SCP Blog Archives | Secure Care Products

How Real-Time Location Solutions (RTLS) Can Help You Protect Your Assets

Real-time location information is extremely valuable as it can allow you to monitor inventory or workflow, manage staff, and ensure the safety and security of your employees and guests. Specific needs for a real-time location solution (RTLS) can vary greatly from industry to industry, but at the end of the day — you simply cannot improve or manage what is not being measured.

COVID-19

How are you protecting your employees and limiting the risk to your business? Two factors have been clearly identified for the successful reopening of businesses and the broader economy: Social Distancing and Contact Tracing. Businesses everywhere are looking for ways to protect their employees, reduce risk to their business and get things back to normal as quickly and safely as possible. But why should you automate contact tracing?

Contact tracing is typically a very manual process and most facilities don’t have extra human resources to manually track the details needed to thoroughly contact trace. Manual processes are also typically prone to human error.

Real-time alerts can promote social distancing and serve as a reminder to maintain space. Perhaps there are some modifications needed to work spaces. Of course, the historical location data enables simple and fast identification of any contacts made inside of the recommended six-foot distance for easy contact tracing later on.

Healthcare

Healthcare executives are constantly concerned with issues of safety at their facility, staff satisfaction, and quality care for patients. A real-time locating system will allow you to efficiently manage your facility, saving you time and money without sacrificing patient care. Maximize your facility’s operations, patient and employee satisfaction scores, and your profits using real-time location solutions that can aide in community care, asset tracking and management, staff safety, and patient security and monitoring.

Hospitality

As more cities, and even states, adopt laws and ordinances requiring the use of panic buttons to increase the protection and safety of hospitality workers, you won’t find a more robust solution than a real-time location solution. This panic button tag silently and quickly triggers notification to hotel security and management within 2-3 seconds of being pressed. The system also allows you to improve efficiency and reduce costs with the real-time information gathered.

Manufacturing/Warehousing

Know where your people, inventory, and assets are at all times with real-time location solutions. Manufacturing and warehousing logistics require a lot of moving parts to work smoothly, and sometimes things get lost in the shuffle. RTLS provides your operations team greater visibility to everything going on in production like never before, the potential use cases in manufacturing are virtually endless. The system allows you to assign tags to assets, inventory, and even employees so that you know precisely who or what has been where and for how long. With RTLS for manufacturing and warehousing you can: create tracking to baseline performance, understand where personnel are spending their time, set up rules to trigger notifications if a key piece of equipment goes missing, and more.

Education

Administrators face many challenges in the day-to-day management of their schools. Student and staff safety is obviously a top priority. By assigning badges to staff and students, the user-friendly RLTS software provides total visibility so you know where everyone is at any time in your school. From the software you can also create zones within your building that will trigger notifications to specified staff, allowing you to better control access to certain areas by visitors or others in your school. In an emergency situation, staff can trigger a notification within 2-3 seconds to alert others of a need for security or lockdown.

Secure Care Products offers the ENVisionIT® real-time location solution in order to see how, where, and when people and assets are moving around your facility. This data allows you to monitor and analyze trends within your business to make data-driven decisions for operational improvements. Safeguard your employees and business with real-time location solutions.

About Secure Care Products, LLC For over 40 years, Secure Care Products has been committed to providing improved safety, security, and locating solutions through best-in-class service and innovative design for your most valuable assets. Protecting people and assets is our business. Secure Care products offers a suite of products including RTLS, wander management, infant protection, asset management, and mobile app solutions. All products are researched, developed, and manufactured in the USA, which ensures superior service, timely delivery, and quality assurance. Using state-of-the-art, advanced technologies, we keep people and assets protected 24/7. Let us know how we can help you by calling 1.800.451.7917 or contact us.

How to Reduce Risk for Wandering Patients

The potential dangers of wandering residents can have permanent, catastrophic effects. High risk residents or patients, like those in dementia or memory care units, wander for a variety of reasons. Sometimes due to confusion, sometimes looking for something or someone, or sometimes because they are just plain lost. Wandering residents can find themselves in unsafe areas of a facility or eloping from the building entirely unnoticed. Knowing how to reduce the risks for wandering patients can help ensure their safety.

