Tag Archive for: RCare

7 Ways to Increase Resident Safety Outdoors During Walks and Recreation

How to increase resident safety outdoors

“A body at motion stays in motion; a body at rest stays at rest.” We’ve all heard Sir Isaac Newton’s first law of motion, and it applies to motion everywhere, including in long-term care communities. Limited exercise and too much time spent sitting can have effects on the health of people of all ages. However, the impact is magnified as we age. A sedentary lifestyle leads to a higher risk for depression and diabetes in elder adults. It also contributes to bone loss and the loss of muscle mass. Time spent outdoors has been associated with reduced sedentary time and increased physical activity among the elderly. However, it can be difficult to create a safe and inviting outdoor space at a long-term care community. Try these tips to increase resident safety outdoors.

1. Add Visual Cues to Alert Residents to Danger

You’re accustomed to the yellow caution tape that alerts the public to unexpected dangers. Dimming eyesight can make raised spots or steps difficult to see, creating a tripping hazard. Increase resident safety outdoors and minimize these dangers by lining steps with yellow tape.

Paint curbs and elevated areas with bright paint colors to draw attention to changes in elevation. These simple changes can be all it takes to make otherwise dangerous areas easier to navigate.

2. Post Large, Bright Signs

Familiarity represents safety. When you go for a walk in an unfamiliar area, you use visual clues to remind you how to get back to your residence. For elders who have failing vision, bigger, brighter cues are required. Signs that direct residents to entrances or lead the way to established outdoor seating add familiarity to walking paths and outdoor activity areas.

3. Include Seating Areas

Seating may not seem like a safety feature. But fatigue is a major contributor to falls. Creating shaded seating areas and placing multiple benches along walkways offers plenty of spots for a quick rest for those who need it. That helps increase resident safety outdoors. Instead of overheating or becoming short of breath, residents can regain their energy for a safer walk.

4. Keep the Grounds Clean

Fallen branches and even leaves can be a tripping hazard for those with poor vision. Keeping your landscape clean and tidy is essential for curb appeal and creating an appealing appearance for visitors. 

It’s important to go one step further to create a safe outdoor space for elder adults. Conveniently placed trash cans will help eliminate litter. Frequent cleanups by your landscaper can help prevent natural debris from building up around seating areas and walkways.

In addition to keeping the grounds clean, smooth pathways are a necessity for easy navigation. Paved and gravel walkways create an attractive outdoor space. However, cracks, bumps, and uneven layers of gravel create a falling hazard. Paved walkways with cracks and dips represent a falling hazard. When gravel creates humps, the terrain can become impassable. Inspect all walkways routinely to increase resident safety outdoors.

5. Provide Emotional Security 

Resident safety outdoors is about more than physical safety. Feeling safe is an important part of having the confidence to explore new options. You wouldn’t embark on a dangerous activity without a safety harness. 

Reduced activity often occurs alongside the transition to a new home. Residents faced with new surroundings see danger everywhere, and rightfully so. It’s easy to lose your way in unfamiliar territory. Dimming vision means new terrain can lead to a painful fall. 

Without encouragement, elders don’t get the opportunity to get used to these surroundings. So a sedentary lifestyle quickly follows. When residents are equipped with pendants that connect them directly with staff members, they have a safety line so they can explore. RCare pendants are comfortable to wear on a necklace or wristband, have advanced location protocol, and bring help with the push of a button.

6. Use Fences and Borders

Sudden changes in terrain can be dangerous. While flowerbeds and mulched areas create an attractive landscape, sudden changes in terrain can cause twisted ankles and falls. Blocks and short fences surrounding flower beds and mulched areas can eliminate hazards and also allow you to keep attractive features that residents enjoy. Increasing resident safety outdoors doesn’t need to conflict with curb appeal.

7. Enhance Accessibility

Indoor accessibility is a common concern. However, for many retirement communities, the outdoors focuses on curb appeal instead of accessibility. Narrow pathways and sloping terrain aren’t particularly inviting for residents confined to a wheelchair or dependent on a walker. 

