How Senior Care Facilities are Beating Covid with VAMS

Older people have long been at a higher risk of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Incidence and severity of diseases is generally higher in the older demographic, due to age-related immunity dysfunction and comorbidities.

So, we emphasize the greatest concern over their well-being, and try to ensure their congregate settings are protected by strong health regulations.

Assisted living facilities (ALFs) are congregate settings where you will find the most dependent segment of this older demographic. And it is there where visitor management systems like VAMS create an exceptional layer of protection, alleviating minds all around.

1. Health Screening Questionnaires for All

Before entry, half the battle can be won.

On-site management can effectuate a system where everyone on the premises is educated in the aspects of prophylaxis. This can be done through online training resources and through emails relaying facility instructions and entering procedures. The prevailing idea is that ALFs create a visitation plan for every type of visitor entering the premises: healthcare personnel (HCF), staff, consultants, contractors, relatives, and residents.

A visitor management system like VAMS can deploy several health screening questionnaires directly to a visitor’s smartphone/inbox. The questionnaires will include inquiries into vaccination status, viral tests, possible symptoms, and recent activity. They will be designed by administrators beforehand and correspond to the various modules that fit the visitor type. They can be used to evaluate visitors weekly, and, if community transmission is high, daily.

2. Automated Temperature and Mask Compliance Screening: 

Frontline staff are always in danger of contracting the virus from visitors. Given that they are tasked with 24×7 vigilance of the premises, the risk involved is often suboptimal.

To mitigate this risk, and to cut costs from employing too many frontline staff, ALFs can look to automate the entry process and enforce source control there. A visitor management system, connected seamlessly to powerful access control technology like body temperature scanning kiosks, is the answer to the tough question, “How do we ensure people coming in are healthy?”

This technology can be used to admit or deny visitors based on their compliance to certain public health mandates, such as personal protective equipment (PPE) of face masks and gloves. If a visitor’s body temperature is dangerously high, a scanner can detect the abnormality, keep the automated door closed, and notify staff that the person coming in should be denied entry.

3.  Contact Tracing using Extensive Reporting

What if a visitor tests positive for the virus 5 days after visiting an assisted living facility?

The possibility of such an individual coming in close contact with the people on the premises would be high. They could have transmitted the virus either through the air, paper money, or high-touch surfaces. That individual’s activity would need to have been tracked and correlated to other visitors, so that contact tracing is possible. This will be a preemptive approach to upholding a low community transmission rate, as people people who were in the vicinity are notified and persuaded to quarantine.

For this purpose, the comprehensive data collection, analytics, and reporting capability of VAMS comes to the rescue. As each visitor is processed into the system, details like timing of entry, purpose of visit, visiting duration, unit level, floor level, family member, etc. are stored for later usage. If an infected visitor was found to have visited his mother on Floor Level 2 for 3 hours on Tuesday, all the other visitors on the system who were found to be in the vicinity will be persuaded to quarantine. ALFs and other resident care facilities in the country would do well to take note of these visitor management systems that safeguard their most vulnerable communities. Make sure you adopt one as soon as you can!