Download PDF Version: Practicing in Skilled Nursing Facilities: Delivering Compassionate, Convenient, Comprehensive Care

Skilled nursing facilities (SNF) pursue multiple related objectives for their residents: delivering good health outcomes, maintaining wellbeing, and generating a positive experience during their stay. An important contributor to these goals is onsite hearing, vision, dental, and foot/lower leg care. Complexity arises in providing this care due to resident profiles that often include compound health issues and elevated risks for additional complications. 

Doctors who join the Aria Care Partners (ACP) team can expect to follow an approach to onsite ancillary services that has proven both effective and rewarding. This article briefly describes the company’s potent blend of Compassionate, Comprehensive and Convenient care.

Compassionate Care

Several specific practice competencies and qualities form the backbone of the compassionate care needed to address the unique challenges of skilled nursing facility residents:

• Keen attentiveness to a resident’s mix of chronic conditions, comorbidities, and risk factors for falls and other concerns. Also important is sensitivity to the ways that dental, vision, hearing, and foot problems can inhibit a person’s social interaction and engagement to the detriment of mental health and even longevity.¹
• Strong communication skills to listen well, address concerns and fears, and explain care options clearly. Residents vary in ability and willingness to communicate fully about health status, often due to physical problems or cognitive decline. Some are alone all day, making communication with a doctor a vital means of engagement.
• Granting residents agency by encouraging them to participate in care discussions and make their own medical decisions to the greatest extent possible. Adherence to care regimens generally accompanies agency. For example, having someone affirmatively choose to get a hearing aid frequently boosts compliance with using it.

Convenient Care

Healthcare consumers have become more discerning and have higher expectations for convenient, personalized care. Sending people to offsite providers can be highly inconvenient and time-consuming for SNF residents and the staff who must accompany them.

Multiple additional conveniences are enabled by a robust onsite program:

• Care at bedside. Some residents are non-mobile. In such cases, care should be delivered in the resident’s room if necessary. Portable exam instrumentation, onsite imaging units, and other tools bring care to each resident’s point of need.
• Dentures, eyeglasses, hearing aids delivered on site. This feature maximizes convenience. Further enhancements include engraving eyeglass frames with the resident’s name for identification if misplaced.
• Insurance options. Receiving personalized, engaged care starts with ability to pay for it. Service providers such as Aria offer insurance plans that help many residents afford dental, vision, or hearing care and cover needed items such as hearing aids.

Comprehensive Care

Traditional SNF ancillary care has relied on transporting residents to offsite providers. This model tends to induce episodic care. Onsite services offer a more consistent approach. 

ACP doctors deliver a set of services within their disciplines. Key components of this comprehensive care include:

• Regular assessments. Onsite routine exams provide steady monitoring of health status as well as opportunities to interact personally with the resident.Corrective measures. Residents receive appropriate treatments and the necessary eyeglasses, hearing aids, dentures, and other devices. 
• Prevention. A full service approach emphasizes prevention, a practice aspect highly valued by ACP onsite doctors. As one example, podiatrists can advise on ways the resident can maintain foot strength and flexibility through hygiene, proper footwear, and exercise.
• Collaboration. Comprehensive care includes working with SNF internal staff to bolster preventive measures and adherence to treatment plans.

Supporting the delivery of comprehensive care

Aria understands that ability to deliver the level of onsite care described in this article depends on supporting its professionals in three critical areas. First, technology is vital. ACP supplies proven technologies and actively tracks emerging ones. Maintaining technology investment is increasingly difficult for medical professionals in independent practices.

Administrative support is likewise fundamental. Aria handles all scheduling, billing and patient follow-up so clinicians can focus on the care. Monitoring relevant regulations is a third layer of support. SNFs must adhere to a variety of requirements regarding extent and timing of assessments and protocols in dental, hearing, vision, and foot care. Helping onsite professionals maintain compliance is fundamental to a comprehensive program.

Conclusion

The three Cs forge a path to holistic and disciplined onsite SNF ancillary care. This practice methodology appeals to medical professionals and residents alike. It is also congruent with the directions being fostered in healthcare today. SNFs gain a variety of clinical and financial benefits, residents get the care they deserve, and clinicians can practice in the engaging and rewarding ways that motivate them.

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