Like the ramps and specialized landings found indoors, the outdoors needs to provide comfortable accessibility for those who need it most. Wide pathways, traction strips, and rails near curbs, stairs, and uneven terrain will make outdoor spaces easier to navigate. This means residents will become more likely to use the space.

Time spent outdoors provides a wealth of health benefits. Sunlight provides vitamin D, and simply going outside more frequently leads to increased activity and a healthier lifestyle. Daily walks can increase muscle mass and improve bone health, leading to better balance and more strength. Ultimately, when you increase resident safety outdoors, you improve the health of elders in your long-term care community. Contact us today to learn more about our safety solutions.

Press Release: RCare Announces Webster-native Jeffrey Knauss as Chief Executive Officer

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RCare CEO Jeff Knauss

WEBSTER, N.Y. (PRWEB) JULY 07, 2021

Knauss Brings Proven B2B Sales Track Record.

RCare, Inc. (Response Care), creator of advanced nurse call and monitoring solutions, announced it has a new owner and CEO, Jeffrey Knauss. Knauss assumed day-to-day leadership of the company after purchasing RCare from founder, Myron Kowal, when he retired earlier this year.

Knauss brings a wealth of experience to the company, including 27 years at a Fortune 500 company, where his experience spanned the entire value chain, including electrical engineering, marketing, and international sales. Motivated by a passion to “make our world better,” Knauss looks forward to putting his broad skills to work scaling up the company’s product line and establishing a measured and focused roll-out strategy.

“RCare has a uniquely talented team with a comprehensive skillset,” Knauss remarked. “The senior living industry is making big changes, particularly in response to COVID. RCare will be innovating every step of the way to offer the best support.”

“We are really excited about the skills and focus that Jeff brings to RCare,” said Nick Garofoli, RCare’s Director of Operations. “As we expand our business and refine our product line, we are in good hands with Jeff’s leadership.”

Knauss has lived in the Rochester area his entire life, and was thrilled to find this opportunity in his hometown. “I’ve lived and traveled all over the world, but Rochester is home to me,” he said. “I am inspired by the passion that Myron has instilled in RCare. RCare’s mission, to improve the lives of seniors and those who care for them, remains strong and true to who we are.”

How Do You Take Your QAPI?

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QAPI

Qapi program for nursing homesIf you’re in skilled nursing, you’re probably in the process of figuring that out right now. Because, as you know, QAPI is the new CMS law of the land.

According to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), “QAPI is a data-driven, proactive approach to improving the quality of life, care, and services in nursing homes.” It starts with quality assurance (QA), the steps facilities take to meet quality standards and regulations. Then it adds performance improvement (PI). QAPI (QA and PI together) is meant to help facilities meet minimum regulatory quality standards, and then to make the quality of services even better.

Does Your Nurse Call System Matter for QAPI?

ABSOLUTELY!

Central to QAPI is the satisfaction of residents and their families, and call response time is a great place to start. Do your residents trust that when they request help it will come quickly and will address their needs? Or do they wait, frustrated or afraid, wondering how long before help will arrive?

Built into every RCare system is the RMetrix reporting and analytics package that lets you track call response times, so that you can assess your current status, and set target goals.

  • What is an acceptable amount of time for a client to wait for help and what isn’t?
  • How well are you doing at staying inside that acceptable range?
  • Are your staffing levels right for each place and time?

With RCare, you can track call response time for the organization, or filter it by:

  • Group – facility, wing, hallway, or whatever grouping makes sense for your community.
  • Time – to see how things are going by shift.
  • Enterprise – For large organizations, Enterprise RMetrix lets you evaluate response times across your entire organization at as broad or fine-grained a level of detail as you need.

Frequent caller reports let you see:

  • Who is calling?
  • Are the calls primarily from just a few residents?
  • Are call numbers higher on one shift or in one part of your facility?

