Essential Forms for New Residents in Your Assisted Living Facility
Aug 19, 2024
Onboarding a new resident at your assisted living facility is critical for both the resident and your business. It is more than just a formal protocol; it is the foundation for establishing trust, maintaining compliance, and providing excellent care. Every step you take during this process has the potential to substantially affect the resident's experience and your institution's reputation.
Today's blog will cover the forms required for this process. From medical assessments to personal care agreements, having the proper paperwork in place is crucial for providing excellent care and running your business quickly and efficiently. These documents are more than just formalities; they represent the basis of a well-managed and legally compliant assisted living facility.
The right paperwork ensures that you have all of the information about the resident's medical history, personal preferences, and legal responsibilities. This allows your staff to develop a personalized care plan that addresses the resident's needs and improves their quality of life. Furthermore, adequate documentation protects your facilities from potential legal difficulties while ensuring compliance with state and federal requirements.
This blog will cover the important paperwork that will help expedite your onboarding process and prepare your residents for a smooth transfer into their new home. We will discuss everything from initial assessments and care plans to legal agreements and emergency contact forms. By the end of this post, you will have a thorough understanding of the forms required to provide a smooth onboarding process for your new residents. Let's get started by establishing the foundation for a successful and compliant onboarding process.
Check out the video too:
Intake Form: The Pre-Admission Assessment
The first step in welcoming a new resident is the intake form, often referred to as a pre-admission assessment. This form helps you evaluate whether you can meet the prospective resident's needs and determine their required level of care. Key elements of the intake form include assessing health and care needs, such as medication management, assistance with dressing, toileting, and other daily activities. Typically, a 0-4 scale is used to rate the resident’s level of independence, where 0 indicates complete independence and 4 indicates total dependence. Based on this assessment, you identify the resident's care level, which helps you determine appropriate rates and ensure you can provide the necessary care. Set a basic tariff (for example, $1,500/month) for private pay residents and then add costs dependent on care level. For example, if a resident requires level one care, you may increase the basic rate by a certain amount (say, $1,000).
Admission Agreement: The Binding Contract
Once you've finished the intake form and decided to admit the resident, the following step is to sign the admission agreement. The admission agreement describes the residency rules and requirements. The admission agreement is made up of numerous components. First, a lease agreement specifies the parameters of your facility's relationship with the resident, protecting both parties. A pricing sheet outlines the costs for various services and care levels. A list of the services provided also clearly outlines which services and items, such as toiletries and towels, etc., are included and any additional prices for unique items. The agreement also addresses living circumstances, including room details and procedures for moving or leaving the institution. Moreover, it is essential to collect family contact details for emergencies and digitize this information for easy access.
Digital Records and Compliance
Maintaining digital records is crucial for efficiency and compliance. Use platforms like Google Drive, OneDrive, or an EHR to store and manage resident information securely. Digital and paper copies ensure you can quickly respond to state surveys and emergencies.
Regular Assessments and Documentation
If a resident's care needs alter significantly, you can perform another assessment on the resident; you're also able to do annual assessments. Regular assessments, with proper documentation, will help to substantiate care level changes and communicate successfully with Medicaid case managers.
Final Thoughts
Ensuring a thorough intake form and admission agreement is essential for running a successful assisted living facility. These documents help you provide the best care for your residents and manage your business efficiently. For more detailed guidance on building a business plan and securing funding, visit Assisted Living Investing. Check out our Business Plan Checklist to help you get started.
Ready to take the next step in starting your assisted living business? Download our Business Plan Checklist to ensure you have everything you need to create a successful plan.
Need help figuring out where to start? Join the next Roadmap Challenge and build your launch plan with me.
