This Customer Spotlight is brought to you by PointClickCare. Here, we explore a customer implementation of PointClickCare’s Electronic Health Record solution including insight into the process and the leadership behind taking team members through the transition to a paperless platform.
Meet Heather Fritz, assistant director of Cedar Creek Assisted Living Residence in Crystal River, Florida. Fritz started in assisted living in 1995 as a caregiver and has worked in the business ever since. She has been with Cedar Creek for 14 years and counting. With a staff of more than 50, Fritz works to bring continued service and comfort to the residents of the privately-owned Cedar Creek community, from budgets to staff training and everything in between.
We sat down with Fritz to hear about leading her community through the transition to working with PointClickCare, and how an EHR-enabled platform has improved Cedar Creek’s position among the competition in its local market—both in terms of the other communities available and the prospective employee pool.
As the Assistant Director of Cedar Creek Assisted Living, what does your average day look like?
Being privately owned, our director and I do everything from budgets to human resources, training, finances—we are just totally hands on. We are very closely aligned with our nurses and resident care staff, and we do what needs to be done. We’re blessed to be privately owned.
How long have you been in this current role, and how long have you been with the organization?
I’ve been with the organization and in this role for just over 14 years.
What were you doing before that? Were you in the industry or were you doing something different?
I’ve been in the assisted living industry since 1995, when I was still in high school. I started out as a caregiver.
Wow! So you are one of those!
I did work in a hospital, but other than that all of my other years have been assisted living.
You’ve probably seen a lot of change.
Oh, absolutely.
I love to hear about that kind of progression, that folks have taken from the caregiver role all the way up to the executive level.
I try to lead by example. I am the first one out there with my caregivers. If a resident comes to me and needs some help I just do it, you know? It’s just how I believe in leading.
I try to lead by example. I am the first one out there with my caregivers. If a resident comes to me and needs some help I just do it, you know? It’s just how I believe in leading.
Tell me about some of the challenges you’ve faced in your current role. If you could point to one of the greatest challenges what would that be and how did you overcome it?
The challenge we’re still trying to overcome is that over the last 5 to 7 years, the acuity level of the residents has been rising.
We are making sure staff who have been used to more independent residents, are comfortable providing more hands-on care and learning how to handle memory care residents. That’s an everyday thing.
A lot of providers are trying to figure out what to do to address that. Does that involve a lot of training?
Yes. It’s a lot of hands-on training. It has changed our nurses. In Florida we don’t have to have nurses in assisted living, but we have had nurses from Day 1. Our nurses have had to do a lot more in the way of medications, assessments, and when the residents are sick, monitoring their medical needs. The level of medical care in our building has gone up, as it has in most buildings.
As far as technology is concerned in this setting, do you view technology more as a need to have or a nice to have for residents? What about for employees?
I think it is a need for both. We’ve had PointClickCare now for just over a year and I honestly don’t know how we functioned as well as we did without it. For the residents, it’s having that information at our fingertips. Our new staff are able to see firsthand the individual care request level that each resident has. When they go to give a shower or help someone get dressed, they have the resident’s particular wants and needs at hand. They can read [the details] beforehand so they are not going in blind. It works both ways because we’re meeting the needs of the residents better, and the staff is more informed and it’s easier for them to document the care. It’s quicker. I don’t know what we did without it.
Tell me a little bit about the transition to the EHR platform. What was the process like and how long did it take? Were you using another EHR before that or was PointClickCare the first?
This was the first one. We were totally paper-based prior to this. It was a big switch to the EHR. We are doing medication electronically now as well. The way we chose to do it, we trained, including myself, two other people on the process and then we went out and trained the employees. We staged in first the Point of Care side and the resident chart side. Once we got that down we did that for about two months. Then we started training on the medication side. We started with what we thought was most important, which was for our CNAs to do the point of care. The training was about a month. It took a couple of weeks to get all of the data in and the background work of it. Once we trained the staff, we did most of the training for the CNAs in two hours, and then answered questions that came to us during the day. The program was just so easy for the CNAs to pick up that it didn’t take them long at all.
It sounds like the staged approach helped too, because then it wasn’t too much at one time.
Yes. The nurses took a little more time for training because what they need to do in the system is more in-depth. But, for the hands-on caregivers it was much easier.