RPhone and The Resident’s Experience

Best describes qapi program

  • RCare’s integrated HIPAA-compliant mobile handset, the RPhone, has the unique “I got it” feature that helps both residents and staff. It lets a staff member claim a call that comes through, preventing unclaimed calls, and preventing duplication of effort, which helps make the best use of your staff’s time.
  • It provides personalized information about the resident, so that staff can offer greater personalization and comfort, even if the caregiver or the resident is new. It allows staff members to phone the resident directly to let them know help is on the way, and allows them to find out more information about what is needed.
  • With the RPhone, care staff check in when they arrive at the room, and check out when they leave. They can record the services performed during the call. This is powerful information for your quality teams, as they try to understand more deeply the processes they’re working to improve.
  • The powerful RMetrix reporting helps you identify specific calls that fall outside the norms, to help you investigate potential problems and get to their root cause.

Your Organization’s Other Services:

Your QAPI program must address all services provided by your facility and thus extends to all departments.That’s another reason RCare’s call system is so powerful. Staff across the facility benefit from the system, and residents never need to pull a cord.

  • Passive sensors integrated directly into the system can monitor temperatures of every room and send alerts if temps stray out of the normal range.
  • Integrated water sensors report flooding or overflows.
  • Universal contact sensors report doors that are open when they should be closed, or closed when they should be open.
  • Refrigerator temperature sensors continuously check and record temps, and send alerts for temperatures out of the safe range.
  • Smoke detectors, integrated right into the nurse call system, so everyone is alerted if there’s a problem in a room.

By now, you should have your written QAPI plan in place, and implementation should have begun. As you plan your performance improvement projects, it’s critical to have objective performance measurements of where you started, where you want to go, as well as the ability to monitor the effects of your changes. You need data to evaluate where you have opportunities for improvement, and where you’re exceeding expectations. You need to measure progress, and to provide insight to investigations of where problems persist. Root Cause Analysis provides the most insight when it’s evidence-based and drawn from reliable data.

RCare is more than a nurse call system. Add RCare to your QAPI! Contact us today.

Is Your Refrigerator Running? The Importance of Refrigerator Temperature for Senior Communities

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Importance of Refrigerator Temperature

Hey….Is Your Refrigerator Running?

Unlike the old prank call joke, refrigerator temperature in long term care is no laughing matter. When health inspectors check out your senior community’s kitchen, one of the first places they’ll look is at your refrigerators. Are they keeping food at the proper temperature? This is important because food-borne illnesses are surprisingly common and can be very serious, especially among the more vulnerable populations. According to Federal government estimates, “Each year these illnesses result in an estimated 128,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths.”

Good refrigeration is easy to get right by using RCare’s advanced temperature sensors to monitor temperatures inside refrigerators.

It’s a critical responsibility to ensure that all dining facility refrigerators are within the proper cooling range. However, many times residents have refrigerators in private apartments too, which need to be consistently monitored as well.

But food safety isn’t the only reason refrigerator temps needs to be monitored. Perhaps equally important are the medications and vaccines which require refrigeration, including insulin for controlling diabetes, some rheumatoid arthritis medications, some common antibiotics, and many more. For these medications, temperature stability is critical, and even small temperature fluctuations can render them ineffective, or even dangerous.

According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) guidelines, refrigerator temperatures that drop even 5 degrees can freeze medications and vaccines, rendering them totally ineffective. The CDC also warns that temperatures varying the other direction, and are too warm, can melt some meds, and can cause others to become useless. While medications can cause harm by being made ineffective, what’s potentially even worse is that they can cause an adverse event in the resident.

The solution is to make sure that you know the temperature in your refrigerator at all times, and that you get alerted if the temperature spikes or falls. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommends using a thermometer to check the refrigerator temperature frequently, but in a facility with dozens or hundreds of refrigerators, this is a process that clearly needs to be automated. What’s more, according to CDC guidelines, it’s important to test at different times of day, at different times during the refrigerator cooling cycle, during different seasons and weather conditions, and during different user activity patterns, to ensure that the refrigerators are always maintaining a safe, stable temperature. And it’s important to be able to refer back to a log, to verify that over time the temperature has remained at a safe level.