Who’s at Risk for Wandering?

Anyone living with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia is at risk for wandering. Understanding the common signs of wandering can help caretakers or family members prevent it. Some of the common signs a person may be at risk for wandering include:

Forgetting how to get to familiar places
Talking about fulfilling former obligations, for example: going to work
Trying to “go home” even when at home
Becoming restless or pacing
Difficulty locating familiar places, for example: the bathroom, bedroom, or dining room
Appearing lost in a new or changed environment
Becoming nervous or anxious in crowded areas

Reduce the Risk of Wandering

Preventing and reducing the risk of wandering is always a multi-layered process, but these actions can help bring peace of mind to caregivers and family members.

Provide a routine of structured, meaningful activities throughout the day.
Identify the time of day the person is most likely to wander and plan things to do during this time – activities and exercise may help reduce anxiety, agitation, and restlessness.
Reduce liquids up to two hours before bedtime so the person doesn’t have to find the bathroom during the night.
If the person is no longer driving, remove access to car keys as the person could forget they can no longer drive.
Assess the person’s response to new surroundings. Do not leave someone with dementia unsupervised if new surroundings may cause confusion, disorientation, or agitation.
Identify a companion for the person living with dementia if the caretaker is not available.

How to Take Action

Having a plan before wandering occurs can help relieve some of the stress experienced by family and caregivers and ensure the safety of the person living with dementia. Here are some tips for creating a wander management plan:

Ask neighbors, friends, and family to call if they see the person wandering or lost.
Identify potentially dangerous areas around the neighborhood, such as bodies of water, open stairwells, tunnels, bus stops, and heavily trafficked roads.
Create a list of places the person might wander to, such as past jobs, former homes, or favorite places.
Start search efforts immediately if the person goes missing and begin by looking in the surrounding vicinity as individuals who wander are typically found within 1.5 miles of where they disappeared.

Installing a wandering resident security system can’t prevent every potential wandering scenario, but it should absolutely be a key component of any wander prevention program. Wander management technology from Secure Care allows facilities and hospitals to monitor wandering residents, secure or lock exits, and track the exact location of patients who are prone to wandering.

About Secure Care Products, LLC

For over 40 years, Secure Care Products has been committed to providing improved safety, security, and locating solutions through best-in-class service and innovative design for your most valuable assets. Protecting people and assets is our business. Secure Care products offers a suite of products including RTLS, wander management, infant protection, asset management, and mobile app solutions. All products are researched, developed, and manufactured in the USA, which ensures superior service, timely delivery, and quality assurance. Using state-of-the-art, advanced technologies, we keep people and assets protected 24/7. Let us know how we can help you by calling 1.800.451.7917 or contact us.

How Hospitals Can Improve Care with an Asset Management Plan

Now more than ever, ensuring the safety, security, and well-being of hospitals is essential to provide quality care to patients. Thorough security protocols, staff training, physical security, staff communications, and reporting are all critical to maintain the safety of patients, and staff in healthcare facilities. Facilities teams have a big job within a hospital and require specific tools and resources to be successful. An asset management plan can help teams maintain regulatory compliance, assess risks, reduce operating costs, and improve operational efficiency within hospital buildings, but first, what is hospital asset management and how can it improve quality care.

What Is Hospital Asset Management?

Hospital asset management refers to the management of hospital equipment and requires tracking assets that are identified as “High Value Assets”, which are used across departments and hospital floors. The hospital asset management market is expanding rapidly, due to the improvement and optimization of workflow, productivity, and safety concerns stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Why Is Hospital Asset Management Important?

Biomedical and facilities teams involved in hospital asset management ensure that critical systems and equipment within a hospital are maintained, tested, and always kept in a reliable working condition. Additionally, it will lead to better communication, improved attention to detail, and facilitate active problem solvers within the hospital. This plan aims to protect the hospital’s inner workings to maintain a safe and clean medical environment. Essentially, hospital asset management plans ensures that medical facilities run as a well-oiled machine.

How a Hospital Asset Management Plan Can Improve Quality Care

Hospital facilities teams need to ensure that equipment is thoroughly inspected and repaired to comply with healthcare regulations.