Show full transcript 👇
Transcript
00:00:00
hey friend I'm Brandon Gustafson I help new and aspiring Real Estate Investors start their Assisted Living business in today's video we're going to be getting into the topic of what forms does a new Resident need for your Assisted Living business welcome to Assisted Living [Music] investing hey friend welcome back to the channel just want to remind you to get over to the website Assisted Living investing. net you can get access to our free underwriting calculator there to help you along your investment journey
00:00:33
to start your own Assisted Living business so make sure you can hop over to Assisted Living investing. net for our topic of today's video we're going to be discussing what are some of the forms that a new Resident is going to need at your assisted living facility so you know how to bring them in and help get them onboarded and acclimated so you can start moving along the path and we actually just went through this process at one of my facilities so it's something I'm really familiar with right
00:00:59
now and we'll be able to give you some good guidance on as you get started along your path to starting your own Assisted Living business and bringing residents into your home now the first thing that you're going to want to do is to have an intake form and this is kind of like a a pre admission assessment you want to see what are the things that your potential resident might be dealing with and make sure that you're going to be able to provide that level of care for them to help them out and you know
00:01:28
help them get the things that they need to be happy and healthy in your home that pre-admission assessment is going to have questions like do they need help with medication management what about dressing and toileting and then it's going to dive a little bit deeper how much help do they need do they need it every single time they get dressed do they need help or do they just need prompts to remind them hey good morning make sure you change out of your pajamas get in your in your clothes today um
00:01:58
what at what level do they are they going to fall in that Spectrum typically we actually have this on a zero to four point scale so we'll have a zero4 they don't need any help they're good at this on their own one is like they need some prompting um they need some guidance on there all the way up to four is we have to do this for them every single time and you're going to be looking at this from a bunch of different areas um from like I mentioned toileting clothing medication management
00:02:25
um any number of things that that are important to you that you want to be uh looking at with your Assisted Living business now the reason why you do that is it's going to help you especially if you're in a private pay setting it's going to help you dictate how much money you're going to be charging them to stay there uh typically you're going to have on this intake form a base let's say it's $1,500 a month and then depending on what uh level of care they need uh way that we do it is we'll put them in
00:02:52
like a one uh two three or a four um kind of level of care and the higher they are the more they have to pay us and then we will give a a dollar amount for each of those levels of care let's just say it's $1,000 um so if they're at a level one they have that base of 1500 they're level one Care Plus 1,000 so they're 2500 those are numbers just quick and easy to give you an idea of what that looks like typically you're going to be getting higher numbers than that but it just gives you an idea of of
00:03:21
what that's going to look like so you can bring them in and as a private pay person you can set those numbers to be exactly what you want them to be um there's also different Point systems that you could do that are for every single thing they get um a certain dollar amount there's a lot of different ways to do this intake form but at its core what you're trying to do is assess how much care they need and are you able to provide that care to them and then from there um for private pay you're
00:03:47
going to be looking at what that rate's going to be with Medicaid it's a little bit different because that's going to be dictated by the the case manager and what they have in there so you just want to be aware of that but the more that you document these processes and go through this preassessment um experience with a new Resident the more ammunition you have to take to the case manager and say yeah we just did our assessment and it's these are the things that need to happen with this resident and you told
00:04:14
us it was only this much and so we're going to be providing more care we need to get paid more so this is how you make the case to do it typically in addition to doing this on an intake basis you want to be doing this at least on an annual basis or when you see a significant shift in the care that needs to be provided to your residents that's how you're going to be able to justify bumping up pay because you're providing more care and also how you're going to take this to Medicaid and say hey we're
00:04:39
providing a lot of care to this resident that we initially were not providing um so that's how you do that so that's the intake form one of the most important pieces of paperwork that you need as you're getting started with your bringing new residents into the home now the next big thing is going to be your admission agreement and this is after you've done that preassessment you know you're moving forward you're bringing this resident in and typically this is going to be a packet I was just
00:05:00
reviewing ours yesterday actually and I think we're up to 16 pages long and inside of that packet there are several different things so we're going to have like a basic lease agreement um that we that we put together with the resident and this is different on my website you can get a a lease agreement that's between your two businesses your operating entity and your real estate entity um this one is more of a here this is a lease agreement with the resident um and helps protect you as the
