How Responsive Group Elevated Their Resident Experience with Welbi

It’s not easy building a person-centered recreation program — especially when your team is flooded with time-consuming administrative tasks. That’s why Responsive Group chose Welbi to elevate their resident experience.

“Welbi's platform not only leverages individual preferences, likes and dislikes to create and bring to life personalized recreational calendars but even more importantly shares information about the individual — about the "person" — with each member of the care team for meaningful interactions at all times.” – Cristina De Santis, Vice President of Performance Improvement and Innovation at Responsive Group Inc. 

In addition to saving Responsive’s recreation teams almost 24 hours each month on administrative tasks, Welbi also empowered them with the insights and resident knowledge they needed to create programming that truly engaged each resident. In only a few weeks, Responsive’s teams were able to:

• Spend 60% less time updating PCC and creating calendars
• Identify specific residents that needed engagement 55% faster
• At-a-glance insights on each resident to offer person-centered experiences

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Background

Responsive Group Inc. is a recognized leader in creating practical and innovative processes and programs as well as lasting partnerships that support healthy options for seniors. The organization offers a comprehensive portfolio of services that includes the management of retirement communities and long term care homes as well as consulting, mentoring, and restructuring services. They currently operate 20 long term care homes and 18 retirement communities in Ontario.

Responsive Group prides itself on pioneering services that respond to the changing needs of seniors and their communities. Their vision of creating communities where people of all ages achieve all that they can be starts with a person-centered approach to care. Responsive’s long term care homes and retirement communities provide person-centered services based on a holistic understanding of residents’ interests, hobbies, and needs.

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Challenges

Responsive Group wanted to grow their person-centered services in their long term care communities and needed a solution for time-consuming administrative tasks that were cutting into the recreation team’s time with residents. The higher standards of documentation in long term care communities lead to heavy administrative workloads that can be slowed down by outdated tools. Responsive’s recreation teams were losing almost 24 hours a month on time-consuming processes like documenting in ActivityPro and PointClickCare, as well as creating calendars.

Recreation teams also needed a way to keep resident information accessible.

Person-centered recreation depends on teams having a deep understanding of residents’ hobbies, interests, goals, and needs. However, resident information is often out of date and kept in binders that take hours to sift through. This also makes it challenging for teams to identify residents who are at risk of isolation. Loneliness has been linked to a 59% higher risk of physical and mental health decline and a 64% higher risk of dementia in seniors. Recreation staff had to rely on their individual knowledge of residents to identify and meet their needs. They needed a solution that would centralize resident information and make it easy to offer person-centered experiences.

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Solution

Welbi’s resident experience platform was able to alleviate administrative burden and elevate Responsive’s program offerings. Our partnership is strengthened by our shared belief that every resident deserves a person-centered experience. We hold a common commitment to recognizing the individuality of each resident and to eliminating the one-size-fits-all approach to programming.

Welbi worked alongside Responsive to set goals that would guide the implementation of their new resident experience platform. Welbi committed to help Responsive reduce time spent on administrative tasks by 25% and to increase person-centered recreation by supporting the creation of person-centered wellness journeys.

“One of our department goals is to focus on person-centered care while programming for residents. Welbi is now an important tool to help us reach this goal.” – Shelley Deir, Director of Programs at Wellington Park

Welbi’s full integration with PointClickCare’s EHR platform also ensured a smooth data transfer for Responsive, making it seamless for their communities to upgrade their resident experience platform without disrupting programs and activities.

Unlike the one-size-fits-all platforms, Welbi also worked closely with each of Responsive’s communities to configure the resident experience platform to each community’s unique needs. For example, Welbi was able to tailor the attendance tracking page to allow for easier logging of 1-on-1 and self-directed programs — a need that arose from social distancing rules due to COVID-19.

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Results

Within three months of implementing Welbi, Responsive was already able to exceed their time-saving goals. With Welbi, Responsive was able to address the critical activities of documenting information in PCC, building calendars, and identifying residents needing engagement and cut down the time spent on each by more than half.

“Completing calendars took forever. Now with Welbi, all you have to do is start typing [in the program name] and [everything] auto populates. My staff have such an easier time completing calendars. Designing and making sure everything fits is so quick and easy. Something that used to take days for them now can be done in a matter of hours.”

Responsive also succeeded in boosting their person-centered services with the platform’s host of recreation-planning tools. Before Welbi, staff were overwhelmed trying to stay up to date with each resident’s engagement level. Now, with Welbi’s homepage dashboard, residents with low engagement are automatically flagged on the homescreen for all recreation staff to see. This has reduced the time spent on identifying residents needing engagement by 55%. Teams have the tools they need to identify at-risk residents and the time to better engage with them.

“Since moving platforms, [my staff] are spending more time with residents who wouldn't actively participate in more cognitive activities, and are spending more quality time with passively involved residents.”

With Welbi, Responsive’s recreation teams have easy access to the information they need to offer person-centered experiences and programming to residents. Welbi’s in-depth, fully digital resident profiles and assessments enable teams to surface relevant information instantly. Teams have noticed that knowledge transfer for students and new-hires during onboarding has never been easier. Personalization no longer depends on an individual’s own knowledge of a resident — that information is made accessible to all staff through Welbi.

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What’s Next?

Here’s a quick recap of what Responsive’s communities were able to achieve with Welbi:

• Spend 60% less time updating PCC and creating calendars
• Identify specific residents that needed engagement 55% faster
• At-a-glance insights on each resident to offer person-centered experiences

With Welbi, the entire Responsive team is now able to provide residents with person-centered experiences and programs while making the lives of recreation staff easier. With all this in mind, Responsive also knows there are still many opportunities where Welbi can make a difference. In this vein, Responsive is planning to expand implementation of Welbi throughout even more communities — in some situations with Welbi’s newest early release features.

“We are delighted to partner with Welbi to tailor and grow their personalized service offering for LTC. We share a common, profound, commitment to recognizing the individuality of each LTC resident and affording each a daily lived experience that reflects the same.”  – Cristina de Santis, Vice President of Performance Improvement and Innovation at Responsive Group Inc. 

Responsive has only just scratched the surface of the possibilities that Welbi has enabled.