Tracking Mission-Critical Equipment

Tracking mission-critical equipment and knowing its status at all times is key to keeping the quality-of-care high. An asset management plan allows facilities to compile an inventory of maintainable or replaceable assets and identify where they are in the facility to help with upkeep and asset rotation.

Timely Audits for Safety Requirements

Healthcare safety is constantly changing, requiring your team to build out a reliable asset management program. Your facilities team can use an inspections application to simplify inspection rounds, compile inspections results, and even create work orders based on anything that fails inspection.

Preventative Maintenance

Augmenting your preventative maintenance plans will lessen the likelihood of equipment failures through the use of your asset management solution. This reduces the need to waste time running to other hospital sections to get supplies.

Inventories of everything in the hospital, from the light bulbs to medical equipment, needs to be tracked and monitored. A hospital asset management system is critical to keep all the moving parts going so that care plan failures don’t occur. Technology is also an important piece to ensure quality care for medical facilities and can reduce the burden on staff. Secure Care Products ensure your patients, staff, and assets are protected through innovative solutions and high-quality products.

About Secure Care Products, LLC

Finding the right solutions during a pandemic, and beyond

During these hectic times, it can be a challenge to identify the right technology for your facility’s needs. As a company that has proudly designed and manufactured wireless protection solutions for over 40 years, we are able to help you do just that. We provide both technology solutions and an extensive network of certified partners. This winning combination ensures the expert design and installation of a custom solution suited to your facility.

Virtually all facilities today are looking for ways to operate within the new pandemic environment. How do you keep residents and staff safe and healthy? Is there enough staff available to assist with contact tracing efforts if you experience a positive case? How long would it take you to identify possible contacts? Our McKnight’s Guest Column proposes some considerations. So if you’re looking to add contact tracing technology to your facility, check out the article which discusses the following considerations:

Alerting
Tag management
Integration to existing software/hardware
What happens when the pandemic is over?

We can provide solutions to automate contact tracing, increase resident safety without infringing on their mobility, and more. Our solutions can help now and will adapt to fit new and different needs well into the future of your facility.

RTLS solution for social distancing and contact tracing

SCP Announces Technology to Get People Back to Work – Safely

We are excited to announce a new use case for our ENVisionIT^® RTLS platform that can help health care facilities and businesses alike get back to work safely.

We’ve all heard that contact tracing and social distancing are critical as various facilities and businesses start to re-open. Using a combination of our RTLS hardware and software, a facility can maintain a constant, automated log of all contacts that occur within a set distance and time criteria. Real-time alerts via a mobile app can support in-the-moment notifications, and historical location data can be used to quickly and effectively identify contacts for notification/isolation as needed.

These are unprecedented times. But we are excited to offer a technology solution that helps increase safety for employees, residents and patients, caregivers and business owners. As a small, veteran-owned company, we are proud to be using this new solution in-house to help keep our own team safe and look forward to bringing this technology to others!

Learn More About Contact Tracing for Long-Term Care

Learn More About Contact Tracing for Business

Here to Support You

The past several weeks have been challenging for everyone. There have been major changes in all aspects of life and business. From not being able to access facilities the way we normally would, to postponing training and meetings, and in many cases, moving from the office to home.

As much of our team has transitioned to home offices, we’ve been learning and using new tools. We keep in touch with each other. We’re keeping things moving forward.

We also noticed that our coffee makers, Keurig machines and french presses seem to be working overtime. For a little fun, we thought we’d share our favorite coffee mugs for working at home.

In all seriousness, we are still engineering, selling and manufacturing to support customer needs. To date, we have successfully minimized production disruptions and managed to avoid significant material shortages. Most importantly, our entire team is dedicated to supporting our customers during these unprecedented times.

COVID-19 Response

As a company that supports thousands of health care facilities around the world, Secure Care Products is absolutely an essential business. We are focused on working hard to support our customers however we can.

We have provided updates regarding our response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our local partners are open for business too and ready to support facilities needing service. All of our partners are out in their communities supporting customer needs every day! If you need service assistance, contact your local certified partner.

