Transitioning to care at home after a hospital visit can be a difficult experience — for patients and family caregivers. Fortunately, a collaboration between electronic health record (EHR) provider PointClickCare and software company Trualta is aiming to improve the care experience through an educational and social platform designed for family caregivers.
“Getting discharged from a facility or hospital is one of the hardest things you can do, regardless of what you went through,” Trualta Chief Technical Officer Shahzad Zafar told McKnight’s Home Care Daily Pulse. “You have family members usually helping you out and there’s no training available. I’ve seen it firsthand, where people come home and suddenly you don’t know how to look after them. So we are immediately there to provide that continuation of care to make the transition of care much easier and help the patient at home.”
The Trualta platform is available to caregivers, accessible via phone, tablet or computer, upon discharge. It uses data collected by PointClickCare’s EHR. Once signed up, users can access modules, videos, articles and a variety of other resources intended to guide the caregiver. So far, the platform has had a positive impact on readmission rates as well as easing the effects of the caregiver shortage.
“From our data that we have gathered, we can see that we have reduced readmissions by almost 20 percent,” Zafar said. “If you think of that from a cost perspective and even from a patient health perspective, that’s huge. We hope to get even better at that number, but we have data to prove the kind of value for both an unpaid caregiver setting as well as paid caregiver settings.”
While the application provides plenty of educational resources, it also provides an outlet for caregivers to communicate with each other across the nation. Zafar believes this makes the software stand out in a competitive marketplace.
“We’re not just a learning management system. We provide a sense of community and really broaden that connectivity from your home,” Zafar said. “It makes it super-easy for you to connect with other caregivers around you and even connect to our experts and our coaches to get help from them as you need. It is a seamless experience, which I think puts us in a unique spot of having both the community platform as well as an online learning platform. The two combined are, in my view, pretty awesome.”
As more adults age in place, there will be a premium placed on effective, trained caregivers. With the help of Trualta, they will be more than up to the challenge, according to Zafar.
“It’s the caregiver who we’re trying to help, that’s our mission,” Zafar said. “Our goal is to have better days for everyone, that’s the mantra that we go in with every day. We definitely feel like we can help people stay at home longer and provide better care for themselves and their care recipients.”
Home Sweet Home is a feature appearing Mondays in McKnight’s Home Care Daily Pulse. The story focuses on a heartwarming, entertaining or quirky happening affecting the world of home care. If you have a topic that might be worthy of the spotlight in Home Sweet Home, please email Special Projects Coordinator Foster Stubbs at [email protected].
