Tips for families and friends with quarantined loved ones in senior living

By: Lindsay Levesque, Customer Success Manager 

March 31, 2020

During a time of uncertainty, senior living operators are looking to a variety of ways to keep their residents engaged and positive. By now, we’ve all seen the viral posts of grandkids visiting outside of the window and even impromptu performances for senior living residents who are quarantined inside — making the decision to lock down a community during COVID-19 and prevent families from seeing their loved ones is not a decision taken lightly. Sustaining resident communication with family and friends outside of the community is essential to resident well-being during this crisis and operators have quickly pivoted to alternative ways to build and maintain these connections.  

The K4Community Family App does just that.

It allows for a secure, cost-free connection to those that matter most. It keeps families connected to their loved ones and allows for direct updates from the community operations team ensuring families are constantly informed.  

Now, more than ever, we are seeing the K4Community Family App fulfill its purpose.  Whether families prefer sending a quick message to say, “Hello, I’m thinking about you”, or opt for a more personal connection through a video chat, there are multiple ways to connect with loved ones from the comfort of their homes.  

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“The best way to cheer yourself up, is to try to cheer somebody else up.” — Mark Twain

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To help families get the most out of these features as circumstances in the world continue to evolve, we’ve created some helpful tips to keep resident interactions consistent and even have a little fun:

• Consider scheduled calls so your resident family member knows when to expect you. This gives them something to look forward to and prevents anxiety associated with unexpected behavior, specifically if they’re more familiar with routine and structure. 
• Opt for a change of scenery, showing your loved one a piece of nature or the outdoors. This is particularly important for residents who are isolating in their apartments.
• Remind them of particular Alexa features.  Other than the enhanced communication functionality such as the COVID hotline, an Alexa can also help lighten the mood by playing music or sharing jokes.
• Reminisce on a favorite memory and use video chat to share old photos or other memorabilia from home.
• Include your little ones! While the kids are at home, don’t forget to include them in video chats! They bring a particular spunk to the day and sharing that energy through a video chat can be contagious.
• Don’t forget to take things one day at a time, prepping for the future when it’s unknown can be frustrating. When you’re in your golden years, it’s all about the journey. Today matters.

When working in the field, it was often said to me that it means so much more to be able to see mom, rather than just hearing her voice.  It is hard to explain exactly what it is but, it’s definitely easier to be empathetic when you can see the other person’s emotions. As a family member of loved ones in communities, I now understand that feeling, too. When something as simple as checking in on mom or dad isn’t so simple anymore, being able to experience their expressions through a video call is incredibly valuable.

Finally, I’d like to share a personal note, below. This was provided directly to us by one of our member’s families on the true value behind a simple engagement. 

While I Love my Bride Linda and will miss seeing her each day, I applaud your decisions and without reservation, support then. You are in my prayers as you follow the guidance of our most Holy Father..

P.S. I hope you will continue your willingness to allow us to talk to our Loved ones on the telephone.  I was able to hear Linda’s “giggle” during my call to her today. It meant the world to me. – A K4Community Family

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For more COVID-19 resources, visit our landing page at K4Connect.com/COVID-19.

Best practices for leveraging digital communications methods during COVID-19

By: Michelle Harper, Director of Growth – Southeast

March 30, 2020

In your communications, marketing or activity roles, you are constantly thinking of creative ways to better communicate and engage your community’s residents, their families, and your team. During the COVID-19 outbreak, digital communications play a key role in communication both within the walls of your senior living community or organization and beyond.  

Here are four tips you can use to drive engagement with effective digital communications using K4Community.

Tip 1: Leverage Existing Resources

From hundreds of predesigned templates to auto-updating widgets, K4Community puts the tools to create engaging content at your fingertips.  

Last week, K4Community launched a set of 11 slides and 5 editable templates including:

• Health organization-certified COVID-19 information
• Prevention techniques
• Revised visitation policies

We’ve also curated 10 helpful PDFs with various COVID-19 related information you can download and use. 

 In addition, LeadingAge has a full page dedicated to Coronavirus Resources including additional WHO and CDC resources along with media and family communication tips and templates.

PRO TIP:  Intermingle COVID-19 resources with other community content to create a balance focused on educating.

Tip 2:  Less is more for Digital Signage

When creating content for digital signage take the billboard approach.

Much like drivers have to consume and process the content on a billboard as they drive by, digital signage slides automatically rotate giving residents a limited amount of time to view the great content you created. Create slides that are simple, legible, and quickly understood by your residents.  Pare down the amount of information on each slide.

Example: K4Community has a number of COVID-19 resource slide templates, some of which are editable.  

Here is one of the slides with relevant content on how to cope with stress during the current COVID-19 crisis.

