Yardi has been building Yardi EHR, a full service electronic health record solution for senior living, for the better part of a decade. Client feedback and ongoing development give rise to regular product enhancements. Here’s a sampling of recent upgrades. Clinical move-in Users can now execute a clinical move-in process that includes adding global contacts, allergies, diagnosis, orders from a library, and schedule assessments.  This new feature allows a facility to perform a financial move-in prior to the resident physically arriving in the building or vice versa.  Clinical staff can move a resident in and the billing staff can complete the financial move-in when they return. A new KPI shows a resident’s pending move-in status, allowing the facility to easily monitor resident move-in activities. Medication tracking Recent enhancements allow counting of controlled substances between shifts, check-in of medications delivered to the community and documentation of medications disposed of. Facilities can also update the quantity of medication on hand when new deliveries arrive. Digital care plan signatures New functionality enables digital signing of service plans. Five new KPIs monitor the signing status. Continuity of care document interface (CCDA) Facilities can now create, send and receive CCDA documentation using the KNO2 interface. The CCDA document sends and receives data elements in a standard format. Information exchanged includes advanced directives, allergies, adverse reactions, medications and social history. The CCDA user interface lets you search for documents by a date range or create a new document. Shower/housekeeping/laundry schedule A new report assists staff with weekly shower, laundry and housekeeping schedules. Filters allow for multiple schedules to be displayed and is viewable in a list or calendar view. The list view can also display task details. Simple wounds The wound module has been streamlined and enhanced for assisted living...

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,”...

With the click of a mouse, doctors in New York State will soon be able to abandon their sometimes illegible medication notes for electronic prescriptions. As of March 27, New York is the first state in the nation to require all physicians to use electronic prescriptions, a law backed up by fines and criminal penalties. The basis of the new mandate lies in a 2012 state law, I-Stop, designed to decrease prescription opioid abuse. I-Stop created an online registry listing all medications prescribed to an individual patient. In an effort to reduce substance abuse, doctors were required to check the list before prescribing any new medications. Far from infallible, I-Stop’s registry remained vulnerable to human error – intentional or unintentional – as even a minor misspelling could thwart medication tracking. The hope is that by shifting to an entirely electronic prescription system, medications can be carefully tracked and fraud mitigated, if not eliminated altogether. The prescriptions will be managed via the Surescripts network. Surescripts, which processes over 1 billion e-prescriptions per year, connects doctor’s offices, hospitals, pharmacists and health plans through an integrated platform. While the shift to electronic prescripts robs consumers of some agency –patients will have limited ability to change pharmacies – a 2015 survey by Surescripts revealed a majority of patients felt more secure with physicians who were “digitally connected.” In fact, more than 50% of survey respondents admitted online access to test results, medical records, and appointment scheduling would all be compelling enough to choose one doctor over another. Despite the law, many of New York’s health care providers have yet to make the switch to electronic prescriptions. As of January, a little over half of the state’s prescribers were able prescribe and send prescriptions electronically. Some of the state’s...

If you’ve been to the doctor lately, technology’s advance into the patient care and treatment realm was likely evident – whether your physician made notes on an iPad or your follow-up questions were addressed in an e-mail, medicine and mobile record-keeping have become inseparable. A similar transition has been underway in the realm of senior living, specifically in assisted-care communities. Yardi recently introduced Yardi EHR, an Electronic Health Record platform. Yardi EHR is the final piece in a single stack solution for assisted living and retirement communities, and provides seamless connectivity for resident care, medical record keeping, community marketing, property management, back office accounting, finance, and business intelligence. For companies looking for an enterprise solution to optimize their performance in the senior care sector, it is the perfect fit. “It really is just one completely integrated ERP and EHR solution, fully interoperable, and combining the knowledge of multiple teams from across all facets of the real estate, senior living, and healthcare industries,” said Fil Southerland, Director, Yardi Health Care Solutions. Southerland was an innovator of Yardi’s eMAR product, an Electronic Medication Administration Record that is now a module within Yardi EHR, and has extensive experience with senior living technology. We spoke with Southerland about the Yardi EHR product and its many advantages for senior living providers, pharmacies and investors. Read on for more insight. How have EHRs and the records that help run a senior living community typically interacted? Southerland: Linking care tracking with a financial/GL accounting system has, until now, never been seamless. Stand-alone EHR developers have bolted on bare bones accounting packages that aren’t fit to run care and housing organizations regional or national in scope. At Yardi, we’ve created an outstanding electronic health record, compliant with all HIPAA regulations. Who will...