RCare Refrigerator Temperature Sensor in Senior CommunitiesRCare offers the ideal solution, a digital refrigerator thermometer that is integrated right into the facility’s nurse call system. Temperatures are monitored continuously, and logged, so you can check the history of any refrigerator. Should the temperature veer outside of the safe range, caregivers receive a discreet alert, letting them know immediately when there is a problem. This means that food and medications can be moved to safer storage right away.

Whether it’s food or medicine, you can’t count on knowing whether they’re safe just by how they look. “Some medications may visibly show a compromised medication through cloudiness and/or clumping. However, other medications may not show any signs of alteration, thereby leaving the impression the medications are fine.”

With RCare monitoring your refrigerator temperatures, you can be confident that your refrigerators are running exactly as they should be. And if they’re not, RCare will let you know. Your residents count on you for their health and safety. RCare can help.

New eCall Program for Affordable Housing

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RCare eCall Program for Affordable Housing

RCare, maker of advanced wireless nurse call systems, recently announced the addition of a new low-cost eCall Program designed for providers of affordable housing for low-income seniors. This eCall Program is a testament to the company’s mission of improving the quality of care for all seniors, regardless of financial status.

The new RCare eCall Program for Affordable Housing offers the critical capabilities of RCare’s flagship wireless nurse call technologies, for a fraction of the cost. The RCare eCall system will offer savings to affordable housing providers in several ways, including an extremely low cost of entry, minimal hardware to maintain, lowered on-going fees, and requiring only one internet connection for the entire eCall system.

“If you run an affordable senior housing community, you need to talk to us. We can save you money.”

The purpose of RCare’s affordable eCall Program is to provide the very best of nurse call capabilities to America’s lower income seniors, according to RCare CEO, Myron Kowal. “RCare is always looking for ways to offer our comprehensive features at a more competitive price point, especially to those who can’t afford all the bells and whistles,” said Kowal. “If you run an affordable senior housing community, you need to talk to us. We can save you money.”

The RCare eCall Program is simple to install, with one small wall-based touchscreen server and one pendant for each resident. If the building has an existing internet connection, that will be sufficient for the entire RCare eCall Program. No landlines are required. When a resident presses the pendant, the RCare panel will notify the call center, who will assess the situation directly and determine further actions.

RCare has had a busy year of progress and innovations including the announcement of an Amazon Alexa skill, their iOS app launch for RCare Mobile, and RCare’s integration with PointClickCare. RCare was recently nominated for two mobile caregiving awards for “Best of 2018” Mobile Star Awards.

Find out more about RCare. www.rcareinc.com or 585-671-4144.

How Senior Housing Campuses Can Save Lives During Heat Waves & Other Disasters

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Heat Waves and Senior Housing

When the outside temperature rises, it’s not only an inconvenient situation. Heat waves can be deadly to older and more vulnerable residents.

This lesson was driven home starkly in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma in Florida, where nine residents died after losing power in their nursing community.

It doesn’t take a catastrophic hurricane to make heat a deadly problem for seniors. Nearly 400 Americans die from heat waves each year. “Most of them are elderly people who often don’t realize when they are overheating and in danger.” (agingcare.com)

This is an awesome responsibility that falls on senior communities, to prevent and respond to a potential temperature increase, even if the resident doesn’t realize the danger or severity of the situation.

RCare Temperature Sensors (TS9 and TS9E) to mitigate the danger of heat waves to seniors

RCare’s temperature sensors

Nurse Call Systems have come a long way in the past few decades. Caregiving staff are expected to do far more than simply respond to button and pull cord alerts. They need to be aware if a resident is in a dangerous environment, without the resident having to do anything. The technology needs to enable better, faster, and more predictive care.

That’s why RCare’s nurse call systems have gone above and beyond, to integrate passive environmental sensors, such as temperature and flood detecting sensors. RCare’s temperature devices will detect when temperatures are rising and start sending out alerts to designated caregiving team members. RCare allows for a quick intervention, before the situation becomes a crisis.