In this example, we renamed each bullet: Tip 1, Tip 2, etc.

PRO TIP: Optimal font size = Oldest person’s age divided by two.  If the average age of the residents in your community is 90, the text size on each slide should be > 45.   

Tip 3:  Timing is Everything

Whether it is residents, families visiting your community (after the crisis has passed) or future residents touring your sales model, different viewers read and consume digital signage content at different paces. K4Community lets you modify the slide duration based on the content and viewer.

How long should the slide duration be? Well, if you are following Tip 2 above, then the default of 15 seconds should work for the majority of your slides. That said, here is a good way to confirm the default timing works.

• Click the Preview button for the slideshow you are editing 
• Close your eyes
• Count to 3
• Open your eyes 
• Read the slide content out loud (including the title, any call outs, etc.)
• Time how long it takes you to read the entire slide
• Then double or triple the time based on the intended audience and digital signage location

The Slideshow module in K4Community allows users to set custom times for each slide to display. For instance, you may want a weather slide to only show for 10 seconds, but a slide showing today’s lunch special to display for 20 seconds. K4Community makes this easy.

Keep in mind where your slide shows are displayed (Independent Living, Assisted Living, Memory Care), who the intended audience is and modify the slide timings to best fit the viewers.

Tip 4: Reach Them Where They Are

Family and friends always welcome proactive communication, especially during a time of uncertainty and stress. 92 percent of American adults now own a Smartphone and communities have a more efficient way to communicate news and resources to family and friends.

Publish the latest community information and resources to the K4Community Family App. You can use the general resource folder or create a folder strictly for COVID-19 information. This would allow you to “unpublish” the entire folder post the current outbreak vs. resource by resource.

This provides a quick way to proactively share information and updates with family members.

Digital communications are an effective way to inform, educate, and increase awareness. Following these tips can help communities create dynamic digital content that drives engagement as teams and residents continue to navigate the communication impacts of the Coronavirus.

Be sure to check out all of our COVID-19 resources on our COVID-911 initiative landing page.

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Interested in seeing a K4Community demo? Reach out to our team, here.

Simple ways senior living leadership can motivate and support teams

By: Cindy Phillips, K4Advisors Managing Partner

March 27, 2020

As this stressful situation continues to escalate, all the staff on the front lines are reaching deep to press through fatigue, fears of getting sick or passing it along to loved ones, or just the personal impact the stress has on their bodies and minds. 

As leaders, we are trying to share praise and thanks – I am seeing many kudos, shout-outs, Facebook posts, gifts to employees, etc. All of these are terrific, however, now they may need a more personal touch from their leaders (metaphorically). 

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Maya Angelou

I believe the best thing leaders can do to ensure gratitude really lands, is to personalize it. Try this – put a daily reminder on your phone, and before you stop work or leave for the day, take 10 minutes to make 2-3 personal high-touch connections with your staff. 

How? 

• Use their name – customize the message to them directly
• Mention something they are sacrificing right now to be at work
• Recognize a recent completed task or work item they accomplished

And equally important, make sure they will see or hear your message.

• Share it via phone call, text or short email
• If you are still in the “in-person world” (like my friends in healthcare and senior living), drop off an old fashioned card, leave a post-it note on their work screen or simply a walk by as you leave for the day. 

Honestly, they won’t care that it is perfectly spoken or written, but they will care that you recognized them!

This week’s bulletin introduces video calling best practices, additional Alexa capabilities and new visual experiences for residents

March 25, 2020

We know new challenges are surfacing as impacts of the Coronavirus continue and we remain dedicated to helping you and your residents get through this. We have collected a new actionable list of K4Community best practices you can immediately implement to support residents and your teams.

This week’s updates include:

• Video Calling – how communities are getting creative with devices and the K4Community video chat feature to keep residents connected with families (like scheduling video chat appointments for residents without personal devices or who may need more assistance)
• Alexa “Call My Neighbor Feature” – a new resident-to-resident direct dialing feature through resident Alexa devices
• Add Resident Check-In at No Cost – to assist communities with stronger visibility into resident awareness, any community with existing K4Community Smart Home can turn on Resident Check-In at no cost
• Visual Resident Experiences – all communities with the K4Community App and Dashboard now have a preloaded playlist of a variety of digital experiences and at-home activities to keep residents engaged while in isolation

As a reminder, if you’d like to reference our former bulletins of best practices, they can be found in the Support Center COVID-911 Resource Folder, along with a number of other helpful articles specific to managing COVID-19.

As always, we are here to support you. Please do not hesitate to reach out — we are directly staffing support lines 7 am – 9 pm ET 7 days a week in addition to our 24/7 live answering service at (855) 876-9673 or Support@K4Connect.com.

