Our Resident Safety Solution Protects Your Alzheimer’s Unit
Adam Peck, VP of Marketing
According to the Alzheimer's Association, which is the world's leading voluntary health organization in Alzheimer's care and research, six out of every 10 people with dementia will wander. Six out of 10! Patient elopement and wandering, you might say, is an affliction that every Alzheimer’s unit needs to concern itself with.
What Happens When a Person with Alzheimer’s Wanders?
What’s worse, as the Alzheimer's Association goes on to say, is that someone suffering from dementia may very well forget his or her address during a wandering episode. Even while wandering in very familiar places, a person with Alzheimer’s can easily become disoriented and altogether confused. Clearly, that’s a dangerous situation, not only for the patient, but for your residential care facility as well.
In fact, according to an article published by the Huffington Post, 5.5 million Americans have Alzheimer’s, and a full 70 percent of them wander away at least once. In the state of Virginia, if an Alzheimer's patient isn’t located within 24 hours, roughly 46 percent of them are eventually found dead, according to Kimberly Kelly, the founder of an Alzheimer's education program known as Project Far From Home. In some parts of California, Kelly says, an eloped Alzheimer’s patient has never been recovered alive after 24 hours.
CenTrak Ensures the Safety and Security of Your Residential Care Patients
CenTrak’s Security Solution is a one-of-a-kind, Clinical-Grade™ Safety & Security Platform that can literally put an end to any patient wandering issues you may be experiencing (or hoping not to experience) at your residential care unit. And while the platform’s real-time location system (RTLS) technology may be complicated, the process of actually operating the platform and understanding its many benefits couldn’t possibly be simpler.
For starters, the Clinical-Grade Locating™ system requires the installation and management of just one single infrastructure. That makes it the world’s most practical resident visibility platform available.
And where the residents and staff members in your Alzheimer’s unit are concerned, your access to the entire platform is controlled through a single tag they can wear around their wrist, not entirely unlike an emergency center’s medical tag. This future-proof platform supports room-level locating, and even integrates with your existing RTLS.
What Are the Platform’s Other Benefits?
The open platform CenTrak operates on is one reason the system is so simple and intuitive to operate. It integrates with over 100 clinical applications, for instance, including Nurse Call, fire systems and high acuity systems. And aside from the fact that it offers an incredibly high level of location accuracy and adjustability, it’s designed to be firmly resident-focused and not at all invasive.
The residents in your care, in other words, will benefit from a feeling of increased control and freedom with CenTrak, which can be uniquely programmed to allow certain residents to pass through any of your facility’s designated access points. Other residents, meanwhile, can be securely protected in different areas of your facility and kept out of danger’s way.
So while your residential care facility will never take on the atmosphere of a "lock down," the reality is that both your high-risk and low-risk patients will be safe and secure with the platform installed, and your staff will be aware of the comings and goings of all your residents at all times.
In short, the CenTrak platform is an incredibly accurate and reliable RTLS system that your staff will find simple to use, and that won’t interfere with the day-to-day lifestyles of your residents.
Learn More
Learn more about the first and only single-use patient tag with clinical-grade locating. CenTrak’s unique disposable active-RFID (RTLS) patient tags support the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) infection prevention and control recommendations. View our products or contact us today for further information.
