Empowering Nurses

SRI Uses Yardi EHR + eMAR

By Yardi Blog Staff on Oct 12, 2018 in News

Dennis McCarthy, chief information officer at Florida’s SRI Management, knows that nurses are critical to providing quality care for residents. Keeping clinical staff happy means making sure they’ve got the tools they need to do their jobs as easily and efficiently as possible. That starts with ensuring they have access to the most accurate, up-to-date patient health records.

“Satisfying nurses is the number one thing. You don’t want them on a separate system; once you have people on two systems you have all sorts of issues—nurses are trying to figure out which record is current and things like that. Integration to the core software is critical,” McCarthy explained.

That’s why SRI, already successfully using several modules in the Yardi Senior Living Suite, adopted Yardi EHR and eMAR last July. “We just had nurses watch it in action,” said McCarthy.

Once the staff got their first look, they were hooked. The team began using EHR right away to record resident incidents. Documentation was simple and everything that was logged was immediately appended to residents’ files in the database and kept as part of their permanent record. But the best part was that all the information was readily available after the fact, said Casey Polk, chief nurse and director of resident services. She finds that feature indispensable.

“At my fingertips in the Yardi platform, I have easy access to what nurses wrote and charted about each incident and how it was handled. I can quickly pull up the chart and read the notes and have all the information on hand. And I love that the software also has reports on resident activity, new orders and missed medications. It allows me to follow up with my staff based on what has or hasn’t been charted that week,” Polk explained.

The ability to quickly review all care activity has provided a level of oversight that didn’t exist previously. According to Polk, it has also saved the team a lot of time.

“eMar definitely creates the most efficiency for us. Before we had it, everything was done on paper, and it was a very time-consuming process to create medication records for each resident each month. We don’t have to do that anymore,” McCarthy said.

“With Yardi eMAR, shift to shift handovers are easy. Staff can see what happened during the day and what still needs to be done. Everything is right there in the system. They no longer have to spend time informing the next shift, which has made operations much more efficient.”

But the most meaningful benefit of all is the impact Yardi software has had on patients and their families, whether they know it or not.

According to Polk: “Residents may not realize that they’re deriving value from the Yardi platform, but Yardi makes it so much easier to give an accurate list of the prescriptions they’ve been given. We can print it out in a heartbeat for the family or the doctor. The families and the third-parties who help care for our residents definitely get value from our use of Yardi.”