Excellence Achieved: Aline Quality Helps Atria Community Win Q Award

For Natasha Georges, senior executive director of Atria Senior Living’s El Camino Gardens community, nothing is more important than ensuring the safety, health, and happiness of her residents. Her dedication ensures that their well-being is not just a priority but the ultimate measure of success. Under Georges’ leadership, this commitment to high-quality standards of living recently culminated in Atria El Camino Gardens receiving the coveted Q Award — a prestigious honor bestowed by Atria to its best-performing communities that demonstrate the highest level of service in the senior living industry.

Raising Resident Experience Standards

Of course, Georges feels proud of her community’s exceptional resident experience, but winning the Q Award didn’t come without concerted efforts to improve service quality. Atria employs an internal team of quality enhancement directors to travel to each community twice a year unannounced. Using Aline Quality, a mobile quality management solution, a quality enhancement director conducts an extensive two- to three-day assessment during this visit to proactively identify any areas that fail to meet Atria’s high brand standards and regulatory requirements.

As the quality enhancement director uses Aline Quality to assess the community, they can access interpretive guidelines for reminders of company policies and state regulations while also capturing field photos and contextual comments for each survey question. This stringent process not only helps Atria maintain universal guidelines across its entire portfolio but it also ensures communities get ahead of costly compliance issues. With so much on the line, passing these assessments is no small task.  

“In my opinion, our quality enhancement assessments are more in depth and harder to pass than the state surveys,” Georges said. “Atria wants to make sure we don’t come out of a state survey with citations and issues, so the quality enhancement directors design these assessments to make sure we’re dotting our I’s and crossing our T’s and doing right by our residents and staff.”

Implementing Decisive Action Plans

When Georges first came into leadership at Atria El Camino Gardens, she inherited a comprehensive list of necessary improvements from a previous assessment to elevate the community’s performance to expected standards. Georges knew implementing these changes would come with challenges, but she saw this as an opportunity to create strong, repeatable processes that support better resident care and services. 

Like the quality enhancement directors, Georges used Aline Quality to tackle these outstanding issues. For each item that failed the assessment, Aline Quality automatically generated a corrective action plan. The tool then reassigned those failed items to an entire department or individual team member with a required completion date. Once the Atria team solved an issue, Aline Quality marked the corrective action as complete and sent an automatic notification to Georges. 

To prioritize corrective efforts, Georges first focused on the simplest critical factors, which are always subject to review, and come with costly citations. Some of these critical factors include whether assessments were completed and submitted to the state on time and whether resident acuity levels were appropriate for the community’s setting.

“We first went after the low-hanging fruit — the items that are easiest to address,” Georges said. “Moving forward, we then created a process so that we don’t ever miss a beat. Since these reviews are unannounced, you can’t really prepare for tomorrow. If you don’t have a long-standing process in place, you won’t pass your assessment because they’ll find that even if you’re doing certain tasks correctly today, you weren’t doing them correctly several months ago.” 

To further build those processes, Georges also held weekly status meetings with her team leaders. During these meetings, Georges performed mock audits in Aline Quality with the team leaders to identify any process gaps and provide her team with the necessary support to correct any issues. This was especially powerful when it came to compliance for resident care, which receives the heaviest regulatory scrutiny.

“There’s no way to have a solid compliance program without all the tools in Aline Quality,” Georges said. “Our staff is so busy taking care of residents, but they can easily access any report or corrective action plan they need on the go to ensure we’re in compliance. It makes our staff’s lives easier, and it creates a safer space for our residents.”

Setting Atria Apart With Exceptional Performance Standards

Since elevating her community’s operations to meet Q Award standards, Georges and her team now leverage this distinction to build trust with prospects and differentiate the Atria El Camino Gardens community from competitors. During community tours, they proudly highlight this award as a testament to their dedication to creating a positive resident experience. 

In senior living, demonstrating a commitment to excellence is essential. Transitioning to senior living is an emotional decision for both residents and their families — often accompanied by understandable reservations. By showcasing their proven track record, Georges and her team offer reassurance, helping families feel confident that their loved ones will be well cared for.

“Receiving the Q Award is something that I hold very dear to my heart,” Georges said. “It’s more than an achievement; it’s our commitment. Maintaining these high standards is essential for our residents’ well-being. People entrust us with their lives, and we’re dedicated to providing a safe, supportive environment that makes them feel good about being part of our community.”

Improve Your Senior Living Community With Aline Quality

Ready to improve the resident experience for a distinct competitive advantage? Book a demo to see firsthand how Aline Quality can support better resident safety and operational excellence.