Data and technology directly impacts the safety of residents. Listen in as President and CEO/Co-founder at Accushield, Allen Barnes shares operational efficiencies and comprehensive assessments teams should consider when overseeing and monitoring guest traffic in communities.

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Listen to Allen on Ep. 314 here.

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This episode was recorded at the ASHA Mid-Year Meeting. 

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Produced by Solinity Marketing.

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Become a sponsor of Bridge the Gap.

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Listen to more episodes here.

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00:00

Welcome to season seven of Bridge The Gap, a podcast dedicated to informing, educating, and influencing the future of housing and services for seniors. Powered by sponsors Accushield, Aline, NIC MAP Vision, Procare HR, Sage, Hamilton CapTel, Service Master, The Bridge Group Construction and Solinity. And produced by Solinity Marketing.

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00:32

Lucas

Welcome to Bridge the Gap podcast, the senior living podcast with Josh and Lucas. Want to welcome a good friend and one of our great supporter partners back to the program, Allen Barnes of Accushield. Welcome to the show. 

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00:45

Allen Barnes

Great. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. 

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00:47

Lucas McCurdy

And you know what? It's we get to always have these great conversations and, you know, these really nice places. And here in Dana Point, California is definitely one of them. And I don't know why we didn't just set this up by the pool or the beach today. We should have done that maybe later, right?

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1:02

Josh Crisp

Yeah, well, lots of sunscreen for me, actually.

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01:04

Lucas McCurdy

That's right. Well, maybe an umbrella, right. 

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1:06

Allen Barnes

Maybe have episode two tomorrow?

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1:08

Lucas McCurdy

There we go. There we go, and have a little drink with an umbrella. Okay, now I digress. This actually is a very serious topic that we're going to go over today. Pretty much everybody in the industry knows of Accushield, and the high commitment to safety and transparency that Accushield is well known for. And, you know, I spend many of my weeks going in and out of communities myself, and I'm a frequent Accushield user. I should get like a punch card or something.

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1:38

Allen Barnes

Fast pass.

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1:40

Lucas McCurdy

That's right. I need a fob. I need a fob to get in and out. But, safety is a big concern in the industry. And in really, you know, any kind of major industry where you have people that are vulnerable, there should be a bigger conversation around safety. And so I'd love for us to kind of do a deep dive today around your thoughts on safety and then what Accushield is proactively doing to bridge the gap for the industry.

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02:10

Allen Barnes

Yeah, I love to do that. 

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2:12

Josh Crisp

Well, and I'll tell you, you know, in light of there's so much going on in the world, right. 

And I think because, now our connectivity to the internet where everyone has a device, and everyone can almost, close to real time, hear of any bad story that happens anywhere, including senior living. It’s more important ever to actually have a plan for prevention and safety and the digitization of all that and so operators are faced with real challenges, not only just with the daily operations, but families, our industry hasn’t changed that families are still trusting us with their number one asset that they love the most- that's their loved one- and often times it's the adult son or daughter, or its the resident themselves that's coming to tour and they’re asking a lot of really tough questions in light of what's going on in the world, and how are we prepared to answer those questions. 

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And I think Accushield has been leading the way on securing and helping to understand what's happening in the community and who’s in our communities. And so, kind of tell us how the latest, as you’re helping be a partner in the industry and equipping operators and owners with the ability to be able to answer those tough questions for families and their loved ones as they enter them. How are we keeping people safe? What’s your response to that?

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3:40

Allen Barnes

Yeah, I think in the past and for so many years, you had to throw people at a problem like this. And one of the things that we focused on since our beginning, actually a decade ago, is the digitization of safety. By itself, data doesn’t keep anybody safe, but it's what you do with that data to create positive outcomes. 

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And so, what we continue to do is just focus on how we can capture more data, but make it useable and actually beneficial to communities so that they know who’s in their community at any time and is that person supposed to be in the community, and if they are, what are the limitations around what they should be doing. Who is it and what function are they there to provide. Families, obviously, are much different than third party care providers, they’re much different than an auditor who comes in or someone like that. So, it's important to understand that. 

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When you think about, for instance, elementary schools. Elementary schools know exactly who is in the building at any time, because there are established procedures around, when somebody comes in that single point of access, who are they, they must go to a specific spot, and hopefully get their license or verify that they've got their background check done, and then proceed from there, or not proceed from there. And so, senior living, I think, is trying to do the same thing, but they’re trying to do it as opposed to a school where you've got classrooms that are pretty static. In a senior living community, you still got to make it feel like a residence, because it is somebody’s home and it's a bit more challenging than even a school, I think, to do that. To give somebody the feeling of home but also keep them safe and have procedures that are pretty defined and rigid.

