April 22, 2021
Autumnwood Mature Lifestyle Communities
Sudbury, Ontario
Retirement & Assisted Living
Autumnwood Mature Lifestyle Communities is composed of four senior living communities in Northeastern Ontario. Their mission is to assist residents in the preservation of health and independence through the promotion of complete wellness—Body, Mind, and Spirit. The group offers three levels of care for older adults: independent living, assisted living, and extra care. Autumnwood communities are committed to providing exceptional quality experiences for their residents.
With the motto “Leisure for Life”, Autumnwood sees the benefits of their social programming in helping residents to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Their wellness program meets the social, physical, spiritual, intellectual, and emotional needs of their residents by providing activities that correspond to each dimension. This ensures a comprehensive program that promotes active aging and wellness. The communities are continually adding activities to meet the needs of their new residents and the ever-changing needs of current residents.
Julie Aube, Director of Retirement Operations at Autumnwood, sees their wellness and recreation program as a major sales point and something that sets them apart from their competition. This is what led to her interest in Welbi, a solution that would support Autumnwood’s wellness efforts and track key performance indicators all in one place. With Welbi, Aube is able to track all of the KPIs for Autumnwood’s wellness program while best supporting her recreation team with Welbi’s state-of-the-art programming software.
Monitoring the success of Autumnwood’s wellness program each month is something that Aube finds incredibly important. It helps her to ensure they are continuing to cater to the needs of their residents.
She explains “if the number of residents that don't participate, in anything, in any given month is high then we're failing to deliver the key service offerings that we pride ourselves on.”
Although tracking these numbers for all four communities each month was not easy, Autumnwood had set up manual activity tracking using Excel and Word documents in their facilities which was “quite painful and very time consuming” says Aube.
But, Autumnwood’s wellness programming did not only have pain points at the executive level. Manually tracking program KPIs was also taking its toll on recreation teams. The recreation team’s biggest challenge was the large amounts of manual administrative work each day. Aube explained that recreation professionals thrive off of interpersonal relationships and when they are at a desk inputting data or creating their calendar, they are not doing the work that they love. They would rather spend time adding value for residents and running activities and programs.
“We just did a demo. That is all we needed.” Aube remarks about her first time seeing the Welbi platform.
She was struck by how Welbi automatically tracked everything she was manually tracking and more. Gone are the manual Excel and Word documents that were plaguing her monthly reporting. Now, with Welbi, insights from all four of Autumnwood’s communities are automatically calculated in real-time. With the click of a button, Aube can ensure that each community’s attendance rate is up to standard, their list of compulsory events is being offered and that there are adequate programs being offered per month for each dimension of wellness. Autumnwood’s wellness program reporting is now completely automated and valuable insights are available to the people who need them, whenever they need them.
In addition to operations, Autumnwood’s recreation teams hugely benefit from using Welbi. Debbie Gaudet, the Activity Coordinator at Red Oak Villa and Manager of Activity Coordinators for Autumnwood Mature Lifestyles, says that
“The best days are when she gets caught up on her work and is able to spend quality time with the residents”.
Welbi allows her to have this time by significantly cutting down her planning and preparation time.
Welbi is a one-stop-shop for her calendars, resident assessments, and insights, making them all extremely accessible and easy to edit. The additional features such as the birthday reminders and real-time activity recommendations help her to personalize her residents’ experience.
For Autumnwood, using Welbi was a no-brainer. Autumnwood was already an industry leader in wellness before Welbi, but they were bogged down by stacks of paperwork and hours of administrative work leading to a more reactive approach to their programming. Now, with the time saved, they are able to focus on being proactive about their residents’ wellbeing.
Welbi’s meaningful insights and smart tools support Autumnwood to continue being an industry leader in wellness and recreation.