✨ Resident Life

How many of the NaCCRA member CCRCs use TouchTown for community communication? What features are used? Do staff and residents use it effectively?

Janice Clements, Wake Robin (Vermont)

We use it at Stomebridge at Montgomery, Skillman, NJ. and I believe the other 7 ccrcs in the Springingpoint Senior Living group do also. It's been evolving into a useful tool. I believe much of the 'evolution' is the staff learning how to use it. Much of it duplicates, but makes more conveniently available, written documents such as daily activities, resident and staff and library directories. Keeping it up-to-date an issue in terms of staffing.

Our current subject list includes:

Activites, Dining

Community Info

Our Channel

Resident Directory

Bios

Getting to Know You

Stonebridge News

Staff Directory

Newsletters

LivWell

Resident Handbook

Committees

Library Catalog

Event Photos

Monthly Birthdays

Important Forms

Activity Packets

Covid-19 Resources

Total Brain Health

Virtual Travel

Stonebridge Live

Work Orders

My ProfileMessage History

One Day University

Works Hub Help

Learning World - Watercolor Month

Macular Degeneratoion

Black History Month

Touchtown 101

I live at Wind Crest in Colorado. This is an Erickson community. The Erickson Communities use TouchTown. It is a disaster because it has a very primitive search mechanism and residents who are not technically skilled have a difficult time finding information. It searches by document titles not by content.

We used TouchTown at the Loomis Communities in Western Massachhusetts until several years ago. The lack of many features led management to look at new systems and with significant resident participation in the search, chose Connected Living. In general it is well-liked and used, but it requires staff involvement and training. It has now been bought by another company which *may* make further enhancements. It runs well on all platforms (PC, Mac, TV, iPads, etc.), but staff need to regularly update it with the calendar of events, menues, bulletins, new residents, etc. Yes, of course we have residents who are not using it to the fullest because of their lack of technical knowledge, but as new residents move in, they clearly expect to have electronic access to information.

Nancy Eddy

nbeddy@gmail.com

Kirkland Village, Bethlehem PA: We currently use Connected Living for the bulk of our electronic communication needs, however we also continue to use Touchtown. Our use of Touchtown is limited to posting and distributing daily bulletins which are shown on our in-house Cable TV channels. Connected living is used for everything else similar to the functions outlined by Richard Ober.

Previously we started with CATIE from Status Solutions several years ago. CATIE had some unique features at the time but was not robust enough to fill our perceived needs. We migrated to Touchtown but found that we had limited user adoption.

Finally Connected Living was selected because it fulfills about 70-80% of our needs and it has both horizontal and vertical communication and information sharing capabilities. This was deemed important in a multi community organization such as ours because it supports sharing information top down from the administration and across communities within the organization.

We continue to use Touchtown for its CCTV support and we continue to prod Connected living to provide that support so that we can drop Touchtown and operate on one platform.

Intereswting comment on Connected Living. We post Connected Living on our inhouse TV channel. Just as we used to do when we had TouchTown. The only issue is that bulletins scroll across the bottom of the screen and that's inconvenient for people - you have to let one bulleting go by before yo can get to the next one.

Nancy Eddy

nbeddy@gmail.com