About Us

Our Story

In 2019, Joe Ewert, the CEO of a campus of elder care facilities that spanned 30 acres and operated on a nearly 25 million dollar annual budget, had a problem: incontinence. 

This is an easy punch line to anyone on the outside, but within the walls of a nursing home, the joke doesn’t land the same way.  The amount of work that surrounds this topic is a constant source of anguish for all levels of caregivers, administrators, and most importantly: patients.

Joe knew they needed more information. He tasked his care givers with the job of creating what the industry calls ‘voiding journals’ for each patient. To get the data they needed to make more effective care plans was not easy to compile. Each shift, the CNAs were asked to write down the relevant details from every patient interaction and room visit. Those entries were just that - written down - and placed on the desk of a nurse. Even with the best of intentions, this was impossible to compile in a timely manner. 

One compounding factor to this situation is a regulatory one. The government requires nursing home residents to have no more than seven incontinence events in any rolling seven day window. Being out of compliance, from the business perspective, can be quite costly. This study showed the staff at Brewster place a few things - first, they have been out of compliance and owed fines to the government. Second, the massive effort gave them very few actionable insights to address the problems they uncovered. They now knew both the details and scale of the problem from a few months ago. That’s not good enough. 

So the question was raised: can we get the information we need, when we need it, from the people who interact with the patients most frequently and in a manner timely enough to make a plan that prevents the problems from compounding? That need was the reason CNAssist was created.  

We have created a tool that addresses this suite of problems by leveraging the interactions by the medical world’s first line of defense, certified nurse assistants.  These caregivers have the most frequent interactions with nursing home residents and getting their input in real time creates a world of opportunity for informed interventions. We are able to create adaptive, preventative intervention plans that are based on the activity and habits of each individual patient. We can create compliance plans, disseminate information to caregivers, review plans that have not yet been implemented and remotely advise on the guidance of staff.