Skilled Nursing Facilities

Overview of the Standard Alert Library

Alerts notify caregivers of specific occurrences or resident needs during the course of care. Within the Standard Alerts Library, five possible Alert Libraries are available:

  • Simple Alerts.

  • Complex Alerts.

  • eINTERACT Stop & Watch Alerts (if enabled). These cannot be edited.

  • eINTERACT Change in Condition Alerts (if enabled). These cannot be edited.

  • COMS® Alerts (if enabled). These cannot be edited.

The Standard Alerts Library can be configured to contain a list that can be made available to create an alert from the Dashboards, responses to Assessments and MDS questions, Care Plan Detail, and the POC module. Alerts can be hot listed to allow the alert to be manually triggered from various areas of the application or triggered only in response to specific documentation occurrences within PointClickCare.

Two types of alerts can be created:

  • Simple alerts - triggered by occurrence of a single documentation response. For example, a facility can select to set an alert to trigger every time a POC user documents that a resident refused their meal.

    • This type of alerting can sometimes be less effective because the system is alerting the nursing staff to every occurrence of an event and it does not necessarily highlight situations where there is truly a problem. For example, a resident may refuse their meal because their family brought them a snack right before dinner. In this case the resident likely isn't experiencing a change in condition.

    See: Creating Simple Alerts.

  • Complex Alerts - generate alerts based on a trend. For example, the facility may want to alert their staff when a resident has refused more than 3 meals in a 72 hour time period. If the resident refuses 1 meal the alert isn’t triggered, but if it happens multiple times within a specified period the nurses want to be alerted so they can investigate further.

    • The system allows you to configure Complex Alert calculations. The calculation is used to trigger alerts based on a select number of documented occurrences, for a selection of a follow up question responses over a selected time frame.

    See: Creating Complex Alerts .

  • Alerts CANNOT be triggered based on numeric responses to questions (for example, Fluid Intake/Output).