NaCCRA Forum: General

Ten years ago, a group of residents at Goodwin Bailey’s Crossroads (GHBC) developed their own portal: www.ghbcresidents.org is our website. It contains everything one needs to know to live at GHBC and includes the ability to reserve a table for meals, order meals ahead for dine-in, take-out, or delivery, make salon appointments, request maintenance or housekeeping, reserve rooms for meetings or for overnight guests, request transportation and IT services, provide feedback/suggestions to management, various departments, and to our resident council. Only a few sections are password controlled so that families have easy access as well. If a parent is unable to use a computer to access the website, the family or friend can request services for the resident or for themselves as they plan a visit.

A team of eight residents maintain the website, updating information many times a day as needed. We can access the website wherever we are in the world as it’s available through our smartphones and tablets. We can call or email other residents and staff with the click of a button.

Residents, staff, mamagement, and family me,beds say they couldn’t get through a day without it.

Thank you, Ann! This recommendation is what we needed to move forward on changing our Portal. Mary Kazlusky

Uniquest Experience

Uniguest Experience

I live at Charlestown managed by Erickson Senior Living. We were a pilot for Touchtown in April of 2013. A few “tech savvy” residents including myself were invited to demos by Living Connect and Touchtown. The residents liked Touchtown the best which was very basic at that time. 

Many features were added over the years. For example, the What’s Happening feature became the closed circuit TV feed for our TV station. We started dining room reservations in May 2021, and a pilot for the shuttle tracker the same year. My favorite icon is the shuttle tracker which shows where the shuttle is on the 110 acre campus. I added the shuttle tracker to my iPhone home screen. We can now access forms for a variety of purposes, email staff and other residents using the Resident and Staff Directories. 

Residents still push for more flexibility and additions. Every year the corporate folks review the “work plan” for the year. Change is slow but there are enough incremental changes over the 11 years that we may get what we want.

Erickson worked with Touchtown to create an app for Erickson. The app icon is the ESL logo.

Current Home page for the Charlestown MyErickson App. Some communities have different icons. The Dining Information includes the dining reservation system powered by ConnectSmart by QSR Automations. 

You can access the GUEST link here so you can see how it works. This is what you would see as a guest. https://myerickson.erickson.com

I would encourage those communities exploring portals to insist that residents are involved as it is a job effort to make it work for your community.

Ann MacKay

Charlestown, Catonsville

Barry,

Touchtown was acquired by Uniguest in March of 2019. Anyone searching for Touchtown in the App Store today will be taken to the Uniguest app.

Thank you Ms. Hedtcke, I see now that FullCount.net is a web portal, not an app. It is a POS billing system. Uniguest/Touchtown is merely connecting you to the FullCount website, where you have to log in again to connect to your dining account.

Good to know you are happy with it.

Hi - I'm reporting from Wind Crest, an Erickson community in the Denver area.

I highly recommend that any CCRC that is considering a portal should at least check out: TouchTown. That company's customizable portal serves many or all of the 20 Erickson communities (including ours, with 2,000+ residents), and they also serve other Senior communities such as the nearby high-end community of 350 residents that has implemented their own customized version of the portal.

While no portal is perfect, and none will draw rave reviews from every Senior, the TouchTown portal is apparently actively used at Wind Crest by the vast majority of residents -- perhaps 70% to 80%. Ours contains about 20 different modules -- everything from dinner menus and dining reservations to a resident directory, staff directory, monthly bill payment system, and a host of automated forms for requesting everything from meeting-room bookings to maintenance service visits.

-Barry

Full Count is a separate app just for the dining services function (ordering meals and making dining room reservations). It isn't a part of Uniguest, but it it is accessible to us when logged into Uniguest (in the Food & Beverage module, we can click on Dining Portal to get to it). It can also be accessed through its own app. We use a separate username and password from Uniguest to sign into the dining portal. It works with the electronic billing system for our meal plans.

The online ordering for meal pickup or delivery is very easy to use. Our cafe also has a kiosk for ordering and on-table tablets for ordering so you can sit down and order and not have to wait in line.

Our CCRC in NJ also uses Uniguest. It works fine, but the interface is a bit dated.