Offering New Solutions

We are proud to have successfully shipped our first Evolution Series solution in all this chaos. Though not an ideal time for releasing a new product, Evolution Series is available! Our team is excited to tell you more about it. We believe the new Evolution Series for wander management and infant security is truly innovative. Our goal with Evolution Series is to focus on software-based functionality. This means fewer changes to hardware. Less need for costly in-person visits or total hardware swap-outs for additions or upgrades to features. Installing Evolution today is a way to future-proof your patient and resident security solution for the future of your facility.

We wish all of our customers the very best during these trying times. If there’s anything we can do to help, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Partner Spotlight

No business is around for 40 years without having built solid partnerships, and Secure Care Products is no exception. We recognize that in addition to our employees, our network of certified distribution partners is key to our success over the last 40 years.

Our distribution partners are our “feet on the street” and offer their customers a wide range of solutions, provide top-notch service, and have been invaluable to our business since its inception. So in honor of our 40th year, we wanted to recognize some of our partners and showcase what they have to offer. Throughout 2019, we’ll feature some of Secure Care Products distribution partners. So check back often to learn more about the partners that have helped make Secure Care Products a success over the last four decades!

If you’re in need of service for your system, or are interested in learning more about our solutions for your facility, you can Find Your Local Distributor here!

Secure Care Products Joins Michigan Manufacturers Association

Secure Care Products is proud to have recently joined the Michigan Manufacturers Association. With a local regional sales representative stationed in the greater Detroit, MI area, and our ENVisionIT real-time location solution (RTLS), this membership was a natural fit for us.

In addition to proudly designing and manufacturing our solutions in the US for the past 40 years, we believe the location data provided by our RTLS solution could prove invaluable to our our fellow MMA members. You cannot improve what is not being measured. RTLS enables you to:

Locate personnel, mobile equipment, and inventory
See how work orders are moving through your production processes in real time
Provide an added employee safety measure for those working in potentially hazardous or isolated areas on the production floor

Employee Spotlight

2019 is a big year for Secure Care Products…..we’ve been in business for 40 years! As we reflect on this milestone, we wanted to highlight the main reason we’ve been able to achieve and maintain this success for so long – our employees! Throughout the year, we’ll be updating this blog post to feature one of Secure Care Products employees. So check back often to learn more about the people that make Secure Care Products what it is!

Secure Care Products wandering resident RTLS software

Elpas to EOL Its RTLS Products

Last month, Elpas announced its plans to end of life (EOL) its real time location systems (RTLS) products. A letter on the Elpas website indicates that the decision to end of life these products was based on the overall health of the business, the amount of investment and innovation required to continue offering a competitive solution and other factors.

While we are sure this decision was not made without extensive consideration, it must put current Elpas customers in a very challenging position. The letter indicates that there are currently no transition or migration plans at this time. And since Elpas has been in business for decades, there is likely an extensive customer base left wondering: what happens once the company stops providing support for these products after June 20, 2019?

Secure Care Products has been in business for nearly 40 years. In that time, we were the first in the market to provide a wandering resident solution that enabled residents to move freely and securely about their living spaces. Decades later we were the first to provide individual protection for infants in the hospital with our KinderGUARD^® solution featuring cutband technology. And in recent years we have developed our own RTLS solution based on ultra-wideband technology for superior locating accuracy.

So if you are an existing Elpas customer concerned about the future of your installed systems, we would love to speak with you about the possibility of switching to a Secure Care Products solution. We have an extensive network of distribution partners around the globe eager to help design the solution your facility needs. Whether it’s a basic door management solution, or if you’re looking for fully integrated real-time location capability, we’re confident we have a solution to fit your needs. Contact us today to set up a call to discuss a customized solution, or visit our website to learn more.

Secure Care Products is happy to help you work through this transition. We can provide customized solutions to maintain your facility’s safety, security and efficiency now, and long into the future.

We are excited to announce a new use case for our ENVisionIT® RTLS platform that can help health care facilities and businesses alike get back to work safely.

COVID-19 Response

Offering New Solutions

No business is around for 40 years without having built solid partnerships, and Secure Care Products is no exception. We recognize that in addition to our employees, our network of certified distribution partners is key to our success over the last 40 years.

We are excited to announce a new use case for our ENVisionIT^® RTLS platform that can help health care facilities and businesses alike get back to work safely.