In Service, With You

– The K4Connect Team

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Here are this week’s best practices for existing K4Community features and new updates made available to all K4Connect customers. Please reach out to K4Connect Support with any questions:

Video Calling

Video chatting friends and family is available through the K4Community App and we encourage communities to remind residents of this communication feature. The “Invite Contacts” feature also allows residents to invite people outside of the community to their personal directory for voice and video chatting. For residents without a tablet, mobile phone or PC, some communities have also offered times for those residents to schedule video chats on shared community devices.

The Family App is also available at no cost, allowing unlimited video calling with friends and family.

Alexa “Call My Neighbor” Feature

All customers now have resident directories available to access via Alexa voice calling. This feature is another way to keep residents connected, while separated, dialing their friends with the simple command like, “Alexa, call Roger Smith.” This feature has been automatically uploaded to communities that currently have K4Connect supported Alexa devices, using the existing community resident directory list. 

No-Cost Resident Check-In

Our digital Resident Check-In solution is delivered through our smart home devices, like smart (motion) switches. Any community equipped with K4Connect smart home capabilities now has the option to turn on the Resident Check-In solution at no cost for the next two months. This automated feature can augment the manual well-being checks for staff teams that are now at an even higher volume. K4Community Resident Check-In is accessible via desktop, as well as mobile devices to support teams as they are on-the-go.

Please reach out to K4Connect Support for details on activating this feature. 

YouTube Resident Visual Experience

As visitation restrictions continue and community programming is reduced, or in most cases is canceled, there are creative ways to keep residents entertained and stimulated with your YouTube Playlist feature in the K4Community App. We have curated a list of visual experiences residents can enjoy at-home, from world tours and landscape drives to easy fitness routines. A few categories we’ve curated include:

• Bring the Outside, In: Walking museum tours from around the world, airplane flyovers of global destinations and relaxing landscape scenes
• Keeping Active: Easy, at-home fitness videos for older adults
• Calming Wellness Routines: Guided meditation and soothing scenes
• Movie Night: Free, full-length classic films

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Have a best practice to share? We’d like to hear about it — share your feedback with us, here.  

A roundup of ideas and recommendations for senior living teams to consider during extended periods of resident isolation

March 24, 2020

By: Cindy Phillips, K4Advisors Managing Partner

I am not going to start this blog with some list of statistics about seniors and the effects of social isolation, everyone in senior living already knows this well. And now we know how it feels ourselves as we separate from our co-workers and loved ones, unable to enjoy the normal freedoms we are accustomed to. It almost sounds like the emotions of retirement or moving to a long-term care facility?

I recently joined K4Connect, after retiring in 2019 as Executive Director of a large not-for-profit CCRC in Pennsylvania. Relegated to a spectator right now, I am so proud to watch the incredible job the industry providers are doing to protect the physical health of their residents and staff. Kudos to all of you!

I feel like we’re in the second phase of response now, as many of you work to define some new and creative ways to address other dimensions of wellness, specifically the mental and social well-being of residents. Considering all of the activity cancellations and the increased restrictions on dining, we must put as much effort into combating the long-term anxiety, fatigue, and depression that will come with this pandemic.

Let’s jump right into what we can do to help design a new “normal” for your community members. I will offer some ideas through the lens of Dr. Bill Thomas’s three plagues faced by elders as defined in the Eden Alternative philosophy. 

This philosophy has always been a grounding point for me and seems especially relevant during this difficult time:

Loneliness

1- Connecting residents to family & friends – Activity and social services teams, do continue to be creative with helping residents use their own devices to do “virtual visiting” with Skype, Instagram, Facetime, Duo, or What’s App. Also, learn from other community best practices, like several K4Connect operators that are rotating shared devices for residents without personal devices, or who may need additional assistance, to use our Video “Chat” feature to connect with loved ones.

2- An idea to improve resident-to-resident connection – Use those volunteers you had to send home to call and/or write letters to residents living in Assisted or Healthcare (Who doesn’t love mail?!). Calls could be to interview them, maybe even for a spotlight newsletter article for a collection of feel-good stories to share with community residents and family members. If your volunteers are also residents, what a great activity to foster more connections through this effort.

3- We all love to look at photos – Pull out some old ones or create a new project! Teams can still involve residents while maintaining isolation protocols, like making a “big card to my neighbors” and having a staff member take photos of individual residents sharing their sign or card. K4Connect-enabled communities can easily share through the Resident App, Digital Signage or TV insertion channel.  

4- Leverage our older adult’s affinity for our military – Have residents write letters to service men and women, or even their own family members deployed around the world. Capture the activity in photos and share on your social accounts to show how your community is finding ways to stay creative and engaged.