Thank you for your reply. Your comment reminded me of a recent "vendor (Icon, or CareMerge) can't do it" I had. One of the the "Help" videos dealt with making Dining Reservations. That feature hasn't been created for us yet, so I suggested that the instructional ("canned") video on how to make dining reservations be taken down until the ability to reserve on line finally happens. Since the instructional workshops encouraged everyone to "log on and explore" to better understand the new Portal, I wondered why they would keep something in Help that might cause confusion --- someone might try it and get frustrated because they couldn't get a feature to work, not realizing it's not yet available. Sigh.

Also, the Wait List for an excursion isn't visible, only the list of registered participants. Sometimes someone may wonder how long the Wait List is. Or, if they're a participant who needs to cancel at the last minute for an evening or weekend event they're unable to see who is "up" next from the Wait List to give that person a quick call to say "Check Your Email -- you should have a message that you can go to the Sunday matinee in 45 minutes" or, they see the next in line eating brunch in the dining venue and can give them a heads up. Staff is taking the position that they (Life Enrichment) need to manage the Wait Lists, so ONLY they can see the Wait List names. They'll rely "on the system" for after hours and/or weekend event. This means that if the cancellation is last minute, a spot may go to waste. Sigh.

We live in a for-profit CCRC in Illinois with Life Care Services as our management company. We had CareMerge here. The portal they designed was so bad, no one used it. CareMerge had pre-decided we needed a portal that looked like a Facebook page which residents didn't want. They interviewed selected residents, etc., but didn't listen to what we said we needed or didn't know how to do it. I hope they have improved since then.

When the CareMerge contract expired (around 2018 or 2019) we switched to Touchtown (now called Uniguest). When they came in to talk about their product, their representatives actually listened to residents and management talk about what we wanted. We also have a dining services module (Full-Count) that works with Uniguest. Both are accessible via computers, mobile phones, and portable devices. We can sign up for events, order food, make dining reservations, submit maintenance requests, access a staff directory and resident directory, view videos of important meetings, etc. We are very happy with Uniguest.

Reporting from The Village at Brookwood in Burlington, NC. Shortly after moving here in mid-2015, we heard "a Portal is coming." It finally happened with a "grand roll-out" in October 2022. Viibrant was the vendor. At the time our CCRC had just been purchased by a single-site, larger CCRC 30 miles west of us. Our new owner was about six months "ahead" of us in working with Viibrant. I thought we'd get the advantage of bugs already having been worked out therer, but no.

Our new Portal was spearheaded by our quite young and inexperienced Director of Resident Services. I couldn't tell if problems we were facing were due to the incumbent who had achallenge with attention to detail to begin with. We kept hearing "the vendor can't do what your suggesting;" or, "the vendor is working on this." We were told that the Portal could be accessed by one's smart phone, but residents wanting that hit a brick wall and became highly frustrated. We then heard that "the vendor is working on new software so that phone access will work." Say what? What about the benefits of de-bugging I thought we'd have from our new owner's experience?

I could have said "ditto here" from the above response from Karren Lore of Panorama.

Finally it was decided by management to NOT renew the contract with Viibrant in May 2024. A new Director of Resident Services came on board, coming from a CCRC to our east that coincidentally was bailing out of its relationship with Viibrant.

Our new vendor, bringing a whole new Portal, is Icon (formerly CareMerge). Once again I'm hearing "the vendor can't provide that" but some features are better than the previous Viibrant Portal.

If I were you, I'd ask management which CCRCs they checked with to get a reference check before deciding on Viibrant, then contact the resident leadership to get their side of the story at each place.

Hope this helps.

JY

I

I live at Panorama in Lacey, WA. We too use Viibrant and from a user standpoint have been deeply dissatisfied, both with functionality and response times. I am only a resident/user with a career in information systems, but I have heard that our IT staff is also dealing with many challenges in trying to implement this platform and to serve us residents as users. The list of problems is long and Viibrant has apparently not delivered to their commitments.

I live at Heron's Key in Gig Harbor, WA, a level A Life Care Community. We have been using a company called Viibrant to design and maintain our Portal which provides communication for our residents regarding all avenues of life at Heron's Key. I am wondering if any other communities use Viibrant and if you are fully satisfied with their service.