Stellar Senior Living

By Susan Saldibar, Senior Living Foresight

When Stellar Senior Living installed Accushield (a Foresight partner) across their portfolio, they instantly increased visitor/resident security, while upgrading the visitors’ first impressions.

It’s saving them money on agency workers and getting them more Google reviews. (You heard that right.)

I had the pleasure of chatting recently with Stellar’s Dave Martin, chief administrative officer; Matthew Hess, project manager; and Chelsie Ring, director of marketing.

First, kudos to Stellar. These guys are doing a lot of things right. 

A family-owned IL/AL operator, they started off in 2012 with only four properties. Steadily building up a solid reputation for quality, they took over several struggling properties, and now are up to 32 locations spread across the western U.S.

What I like is that Stellar is one of those rare operators who know how to grow the right way, making sure that their size stays manageable enough that they can walk around and know the people personally who they are serving. (We need more like that.)

And they’re smart. They know when it’s time to automate.

Stellar originally had a couple run-of-the-mill check-in apps running in a few of their communities. But, for the most part, the ins and outs were still being self-reported. That means pencil and paper, and it made for not only inaccuracies but potential security issues as well.

For Dave and Matthew, automation was a no-brainer. It was just a matter of finding the right provider.

They loved that Accushield is dedicated to senior care.

Accushield was a provider they knew they could trust. It meant a lot to Stellar that Accushield’s owner, Charles Mann, had operated a senior living community himself. And when he saw a need for front desk automation he decided to build it.

They started off using Accushield in five of their communities, initially mainly for community safety and compliance purposes.

And believe me, Accushield has that covered. …

• Lists of everyone who enters and exits the building.
• Ability to track third-party caregivers and the vendors to residents
• Agency staffing hourly/daily log reports
• The ability to catch anyone entering who is not approved to enter
• Reports that can be printed and provided to attorneys, law enforcement, etc.

But here is my “wait, what?” moment. …

Stellar is also using Accushield to:

• Save money on agency workers. Raise your hand if you’ve ever been over-billed for a contract worker. How about for a shift that never even happened? The folks at Stellar are now able to quickly vet each bill by scanning the billed hours against an easy-to-read report of check-ins and check-outs. No more tedious combing through of records.
• Get more Google reviews. Yes, I said “Google reviews.” So somebody just had an amazing visit with their mom and loved the CNA who was so helpful. They’re about to leave beaming. But they have to check out first. Accushield allows them to quickly connect to a Google review interface to leave a review of their experience. Boom. You’ve gotten a review you probably wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. Oh, and if they leave a negative review, you’ll get pinged so that you can respond right away. How cool is that?
• Utilize the data for other purposes. So you have all this time-stamped data on visitors, right? Once you have time-stamped data on everyone entering and exiting the building, you’ll know which residents are getting regular visitors and which ones may need a little more love from the care team.
• Get third-party caregiver coordination and reporting. The Accushield kiosk captures care information from all third-party care providers as they sign in and out. The data then becomes reportable via web-based dashboard and can be included in the resident care-planning process.

“It’s an all-in-one solution, as opposed to three different solutions.” — Matthew Hess 

As a tech guy, Matthew loves how you don’t have to close out one app and open another and try to reconcile data across multiple apps. Have you ever tried to do this? It’s a pain in the neck.

“This one just makes sense.” — Dave Martin

The folks at Stellar suggest you put pencil to paper and list out all the benefits of upping your game to Accushield. The cost per month is manageable. And the ROI gets really strong once you use it at a few communities or more.

At the end of our chat, Dave shook his head and said, “This one just makes sense.”

Indeed it does.