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Innovative Health, LLC and Transitional Care Management, LLC had a unique opportunity when drawing up plans to replace a 150-year-old senior care/rehabilitation facility in a northern Chicago suburb. Their plans for the new center, “Thrive Of Lake County” in Mundelein, IL, were to combine state-of-the-art technology, patient-friendly touches, and modern infection control measures – even before the world heard of COVID-19. Now that the facility is open, management believes they have exceeded expectations … with some help from Capsa Healthcare technology and their observant pharmacy provider, PharmScript. “We wanted to improve patient care in every way so we asked our s
olutions partners to help us bring it to the next level,” says Denise Norman, President of Transitional Care Management.
One unique feature in Thrive’s 60-suite rehabilitation wing is its novel use of Capsa’s SlimCart. Each suite has its own SlimCart documentation cart outfitted with an iPad Pro, instead of the traditional model of each nurse pushing their “WOW”, or workstation on wheels, from room to room. Now, nurses and physicians access EMR (via the cloud-based PointClickCare), take vitals, and conduct medication rounds in a highly intimate way, right at bedside or chair-side with the guest. This process has an added bonus of infection control efforts; administrators want as little as possible traveling room-to-room. The small, lightweight and versatile SlimCart made that possible. Any bigger mobile computing station would have been impractical.
“Sometimes our patients require a lot of outside equipment depending on their needs: orthopedic, head injury, trauma, spine injury. The suite can get cluttered quickly, so the workstation had to be easy to store and move around,” Norman says.
SlimCart was not on management’s radar until PharmScript brought up the possibilities that such a simple mobile platform existed. (PharmScript has long partnered with Capsa, and Capsa’s medication carts and NexsysADC are in use in several areas at the Thrive Center.)
Norman and Thrive Administrator Jackie Prestel believe the sky is the limit to what the SlimCart mobile station can help them accomplish, like telehealth down the road to connect patients to outside MDs and family members. “The whole medication delivery and patient consultation experience has been improved,” Prestel says. “Med pass can take a good amount of time. Traditionally the nurse was going back and forth from the hall to the medication cart to the room and back again. It drained time and energy, and there are always distractions like side conversations in the hall. Now, with the computer and meds in the room, our nurses can focus. The whole thing is to ‘have a chat’. The perception of our guests is that they feel they have more time and better quality care with their nurse or doctor.”
Thrive of Fox Valley (Aurora, IL) and Thrive of Lisle (Lisle, IL) also installed SlimCarts into each rehabilitation suite, and results are similarly positive. For more about the center, visit www.ThriveAhead.com.
Capsa first released SlimCart in mid-2019; ever since, it has been deployed in surprisingly diverse scenarios where a traditional full-size powered workstation is more than what is needed. That includes lighter duty needs such as brief documentation tasks and rounding carts. And SlimCart’s flexibility allows it to be configured for a broad range of small lightweight devices, including tablets and laptops.
“With the trends that have been accelerated in response to COVID-19, SlimCart’s adaptability has extended its applications further into telehealth use cases and additional care settings,” says Steve Torbett, Capsa’s Senior Product Manager.