Mending Hearts, Inc., of Hazard, Kentucky, provides services and supports to individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (ID/DD) under Kentucky’s Supports for Community Living (SCL) Medicaid waiver. Mending Hearts provides day training, community access, employment, residential supports, personal assistance, and respite care for individuals with ID/DD. They also maintain nineteen homes with two to four recipients in each, in addition to their community based and site-based programs.
Mending Hearts, Inc. discovered MediSked while searching for a solution that would allow their agency to eliminate the production of new paper records, scan and store legacy records spanning up to twenty years, keep track of new data, record medication administration and errors, and gain access to any record through a simple name, date, or number search. MediSked Connect was implemented to alleviate their prior challenges in 2014.
Featured SOLUTION
Streamline information and service delivery to create efficiencies and improve outcomes across provider agencies
The Opportunity
Every year, Mending Hearts would produce several four-inch binders worth of paper per recipient.
The recordkeeping was astronomical; and when auditors would come in, Mending Hearts had to dig through tons of paper just to find a specific note. In some instances, Mending Hearts would have to go to a storage facility to find it, leading to the frustration of dealing with so much paper.
“When you have that many individuals and that much paperwork, you’re always losing paperwork. It’s a lot to keep up with – and then there’s the space required to file all the paperwork.”
– April Feltner, Mending Hearts Program Director
In March 2014, Mending Hearts executive director, Shirlyn Perkins, discovered MediSked as a solution to their paper problem.
The Outcome
Mending Hearts staff members have found that Connect makes many aspects of their jobs a great deal easier. MediSked customized fields and made other improvements in order to fit the way Mending Hearts wanted to keep records.
Through MediSked Connect, Mending Hearts has entered new notes and documentation for each individual into the system, and completed care plans, as well as activity plans.
Employees have scanned paper records and attached them to the recipients’ files, making an enormous legacy of documents available and searchable for the first time in the agency’s history.
“Rather than going through chart to chart to chart, you go into Connect and it pops right up. When an individual’s PA expires, you had to go through every one of those charts. Now when someone needs something, all I have to do is get on the system and print it straight out. Sometimes we can just email it to them—which saves on paper, ink, and time. Anything you need to know you can just go straight to MediSked Connect.“
– April Feltner, Mending Hearts Program Director
Currently, MediSked Connect allows the staff to keep electronic medication administration records, giving administrators the ability to track exactly who receives which medications, when they are administered, and any reasons that an individual does not receive his or her meds.
Connect also provides ways for house managers and other caregivers to communicate with one another about a recipient’s care with a internal messaging board – this feature provides the ability to pass imperative information internally to the others who support the same individual. Other communication tools allow employees to audit and approve their notes, scan and attach forms, and do a number of other tasks that were all done on paper before. The paperless Connect platform eliminates prior challenges like missed details, spelling issues and poor handwriting with standardized tools and alerts.
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