January 2024 – Newsletter

RTasks Blog

A Simple Guide to Comprehensive Assessments

Assisted living providers must conduct comprehensive assessments, both for the health of their residents as well as their operations. These assessments include a head-to-toe evaluation of each resident’s physical and mental condition, as well as evaluations of their activities of daily living (i.e. bathing, dressing, grooming, handling finances, communication, chores, etc.). With a more complete understanding of the resident’s health and capabilities, a care plan can be created specific to a resident’s unique needs. Nurses and staff can use these care plans to provide the required assistance and monitoring for the resident.

Assessments are very important for a resident’s health and a facility’s compliance status. Without the right help from innovative technology, they can be very time-consuming.

With the assessments feature integrated in the RTasks platform, care providers have all the tools they need to conduct comprehensive assessments. For every aspect of resident care, RTasks has an assessment designed to improve staff efficiency and ensure no resident is overlooked. Assisted Living communities can ensure the best quality of care, streamline their assessment duties, and ensure compliance with regulations.

Create Better and Informed Care Plans

One of the powerful features of RTasks assessments is the ability to easily generate care plans, sometimes referred to as “Master Care Plans”. With these care plans, nurses and staff will gain a complete view of each resident’s status based on the needs identified through RTasks assessments. Care plans are automatically pushed out to staff to review and acknowledge. The Master Care Plan serves to enhance communication between staff at each level.

Reduce Missed Resident Services

During assessments, nurses and staff often find that residents require changes in the services being provided. Some residents will require less care, while others may need additional services due to recent changes in their health. Regardless of whether they need more or less care, nurses need easier, more robust ways to document and manage changes in resident services. RTasks assessments combine both of these features into one solution.

Save Valuable Time

With the staff shortages and increased care demands, it’s important for communities to save their staff time in every way possible. Like every other RTasks feature, the assessment is designed to help save time while also improving the quality of care by eliminating the need to enter the same information twice. Historical data is accessible when updates to the assessment are needed. Plus, RTasks alerts nurses to upcoming assessments that are due.

Maintain Regulatory Compliance

Assessments are vital for care, but they also play a large role in survey compliance. RTasks makes it simple for assessments to be documented and accessed at any time for state surveyors to review. Any assessment can be generated into a report that contains key information, such as the type of assessment, date/time, resident data, and a copy of the care plan. Maintain compliance with ease using RTasks assessments.

Report Highlight:

Quick Reports

If you have ever wished you could create your own report, then look no further than RTasks’ Quick Reports. This feature provides an easy way for you to compile profile data (resident, staff, prospect) that can be uploaded in different formats such as PDF, Excel or CSV. Click here for more information: Quick Reports.

Feature Highlight

Outbound Fax

The Pharmacy Connect – Outbound Fax feature sends scheduled faxes to advise pharmacists of important facility data such as refill requests, rejected medications, discontinued medications, changes to orders (med times, instructions, etc.), controlled pill counts < 15, and medications placed or removed from hold.  Each pharmacy will receive a faxed report on a scheduled basis.  Faxes are sent Monday through Saturday at 8am, 10am, 12pm, 2pm and 4pm.

What are the main benefits of Pharmacy Connect – Outbound Fax?

• Pharmacies will receive important information from the facility on a regular basis using faxing (already a normal workflow process in most pharmacies). 
• Pharmacy Connect – Outbound Fax provides pharmacy staff with key insights critical to providing excellent service: refill requests, rejected or discontinued meds, etc. This may greatly improve communication between facility and pharmacy. 
• Pharmacy Connect – Outbound Fax is a service that we provide to the pharmacy and the RTasks client at no charge.

Learn more about Pharmacy Connect. Contact RTasks support at support@residexsoftware.com for further assistance in setting up Pharmacy Connect – Outbound Fax.

Please Note:

The ‘Check for Medication Interactions’ feature has been disabled due to The National Library of Medicine, our source for utilizing this feature, discontinuing their drug-drug interaction application interfacing service.

This Works Better

Public payers are now prorated based on the start and end date set on the payer, this gives you the opportunity to capture changes with greater accuracy and have a history readily available. You are also able to add Services-Waiver and Services-Waiver Other multiple times for a resident.

To update Public Payers navigate to Profiles > Residents > Fees/Payers > Payers. For more information, see our support article on this topic: Setup Payers in RTasks.

Q & A

Q: How do I schedule a service or medication to occur bi-weekly?

A: Select “Every X Days” and enter the number 14.

More Info: Bi-weekly means every 2 weeks.

Available NOW!

MN Survey Preparedness

Survey preparedness planning is an important administrative task for health care settings. RTasks has created a set of tools that will help prepare you for your Minnesota Department of Health Assisted Living Survey according to the guidelines set forth in the MN Department of Health Assisted Living Forms and Self-Audit Tools.  The tools will guide you through the process of preparing for your Survey.  There is a report called Survey Support in RTasks that outlines all of the requirements for the survey and how RTasks can help you maintain compliance. 

We also provide Survey Prep audits in RTasks that help you determine areas you are compliant and areas you may need some further work to prepare for survey. In addition, we have created Missing Assessment Data reports that will help you determine areas in your assessments that may need additional information to be in compliance with the assessment regulations. 

For step by step instructions, see our support article on this topic: MN Survey Preparedness Planning.