When Pine Grove Crossing in Parker, CO, decided to improve residents’ engagement and better connect them with their families and with staff, as well as to streamline operations by automating paper-based processes, the community’s resident engagement increased by 75 percent. Equally impressive, 100 percent of their staff were pleased with the new platform from LeadingAge Bronze Partner with CAST Focus LifeLoop, a leading resident and staff experience solution for senior living.

Read on for details of this transformation, and ideas on how your organization could do the same, in the latest LeadingAge CAST case study.

Web-based Solution Engages Residents and Family Members

One of Stellar Senior Living’s 36 communities, Pine Grove Crossing needed a technology partner to support both future and current needs, such as automating activity tracking, scheduling and other processes, as well as engaging families in residents’ lives through improved communication. Leaders at Pine Grove, which offers independent living, assisted living, memory care, and skilled nursing, selected LifeLoop’s web-based resident engagement platform as their solution.

Residents can access LifeLoop’s resident engagement system through their desktops, laptops, phones, and tablets. Pine Grove develops content, including information such as events and alerts, that is viewable not only via individuals’ personal devices, but also on monitors throughout the community. Residents can use the large interactive touchscreen TVs to access more than 6,700 pieces of engagement content, all backed by clinical research, from iN2L by LifeLoop.

To keep families in the loop on community happenings, Pine Grove has moved from emails and mailed newsletters to an approach that taps the powers of LifeLoop’s portal. Now, family members can use LifeLoop’s companion family app to access event calendars, announcements, and newsletters in real time. As a result of this real-time communications channel, more family members are attending community events. Access to the app and LifeLoop web portal, along with automated weekly emails, also enable family members to see residents’ activities and tagged photos, keeping them connected to their loved ones’ lives.

Because the LifeLoop platform streamlines operations, staff are spending significantly less time sending communications, promoting events, and tracking attendance—and devoting more time to caring for and engaging residents.

Stellar Results for Residents, Families, and Staff

This partnership has brought measurable improvements across multiple areas, including enhanced operations and engagement.

Outcomes include 100% staff satisfaction with the platform, which moves away from manual entry systems and drastically reduces administrative burden, opening up more staff time to engage with residents.

For example, LifeLoop organized an average of 20 requests per month for transportation—including group outings, medical trips, and personal trips—across the assisted living and memory care departments. The LifeLoop transportation feature has also improved coordination between resident requests and drivers’ schedules, preventing booking errors and optimizing vehicle usage.

Thanks to high-quality iN2L engagement content and streamlined activity promotion and communication, resident engagement has increased by 75 percent since the LifeLoop integration went online. As another example of the platform’s effectiveness, a dementia education event that initially had no RSVPs gained 57 RSVPs overnight after Pine Grove promoted it through LifeLoop.

Pine Grove used the iN2L engagement content an average of 477 hours per month over 11 months, with audio, video, and games being the most popular among residents. Within assisted living, staff managed an average of 300 activities per month in LifeLoop. An average of 10 assisted living residents attended each activity, which were primarily intellectual, social, purposeful, and physical activities. The memory care department offered an average of 231 LifeLoop activities per month, each averaging seven attendees.

Read the full case study for details on the implementation, plus advice on how to choose a technology partner that aligns with your organization’s growth trajectory and values, the importance of exploring all available features early on, and ways to encourage buy-in among staff.