Passive sensors are an important part of a complete nurse call system. RCare is the provider of advanced wireless nurse call systems for senior communities across the senior care continuum. With the integration of temperature sensors, water sensors, and other environmental sensors, RCare provides care staff with the extra tools they need to keep seniors safe, even if the resident never pressed a button.

Wander Management

Need wander management?  

We got wander management!  RCare is pleased to announce an integration with Accutech Security’s LS2400 wander management system.

wander managementAccutech’s solution is a low-cost wander system that provides resident ID, loiter and door-ajar monitoring, low tag battery as well as several other alerts without the need for a computer. It can provide resident ID and reporting capabilities at the door or nurses station with the optional touch-screen LCD display.  And now with the introduction of RCare integration, it is possible for communities to experience these capabilities directly from a browser or on their RCare Mobile nurse call handsets.

Long term care facilities can have multiple technology needs, but nobody wants to adopt three or four different solutions to address them all.  Technologies that work together, work the best.  Now your wander management can talk to your RCare nurse call system.

We think that’s the way it should be.

Disaster Planning and Your Nurse Call Systems – 5 Tips for Success

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Disaster planning for nurse call systems

If this year has taught us anything, it’s that anything can happen – wildfires, hurricanes, and even global pandemics. And the year is only half over. “Be prepared” is not just a motto for scouting. Knock on wood, your community or healthcare facility won’t need to evacuate suddenly, or to expand quickly to handle a surge in patients. But it never hurts to be prepared, to be ready to protect your residents and to make sure operations and care can return to normal as quickly as possible. In fact, Federal law requires that Medicare and Medicaid-certified facilities have written plans and procedures to meet all potential emergencies.

If you haven’t been thinking about your community’s emergency preparation plan, let the events of this year be the nudge you needed to get started. And as you’re creating your plan, here are five helpful tips to make your plan more effective.

Disaster Planning Tips

  1. Data Backup: Start by assuming that every technology system in use in your facility is built on a database that stores important data, such as patient information and incident information. If you were to lose your system to a disaster, would you lose all your data history? Your answer should be no. All data for all your systems should be backed up regularly and stored safely offsite, to be ready for you should you need it.
  1. Data Restore: Just as important as backing up the data is restoring it. If faced with a hardware or system failure for any reason, can you restore and make use of your data again? It’s important to schedule periodic tests to be sure that backups have been done successfully, with no data corruption, that restored data is accessible, usable, and that you are able to restore the data  and resume operations quickly.
  1. Hardware Backup: With your data safely secured, it’s important to have a plan for replacing your hardware quickly. whether it’s due to a normal hardware failure, or a flood or fire or other disaster. Be sure to have a source for the equipment that can ship quickly. In the midst of an emergency, you can’t be waiting weeks for back-ordered equipment. Be sure your plan includes a complete list of critical hardware to replace. And be sure that your systems, and your backed up system data, are compatible with your new replacement equipment.
  1. Peripherals: In addition to the system server, many systems have peripheral devices used by caregivers such as printers, phones, and monitor screens, as well as resident or patient devices, such as pendants and pull cords. When you’re recovering from an equipment failure, the biggest time investment will likely be inputting the settings for the peripherals, to reconnect them to the system. Strategize now about the best way to input or restore device settings as efficiently as possible, to get the system back to work. At the minimum, keep a hard copy of your plans and settings, and store it safely to be sure it’s available should it be necessary to rebuild your systems. Better yet, can the settings be backed up and restored like other data? Whatever you decide, don’t overlook this critical piece of your recovery plan.
  1. Temporary Solutions: Another consideration is having a stop-gap solution that you can swap into place in the short-term, while you wait for your systems to be restored to their normal functioning. Even in a crisis, your residents need to be equipped with an emergency call device. If you need to relocate your operations to another facility, or to expand temporarily into another location, a portable or stripped down system may be necessary to help you continue to provide care.

If this year has taught us anything, it’s that anything can happen.

