can help them solve their everyday challenges.

Whether a planned change or a happy surprise, the integrations are incredibly simple.

“Marketplace really replaces about a quarter of an IT person’s time,” Garcia says. “Sometimes when you’re working with a third-party vendor, it becomes a nightmare for the customer because they have to test everything. PointClickCare takes us out of the business of worrying about that.”

These improvements reclaim valuable time and maximize staff productivity to focus on residents. With staff burnout and staffing shortages a pressing concern, Parker was thrilled to find that their new integrations reduced time and resources spent on burdensome tasks. In one case, they were able to eliminate more than 360 manual instances of vital signs documentation necessary in an eight-hour shift, instead automating this workflow.

For staff in their communities, Garcia says, when it comes to manual workflows, “There’s no going back.”

This Views article is sponsored by PointClickCare. To learn more about how to maximize the power of your EHR through Marketplace, visit pointclickcare.com/products/marketplace.

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