Research & Innovation 
August 24, 2023
Lead and support innovation that improves our workplaces and benefits seniors in our communities.
Accomplishments
- Completed two cohorts of Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt certification training across NS and NB and one cohort of Green Belt. The Yellow Belts worked on a total of 54 Quality Improvement projects spanning all areas of our operations
- Participated in research to develop a new family survey with interRAI and launched it as part of our annual survey schedule
- The Shannex Insights Lab launched two analytic reports to support care planning in our long term care homes
- Achieved goal to be in top 10% of SQLI members for Quality of Life survey scores
- Expanded WiFi access to achieve full coverage in all of our homes, including LTC
- Two Leading Practices accepted by Accreditation Canada
Mitacs Partnership Sparks Insight Lab Success
The Shannex Insights Lab is an internal research and analysis hub dedicated to analyzing data that can improve resident care and outcomes.
To optimize data collected through the lab, Shannex partnered with MITACS to hire university students with specialized skill sets. As a result, we recently introduced a new tool called the New Admission Report that helps our care team assess how newly admitted long term care residents are settling into their new home and identifies any changes quickly to allow us to adjust our approach as needed.
Lean Six Sigma Program
As part of our commitment to ongoing quality improvement, we have implemented Lean Six Sigma training to support team members in learning management techniques that help them contribute to business process improvements.
Last year, we graduated two cohorts of Yellow Belts and one cohort of Green Belts across NS and NB. There are now 63 Lean Six Sigma trained quality improvement professionals across our organization, including Yellow, Green and Black belts.
Mitigating Health Risks for Long Term Residents
The Centre for Aging + Brain Health Innovation (CABHI) selected Shannex as one of 40 Spark program projects developing real-world innovations by frontline healthcare workers and researchers. Our project will see us using location data available through an innovative mobile nurse call system, which is in place at some of our communities, to monitor resident wellbeing and mitigate adverse events. Data will be used to generate algorithms for typical resident behaviour patterns and identify when these appear to fall outside their normal range, alerting team members to determine if an intervention is needed.