5- We know residents get very attached to their caregivers, servers, housekeepers, landscapers and maintenance workers – In a time when only essential staff is allowed in resident areas, find ways for them to be seen in some other way. Let residents see they are okay; this is another opportunity to leverage photo-sharing through Digital Signage and directly in the K4Community Resident App.

Helplessness

6- Interactive content such as relaxation or music via Alexa Voice or the K4Community App – We’ve made this one easy for K4Connect communities and it is such fun! Through the YouTube playlist feature in the K4Community App, we have curated and preloaded a playlist of more than 50 videos residents can enjoy via the application, including landscapes, classic films, music performances and world museum tours. Residents with personal Alexa devices can also access a number of entertaining content.

7- Enabling access to a community Hotline of information via telephone or Alexa voice command – Providing more sources for your community-specific information and can help curb worrying about what the news anchors and reporters are sharing about the global crisis that might not apply to them. We have offered this free service for K4Connect customers and made the hotline accessible via resident Alexa devices.

8- Reminding ourselves that helplessness is often about “lack of choice” – While in our limited mode, let’s try our best to give options for meals, activities and daily routine to give residents a variety of even simple things to look forward to.

Boredom

9- Never more thankful for TV – Take advantage of free streaming content and movie replays that are being made available. YouTube streaming through SmartTVs is another helpful tool; you can live stream wellness classes, spiritual services, or life-long learning classes on devices or on TV.

10- Virtualizing game activity – Can you play bingo or have a scavenger hunt in virtual ways across your campus? Each community is unique, but I have no doubt you can find creative ways to involve your residents in friendly games and competition. Alexa has a variety of 1-1 games residents can play, as well as trivia or reading a story. For K4Community deployed Alexa, we have uploaded a number of new games including Guess the Price, Twenty Questions and Who Wants to be a Millionaire.

11- Find new routines – If this truly lasts “months” we need to create an environment that feels like the “old” way of life. We should still build calendars or newsletters for daily or weekly activities, movies, etc. Keep publishing menus, albeit limited, as we know that is an important part of everyday life in senior living.

I know under normal conditions, you all would have the energy and time to think of all these ideas, but this blog was meant to jump-start your thinking or spark even more creativity. Let’s not let this virus ruin the good work your activities, wellness, nursing, dining, spiritual care and therapeutic recreation teams do every day to improve the quality of life of older adults. 

If you have technical questions or have additional ideas to share, our team at K4Connect is here to help – call us at 855-876-9673 or reach out to support@k4connect.com. We’re here to serve!

We’ve curated 10 helpful PDFs with various COVID-19 related information communities can share either as printed materials and signage or digitally through the K4Community Dashboard and App. Simply click to download the file and share as needed.

Our Commitment to Those We Serve

At K4Connect, our mission, in fact, the very reason for our founding, is to serve older adults, including the residents of senior living communities.  That has never been as important as right now as the world faces up to the unprecedented challenge of the COVID-19 virus.  Yet, even at its best technology can only serve as a way to help and augment the heroes on the front lines, the staff of all our customers. To that end, we have already been working closely with our community partners to accelerate community-wide communications, increase resident accessibility to the latest information, build communications to family members and implement monitoring solutions for the communities with Smart Home technologies. 

Starting last Friday, we began publishing a weekly “COVID-911” Bulletin focused specifically on how technology can be used to help serve residents, improve communications and reduce stress on team members.  We will continue to publish the Bulletin weekly to our customers. Moreover, we have added a COVID-911 section to the K4Community Support Center that is available to all our customers that includes actionable how-to guides and information about each of the items in the Bulletin, as well as best practices employed across other communities that are leveraging technology in these trying times. 

Yet, we are not stopping there. Several days ago, we began to pivot our development efforts specific to capabilities that our customers could deploy and leverage during this crisis. For example, for those already using our Amazon Alexa voice capabilities, we have added a direct hotline for residents to ask for the latest update via a pre-recorded voice message from the community. In the end, the focus of these capabilities is to help residents and families stay informed, and safe, while allowing staff to focus on other important issues in the community.  Additional voice, application and other new capabilities will be introduced soon and shared in future bulletins. 

Last, one service we have always offered is our “Virtual Staff” feature. If community residents or staff have a question, they can simply call us – directly and (as always) at no cost. Our K4Connect Advocates are now directly staffing our support line 7 days per week from 7 am to 9 pm ET, with continued live answer support 24-7.

In the end, we are here to serve. I can tell you the entire K4Connect team is working tirelessly along-side the heroes on the front lines to serve those most vulnerable. 

It is our mission.  It is the reason we exist.