This article was written by Jason Martial who, in his role as a senior product marketing manager at Salesforce, works closely with healthcare providers.
The Centers for Disease Control is urging older adults to stay home and physically distant from others to avoid contracting COVID-19. With the concern for the aging population and current strain on the hospital system, senior companies like Lifesprk play a huge role in supporting people through this pandemic, keeping them safe, healthy, and out of the hospital, if possible.
Based in Minneapolis, Lifesprk, a whole person senior service company, accelerated many of its innovations to respond to and guide seniors immediately during this pandemic. With the COVID-19 pandemic largely playing out in the home and community, Lifesprk realized it needed a two-pronged approach: a medical response to provide acute care at home to keep hospital beds available for the highest acuity patients and a community response to provide accurate and reliable information to people isolated at home.
With a unique combination of personal advocacy and technology for its at-home care services, Lifesprk uses Salesforce Health Cloud to monitor members in realtime and proactively manage member life plans with a 360-degree view. Leveraging existing technology through their alternative community-based delivery system, Lifesprk, in partnership with North Memorial Health, was able to fast-track a hospital-at-home practice in just two and a half weeks while continuing to keep seniors safe, offering people a choice about where to receive hospital-level care. Here’s how Lifesprk did it.
A hospital at home
To proactively plan for potential hospital bed overflow due to COVID-19 and to address the health and safety of its people, Lifesprk rapidly deployed an innovative option to prevent and shorten hospital stays, ensuring hospital beds and supplies were available for the most acutely ill, while reducing the viral load on hospital campuses.
Key goals included:
- Shifting care home with a safe discharge plan for adults who are less acutely ill but still require hospital-level support for both COVID-19 and non-COVID diagnoses.
- Integrating Lifesprk’s whole person senior service model with North Memorial Health’s full continuum of services to create a seamless experience for customers and their families.
- Tapping into the depth of Lifesprk’s infrastructure already designed to support an at-home model.
The success of keeping people well at home relies heavily on the use of technology. Real-time data gives clinicians round-the-clock updates remotely through telehealth and an in-home Lifesprk telepak monitoring kit, including pulse oximetry, blood pressure cuff, scale, and video-call capabilities with in-home and remote support set-up (no Internet service required) and select lab testing. Videoconferencing and in-person visits allow clients, families, and their providers to be front and center when it comes to understanding the full scope of care provided, a critical piece right now during COVID-19.
Salesforce captures data to gauge health and life goals and alert the team if necessary to return to the hospital and connect clients to social support within their community for long-term wellness. The ability to learn and review data also helps clinicians gain a 360-view of a client’s whole health to proactively prevent additional hospitalizations.
All information is stored in one place
With a commitment to constant improvement, Lifesprk tracks every interaction with seniors — video calls, phone calls, in-person visits — and creates a member profile. This includes comprehensive medical records, pulled from different systems of record, giving seniors and their team one source of truth for information that is easily integrated with other healthcare providers.
Lifestyle factors such as diet and exercise, social determinants of health like family and community support, economic information, and other demographic data are used in Salesforce to support a client’s long-term goals.
Lifesprk prioritizes human connections
In addition to Hospital@Home, Lifesprk recognized that during this pandemic, people needed reliable information about COVID-19 in their community and how to keep themselves safe and healthy at home. A big piece was identifying gaps including social isolation, food insecurity, and misinformation about COVID-19.
Lifesprk launched the Open House, a tiny house on wheels, as a hyperlocal mobile response to both the pandemic and the social unrest that has rocked communities across the Twin Cities. Through the Open House, they are listening, learning, and responding to what people need. And using technology, they connect visitors to a nationally renowned geriatrician via an OHMNIbot to provide answers to their COVID-related questions.
Takeaway
Lifesprk is taking the idea of aging to a whole new level with personalized care and proactive engagement backed by technology to inform and provide opportunities for long-term wellness. By putting people at the center of everything they do, Lifesprk is paving the way for a different experience for seniors in this country to lower health costs and improve not only their health but their overall experience.
Lifesprk Chief Technology Officer Jason Wenell recently joined Salesforce on a webinar through Becker’s Hospital Review. Watch the on-demand recording to learn how Lifesprk guided seniors through this challenging time.
And, discover how Health Cloud helps providers, payers, and pharmaceutical and medical device companies drive better outcomes.