00:05:28
landlord as well and and give some guidelines and things like that you're going to have a fee sheet that says okay these are the different fees that we're going to be charging you and um this is how it's broken down you're going to have something in there that says these are the different things that we do provide you know we provide toilet paper we provide towels we provide um these things but if you want a special type of shampoo or lotion or um whatever it is you're going to have to go and buy those
00:05:55
things on your own so you want to delineate that and make sure it's clear you want to tell them where they are going to be staying if you have that information available make sure that it's in there you're going to want to put in things like how do they leave the house um if they needed to leave to go to the doctor what does that look like if they uh just like they don't want to live there anymore how much notice do they need to give you if you want to move them to a different room how much
00:06:18
notice do you need to give them if you need to ask them to leave the home how much notice do you need to give them you want to outline all of these things in that admission agreement it's a really important piece of what you're putting together because it outlines everything it's basically The Binding contract and both sides need to adhere to this um but as long as you're doing that and they're doing that then everything's good everything's fine and you can go ahead and move forward with it which is really
00:06:41
exciting another thing you want to do so you have this information is you want to put all that contact information this is for you um so you have family contact info in the event something happens but also in the em in the event of an emergency um you have a fire at the house you have to evacuate it and go somewhere else you need to be notifying families so you want to capture that information and put it in there I really like to digitize this so putting it in a Google drive folder a one drive folder
00:07:05
whatever a Dropbox folder whatever it is that you are using um taking that you want to have paper copies it's a lot easier when the state comes in for a survey and they say we need to see this paperwork to just be able to pull it out but it's also good to have it in a digital format so that you can take it uh and there's a fire and you've got to evacuate you've got it on Google Drive you've got everything there you've got all the contact info and everything is ready for you to go you you can also put
00:07:30
this into um we we use ECP to do our Pharmacy stuff and inside of that it has a little bit of an electronic Healthcare record and we can put that information in there and then we could get on there and and look at it and then it has patient charts and things like that so there's a lot of different ways that that you can do that if you have questions about any of those things or would like to learn a little bit more comment that down below like if you don't know what ECP is or uh what an EMR
00:07:55
uh EHR what what those types of things are um then let me know electonic medical record which is EMR electronic Healthcare record EHR ECP I don't know what it stands for it's like e-clinical practice I think um but these are different pieces of software that are going to help you along your journey and just make things a lot easier for you and they're pretty cost-efficient as well so something you want to be aware of but those are the two big main things that you are going to be doing as you're
00:08:21
bringing new residents in you need to do this intake form this assessment this pre-admission assessment make sure that you can provide the care that you're saying you can provide and you're going to be able to help out the resident and then number two is going to be getting at that um all that admission paperwork and there's just a lot that's going to go into it if you'd like to learn more about that get over to the website Assisted Living investing. net we're here to help you start your own Assisted
00:08:46
Living business it's something I'm super passionate about and love helping people with I have the a couple products on there the business planning guide which is going to give you some guidance on how to build a business plan and get solid underwriting to help you get the funding you need so you can start your business and I have an accelerator course that is a 12we path to ownership to really help jumpstart you and get you moving along the way I love helping people love giving them guidance and
00:09:11
helping people get to the point where you're running this business and and you're successful uh something I'm super passionate about I want to remind you to like the video as well subscribe and ring the bell as well so you get notified we go live on Tuesday mornings and uh put out this leather long form content on Thursdays getting you a lot of information out there to really help you along your investment Journey so make sure you are doing all those things so you get notified and join our
00:09:37
Facebook group because I have a lot of really good content in there as well we're doing some value posts where I dive deep into different topics and and things like that it's going to help you out along your journey and help you reach the goals that you have for time and Financial Freedom down the line I want to thank you for watching and I want to remind you again that it doesn't take a lot it just takes a little bit but persistence is the key the more that you keep going step by step by step the
00:10:04
more you're going to make progress and the more you're going to be successful you can do this I thank you again for watching and have a great [Music] day
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