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5:30

Josh Crisp

When you’re even talking about that, I mean it sounds like okay, of course we want to do that but it's also a little bit of a challenge and, you know our industry across the board doesn’t really have a nationwide regulation right? We’re all state regulated, and so we’re relying a lot of times on individual organizations or operators’ policies and procedures and systems and tools that they put in place. So, I think, you know, one of the opportunities we have as an industry is, take some leading practices. Some best practices or leading practices. 

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And I’d love to hear some of your thoughts on what you guys already have in place, but forward looking, actively putting in place that will help our operators be able to lead in practice. To be in a position where not only you can have that in place, but you have a great story to tell, rather than being reactive to something that the news media is going to tell for you.

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6:25

Allen Barnes

When you think about operators in senior living, there's not an operator in the US that any of us know about who doesn't care about safety. You don’t get into this business because it's purely financial, you get in because of the fundamental base where you want to be in a business that cares for people because you're sort of that mindset. So, everybody wants to keep residents and staff safe, it's that they don't know how a lot of times. 

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And so, there are certain things like our kiosk where you sign in, and you have established procedures there. You can limit and have a single point of access, which is very difficult for a lot of communities, but again, you go back to the school example, sometimes it's just you gotta take a tough tack and do that.

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But other things that we’ve done over the past year and a half is, we’ve added license scans so that somebody coming in can’t say, well I’m Charles Mann, when it's really Allen Barnes. And so you’ve got a license scan to just validate that that person is who they say they are. We’ve added facial recognition. And there are all different kinds of statues depending on the state you’re in but typically in senior living because of the vulnerable population, there is pretty much an acceptance that facial recognition is something that can be utilized and utilized effectively because there is a vulnerable population. And so, we continue to do things like that and bring in technologies, again, digitization that can take out just having a human element and just having human judgment. And hopefully add additional filters to go through. 

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One of the areas that we’re focused on right now very heavily, and this is really core of a lot of development that we’re doing is we’re adding cameras to our product. Because when you think going back 15 years, you have the nest, right, and you had cameras like that that are now pretty ubiquitous in homes. But cameras like that are pretty static, in what they can do, they’ll show you who’s there, they’ll alert you who’s there, but they won’t do anything really more than that. But with the technology behind cameras now, the software has gotten so sophisticated that cameras can, in a sense, think for you. 

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And so, we’re integrating cameras with our product because cameras by themselves can't do what you need to do, you got to teach them to do what they need to do. Once you do that, they can do amazing things. You look at what’s happening with fall management right now, with camera applications, pretty incredible. And so, what the kiosk does, the advantage we have, we think with our technology is, the kiosk captures information and can teach the camera what the camera needs to know in order to teach us. And so it's a great melding of technologies but again, take that risk fence and continue to make it narrower and narrower and our goal is, one day you don’t have a fence, it’s completely safe. But until you get there, we’re going to continue to bring on additional technologies like cameras. 

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9:25

Josh Crisp

Well, and a couple things you said, and I whole-heartedly believe, it would be very difficult to find an operator that, as they’re listening to you talk, would not be cheerleading and saying “amen, yes”. But the challenge is, depending on the type the community has, the age of it, also our industry gets hit with so much tech over the last several years so a lot of folks have made decisions and brought in a lot of different tech that is not integrated and spent a lot of money and they may be listening and thinking, oh I love that but how do I bring it all together. 

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How do I create standard operating procedures on top of that, after I’ve integrated to ensure that we’ve got the right flow and that we’ve created this digitized safety net, so to speak for lack of a better term. What would you say to those operators that are wanting to take the next step and evaluating that. And even a lot of your larger regional operators, they don't have a huge tech team to even help them understand how to integrate all of that. So what would your coaching be, because you’re in this world.

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10:45

Allen Barnes

Yeah I think the first coaching I would have would be to bring in a consultant, a safety security consultant. It might be through your insurance company, then we know a number, anybody can reach out to us for contact information there, we would recommend come into the community. It’s not tremendously expensive. But it's very good to get people who understand the broad parameters of risk and what can happen within those parameters. Who can help you tighten those down. So the biggest thing I think would be to bring in someone who’s an expert and just lay the foundation there. And then build a plan around what we can do, because you can't overnight invest in everything that you need to do. But you can do certain things again, to continue to mitigate risks and cut it down and cut it down and cut it down.

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11:34

Josh Crisp

Lucas, you’ve been in so many communities, you get the opportunity to work with operators big or small across the country. I know you said a lot of Accushield buildings because they’ve done such a great job of protecting our industry and growing with our industry. What are some of the biggest differences you’re seeing when you are going into communities that maybe don’t have a system like that integrated versus walking into the Accushield properties. 

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11:55

Lucas McCurdy

This is an emerging conversation that I think is really, really important. And I like the contrast between an elementary school and in a senior living community, because I have two children in elementary school, and I've gone into this elementary school and it's, it's not easy to get in, but it's also not, you know, terribly challenging to get in, so much so that you dread it, you know, and so there's got there's got to be some, boundary lines there. 