How RCare can Help

RCare is a global provider of wireless nurse call and personal emergency response systems for the entire spectrum of eldercare and senior living. We’ve given a lot of thought to disaster preparation and recovery, because we know your call light system is critically important for the health and safety of your residents.

Rapid Deployment Kit – Portable Nurse Call System

Our Rapid Deployment Kit is a portable nurse call systems in a box, designed to be installed quickly, even outside of normal healthcare environments. It’s a temporary nurse call solution that has been employed nationwide by health systems to create temporary field hospitals to care for the surge of COVID patients. It’s quick to deploy, quick to take down, and easy to store. And it can help you be prepared in the event of an emergency. Learn more about RCare’s Rapid Deployment Kit.

Data Backup and Disaster Recovery Service for RCare’s Nurse Call Systems

RCare’s Data Backup and Disaster Recovery service minimizes disruption of service and recovery costs for our clients. It provides regular software backups, with data securely stored offsite. It also provides hardware protection, with a quick replacement of your RCare nurse call system hardware, no matter what the reason, with the replacement guaranteed to be compatible. System and device settings are also backed up, so that peripherals can be put back into use quickly and reliably. Learn more about RCare’s Data Backup and Disaster Recovery Program.

You can count on RCare every day to provide excellent, reliable nurse call capabilities for your community. And when the chips are down, you can count on RCare to help you provide the best possible care.

Find out more about how RCare’s Data Backup and Disaster Recovery Service and RCare’s Rapid Deployment Kit can help you protect your organization.

RCare Reporting: The Best Just Got Better

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RCare RMetrix reporting

RCare's RMetrix v2You’ve seen the advantages of RCare’s big-time native reporting and analytics. RMetrix, the free reporting package included with all RCare Nurse Call platforms, gives you the information and call analytics you need by person, by shift, or by group. With it, you can increase efficiencies, identify trends, and improve the quality of care.

And now it just got better.

We have recognized the changing needs of our clients and we used that information to completely overhaul our reporting, customized to your needs. Introducing RMetrix v2, a revamped RCare reporting technology providing the most modern, scalable, and customizable reporting and analytics for senior housing communities with one or more sites. Here’s what’s new:

Multiple Output Formats

Output reports in your choice of format:

  • Display them on screen
  • Download them as PDFs
  • Export them as .csv files

Pre-scheduled delivery, or on-demand:

You can choose to receive the reports in scheduled emails, or get them on demand whenever you want them.

Built-in Reports:

RCare RMetrix reportingOur comprehensive list of built-in, pre-designed reports gives you many choices for what information to get and how. You can use filters like date, group, incident outcome, and more.

  • ADLs by Individual Residents
  • Calls by Hour
  • Incident List
  • Resident List
  • Call Distribution Across Multiple Shifts
  • Incident Exceptions
  • Longest Response Times
  • Frequent Resident Callers
  • Check-In Report
  • and so much more…

Plus, you will receive additional built-in reports with future updates. Completely free.

Customizable:

Our new reporting engine also includes a Report Designer. If you don’t see exactly what you’re looking for in our extensive list of built-in reports, you can tailor your own report. Don’t have time to write your own custom reports? That’s okay, too. RCare’s team can create made-to-order reports for you, giving you full-service, custom-built reporting for a low added fee.

But wait, there’s more…

  • Built-in graphs for easy trend analysis
  • Professional, branded report output

Now shipping:

This new reporting is a part of all RCare installations, and it’s shipping now. It’s just one more reason to switch to RCare’s comprehensive emergency nurse call and monitoring technology.

Are you already an RCare client? Contact your RCare Trusted Integrator to request an upgrade.

RCare’s reporting was already the most versatile and easy-to-use in the industry. And it just got even better.

RCare Earns Rochester Health Care Hero Award

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Rochester Health Care Hero Award

The Rochester Business Journal (RBJ) announced that RCare’s CEO, Myron Kowal, has been selected as a 2020 recipient of the Health Care Hero award. This annual award celebrates and recognizes excellence, promotes innovation, and honors the efforts of organizations and individuals making a significant impact on the quality of healthcare in the Rochester area.

