Or Yom nursing home demonstrates the efficient use of an Elpas RTLS (real time location system) wireless nurse call solution. At Or Yom the residents are able to issue a call for assistance anywhere in the facility, while the caregivers can receive the calls even while away from the nurse’s station. The residents also feel reassured that in case of distress they can be immediately located anywhere on the premises.
Or Yom nursing home demonstrates the efficient use of an Elpas RTLS (real time location system) wireless nurse call solution. At Or Yom the residents are able to issue a call for assistance anywhere in the facility, while the caregivers can receive the calls even while away from the nurse’s station. The residents also feel reassured that in case of distress they can be immediately located anywhere on the premises.
Developed under the auspices of the Neve Shalom Jewish Synagogue Foundation, the Or Yom nursing home was opened in September 2004, under the name Barinyurt.
The Challenge
The nursing home spans two buildings over 11 floors — a newer facility in which a nurse call system could be more easily installed and an older building that presented more of challenge when designing and installing a system because of its thick walls and room configurations.
For both buildings, it was important to devise a system that would let the caregivers and nursing staff know the location of each resident and provide those residents with a means to request assistance in case of an emergency. The nursing home also wanted to put more technology in the hands of staff, giving them the ability to alert if they were in distress.
The Solution
Working with its integrator Sigmamed, the nursing home deployed the Elpas Real Time Location System (RTLS) for its 130 residents. Each resident was issued a healthcare positioning tag that serves as an active RFID transmitter.
The tags work in conjunction with a series of readers installed throughout the facility. For this project, Sigmamed took different approaches based on whether it was working in the older or the newer building.
Within the older building, which had walls that were more than 2 feet, 7 inches thick, the integrator installed infrared (IR) readers in each of the residents’ rooms. This part of the facility offers a shared bathroom on each floor, so a single low-frequency (LF) reader was positioned at the entrance to each bathroom. The older building also houses a main dining hall, so a single radio frequency (RF)reader was positioned in the center of the hall so it could cover all the elderly residents gathered there.
The new building, with more modern construction, allowed Sigmamed to put LF readers in individual resident rooms, near each entrance. This way, if a resident issued a call for assistance, the staff could easily see the room from which the call is coming and respond, whether the person was in the en suite bathroom or in the general living space. Within the facility’s Alzheimer’s unit, readers were positioned so if a resident attempts to wander beyond the confines of the floor, an alarm is sounded.
Resident tags are monitored via computers situated at three nurse’s stations. Here, nurses can monitor distress calls from the elderly, with the system providing positioning information. The nursing staff also has the option to receive calls on a mobile phone in case they are away from the nurse’s station.
The 20 doctors, nurses and caregivers at the facility were outfitted with active ID badges so their movements can be monitored as well. The staff tags also serve to cancel an alarm once a staff member responds to a request from a resident through an automatic action within the badge. The information transmitted from the staff tags aids in tracking response times and gives the head nurse information on who has responded to an event.
If a caregiver needs additional help, the badge serves as a means of sending a Code Blue just by a press of a button on the badge.
Another feature available to staff is the ability to monitor calls and information through an easy-to-use mobile application from Elpas called Eiris Go. The app can track such activities as nurse calls, duress alerts and wandering residents.