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And in just like a school, and probably even more so in the senior living community, there's a lot of services that come in. There are active buildings. There's vendor partners that are in and out, every day there's home health, there's service technicians, heating, electrical plumbers, I mean, landscaping crews. I mean, it's just there's a lot of people on campus, on site. And, I think thinking through this and building these standards of practices are super important. And I love this commitment to saying, look we may not have all of the tools that you need in the toolbox, but we're going to help you, build out this toolbox with some procedures and protocols. I think it's a great concept. 

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13:14

Allan Barnes

Well, you know, another important thing to think about too is safety. When we think about safety you think about the bad guy coming in and doing and doing something horrible but safety goes well beyond that. 

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And again, with cameras, one of our initial products is we’re going to try to help with elopement, because elopement is an issue that every operator, every AL operator, every memory care worries about, but cameras are smart enough to be able to position in the right place to say, this person should not be going through that door by themselves. Or this person should be signing out with someone before they leave the community. 

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So there’s a lot that you can do there. And then there are operational deficiencies that lead to safety, let's say it's care notes from a home health provider, they're leaving without leaving care notes and you digitize those care notes. Well, you can marry those two together and again that's safety because it's part of care coordination, it’s part of a plan to keep a resident healthy which really is safety at the end of the day. So there’s a lot you can do.  

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14:17

Josh Crisp

And you just touched on even one thing, the idea of elopement and you look at how much the industry has changed with the different property types and now you’re seeing more and more of acuity being pushed downstream into more independent settings, and I think often time, as independent living developer/owner/operator’s, we think, well we’re not really set up and we’re not really caring for a population that has Alzheimer’s or Dementia. But, how exposed potentially are we with the rising cognitive impairments and disorders, and with dementia’s and with one out of every two are going to have some form of Dementia as they’re telling us. 

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When is the moment that we go from one day a resident, not being confused, then having no impairment to that moment that triggers and being able to save just one bad incident, one bad press moment that not only could negatively impact that community and their operation and their ability to even continue to operate but what that does to the entire industry. So, a little dose of prevention and being preemptive because there’s one thing that's for sure is, people are aging where they are longer. And they’re doing that through technology but what a great tool to be able to integrate the safety net to even be able to prevent that type of situation in a more independent setting which oftentimes our guards a little bit down in those types of settings as well.

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15:51

Allen Barnes

Yeah and to your point, you want that independent living resident to still feel as independent as they can. Take my mother-in-law for instance, she’s 93 in an independent living community. She still would want, and we would want for her to be accounted for. And she would say that. But it’s also her home, she’s going to go in and out. And yet, if you have smart technology, you can know she's gone, you can know when she left, and there's just a lot of, I guess peace of mind for families and for residents if we’re able to do that. 

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16:23

Josh Crisp

Yeah. And maybe that means she doesn't need to be in a lock down community, but we need to put measures in place to be able to care for them adequately where they are. 

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16:31

Allen Barnes

Yeah, when you think about what's happened in the media over the last year. Unfortunately, they’re sort of ubiquitous on social media as well and because it's so widespread, it takes the bad incidents and makes them the norm. And so, I think what we’ve got to do, I think we got a real opportunity, and that is, take safety as a differentiator. When you’re bringing in families, talk about it and talk about what you're doing, and talk about why your community is taking steps above and beyond to make sure that you’re limiting risk as much as you can. You can’t completely limit risk, but if you’re doing something, we think it’s just a great selling point because it's always just one of the top two or three things that's on the priority list for particularly families and also for residents. 

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17:23

Josh Crisp

Sure. Well and if we wait until the regulators jump in and do it for us, there’s going to be for sure a much higher cost to pay for that. So what a great opportunity to partner with groups like Accushield to implement proactively a leading practice before bad things happen. So, Lucas, another great conversation from our friends at Accushield.

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17:42

Lucas McCurdy

That's right. Helping set the standards and bridging that gap. And there's other conversations. Alan was on episode 314, talking about technology and safety. And so if you'd like to learn more about this, go to btgvoice.com. You may or may not know if you've been a listener of bridge gap for a while, we've got an awesome search feature on our BTG voice. You can actually hit the search and type in any key word or phrase that you are looking for. It could be sales and marketing could be safety. It could be anything that you're thinking of. Type that in and every episode that we have ever talked about those topics on will come up for your choices.

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And so 314 Alan was on to  discuss more technology. And this is another great episode for continuing our talk on safety. Thank you so much for your time today.

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18:32

Allan Barnes

Thanks for having me.

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18:34

Lucas McCurdy

And thanks so much to Accushield because they are a great supporter partner, they are helping us bring this content to you. So go to BTGvoice.com. Hit us up on LinkedIn and thanks for listening to another great episode of Bridge the Gap.

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18:46

Thanks for listening to Bridge the Gap podcast with Josh and Lucas. Connect with the BTG network team and use your voice to influence the industry by connecting with us at BTG voice.com.

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