RCare’s Kowal is being recognized as a COVID-19 Hero, a special category created this year to honor individuals and organizations making exceptional efforts to help fight the COVID-19 health crisis and address the unique health care needs caused by the pandemic.

Headquartered in Webster, NY, RCare manufactures wireless nurse call and emergency monitoring systems for long-term care and senior housing communities. During the early days of COVID infections, RCare saw an unmet challenge. As cases were surging and hospitals were reaching capacity, providers were forced to create makeshift triage areas, tents in parking lots as well as full-scale temporary hospitals. These temporary solutions were missing the high-quality, reliable nurse call systems that play an integral role in safe patient care.

RCare’s response was to create a portable, durable, wireless nurse call system, a simple solution that could be set up quickly and easily, particularly in non-traditional patient settings. This special nurse call system, called the RCare Rapid Deployment Kit (RDK), is a nurse call system in a box. It’s completely plug and play, so it can be installed in minutes, even in non-standard settings that may lack traditional infrastructure, while providing the reliability of a hospital-grade nurse call solution. The kit provides effective, reliable nurse call communications between patients and caregivers, or between equipment (such as ventilators) and caregivers, even in non-healthcare, field operation environments.

Nurse Call Systems

Through the initial wave of infections, the RDK was installed in field hospitals throughout the country. One example is UMass Memorial Hospital, which created a 216-bed “pop-up” hospital in the 50,000 square foot Exhibit Hall of the DCU Center in Worcester, MA, to handle their patient overflow.

The DCU Center is an indoor arena and convention center in downtown Worcester. In April, its Exhibition Hall was converted to a field hospital to help nearby UMass Memorial Hospital handle the overflow of COVID-19 patients, those sick enough to require hospitalization, but not ICU care or a ventilator. The center was repurposed to act as both a field hospital led by UMass, and a shelter for homeless people who were positive for COVID-19. The installation was quick, smooth, and successful.

The hospital was created in a 50,000 square foot exhibition hall with cube-type barriers separating patient spaces. Nothing about the setting was traditional. Nothing could be permanently mounted. The server was placed behind folding tables that nurses used for charting, on a box, with the paging encoder on top of it. Locators were hung on centrally-located poles with tie wraps. The server and paging encoder were plugged into a network switch with a patch cable. Pendants were given to the staff for distribution to patients as they were admitted.

Sean Grady, Unit Director for UMass Memorial said this about the installation: “The RCare rollout was probably the best of any vendor rollout involved with the DCU project. From project management to technical install, it could not have gone any more smoothly. I can tell you that the nurse call system has worked great for us at the field hospital we have set up in Worcester.”

The installation happened very quickly, despite the tight schedule and chaotic environment. The goal was to complete the entire hospital in just ten days. In fact, UMass smashed the goal and completed the project in only 8 days. Even as the nurse call system was being installed, the IT department was setting up computers and networking infrastructure, Pharmacy was loading Picsys machines, Biomed was setting up their equipment, contractors were running the O2 infrastructure, and news crews were there documenting the whole thing.

RCare's Rapid Deployment Kit and RCare's CEO Myron Kowal

RCare’s founder and CEO Myron Kowal and the Rapid Deployment Kit

The RDK nurse call system includes a touchscreen server, one pendant for each patient, and four pagers. No internet connection is needed for the system, and no phone lines. The system is preprogrammed by the integrator, to be ready to use right out of the box. This capability is mission critical for overworked clinical staff who have neither the time nor the technical expertise to spend on installation. Each kit is designed for 40 patients, although expansion kits allow it to be used for many more. As easily as it is installed, the RDK can be uninstalled when the hospitals are no longer needed, and redeployed if needed again.

RCare’s founder and CEO Myron Kowal will be accepting the award at an exclusive virtual  awards ceremony at noon on August 24.

Learn more about the RCare Rapid Deployment Kit.
Find out more about the RBJ Health Care Hero Award.