What Five Long-Term Care Homes Have in Common

May 15, 2026 | Varsha Chaugai

Every long-term care facility has its own culture, team, and resident population. But when you read through the Engage⁺ case studies from NYGH Seniors' Health Centre, Richmond Terrace, Park Lane Terrace, Meighen Manor, Humber Meadows, and Rehab at Shannondell, a clear pattern emerges.

The challenges are nearly identical. So are the results.

This blog summarizes what these homes faced before implementing Engage⁺, what they achieved afterward, and what the common thread reveals about the state of family communication in long-term care today.

Before Engage⁺, every one of these facilities relied on phone calls, paper forms, printed mail, and spreadsheets to communicate with families. The tools were not exceptional cases of outdated infrastructure. They were the norm.

Phone Calls Were Consuming Nursing Leadership

At Park Lane Terrace, a 132-bed home in Paris, Ontario, the nursing leadership team estimated that managing inbound and outbound family calls accounted for 15-20% of their working day. On difficult days, a single family could occupy the better part of a shift. Personal Support Workers could not field clinical questions, meaning every call had to be routed to charge nurses or directors of clinical services, the people with the least available bandwidth.

At Richmond Terrace in Windsor, Ontario, the story was nearly the same. Staff fielded repetitive questions about medications, meals, appointments, and changes to the care plan. The calls were disruptive, frequent, and largely unavoidable under the old system.

At NYGH Seniors' Health Centre in Toronto, vaccine consent required nurses to individually phone each of 183 families. Calls averaged five minutes each, per resident, per campaign, multiple times per year. With 75 percent of consents being verbal, documentation then required a separate multi-step process across progress notes and immunization tabs.

Consent Was a Bottleneck Everywhere

Consent management appeared as a shared operational pain point across virtually every case study. The pattern was consistent: staff would call families to obtain verbal consent, document it manually, and then chase down the ones they couldn't reach.

At Meighen Manor, a 168-bed home operated by The Salvation Army in Ontario, the IPAC Lead described the pre-Engage+ process as one of endless follow-up:

At Park Lane Terrace, the team collects an average of six consents per resident per year, covering care plan renewals, code status, and three separate vaccine campaigns. Before Engage+, each one required a phone call. A routine three-minute call often turned into a 20-minute conversation. When families were unreachable during a vaccination clinic window, the home had to reschedule with public health.

Billing and Scheduling Were Equally Inefficient

Two homes highlighted the time cost of paper-based billing in particular.

At Humber Meadows, a 320-bed home in Toronto, Office Manager Octavia Roach spent roughly half a day each month printing, folding, and mailing invoices to over 320 residents, two documents per resident, at approximately $1.23 per print. A previous third-party invoicing platform had also failed due to email volume caps and a three-month technical outage with no resolution.

At NYGH Seniors' Health Centre, Office Manager Duane White described the same process across 183 residents:

At Park Lane Terrace, care conference invitations were printed and mailed weeks in advance, with no reliable mechanism to confirm attendance or prompt families to review the care plan beforehand. Outdated mailing addresses caused non-deliveries. Staff spent days chasing confirmations by phone.

At Rehab at Shannondell, a 120-bed skilled nursing facility in Pennsylvania, the Director of Nursing used Excel spreadsheets and phone calls to coordinate over 50 external appointments per month. Families were frequently notified too late and were often unaware of appointments altogether.

Each of these homes implemented Engage⁺, the family- and resident-communication portal directly connected to PointClickCare. The onboarding process was consistent: families were enrolled automatically from existing PointClickCare contact records, and staff accessed the platform using their existing PCC credentials.

At Park Lane Terrace, Director of Clinical Services Jessica Marcotte described her first reaction to Engage+ in one word: "Terrified." The concern was that giving families real-time access to progress notes, care plans, and vitals would increase calls, invite misinterpretation, and expose the home to compliance risk.

At NYGH Seniors' Health Centre, IPAC Lead So Yeon Park was equally candid:

In each case, the apprehension dissipated within weeks of go-live. The anticipated flood of calls from families reading their loved ones' records did not materialize. Instead, the nature of the calls that did come in shifted — from general status inquiries to specific, clinically grounded questions.

As Laura Leblanc, Director of Care at Richmond Terrace, put it:

The outcomes across these homes are consistent, quantifiable, and — for anyone still managing family communication by phone and paper — worth paying close attention to.

Consent Processing

• Meighen Manor: 75% reduction in time spent on consent collection. Over 90% of accounts are activated within the first year.
• NYGH Seniors' Health Centre: ewer than 10 phone calls required for a complete vaccine consent campaign across 183 residents. A consent cycle that previously took up to a month was reduced to a matter of days.
• Park Lane Terrace: Vaccine consent responses came in within 10 minutes of sending the first campaign. Forty replies were received before the sending process was even complete.

Billing and Administrative Time

• Humber Meadows: Monthly invoicing time reduced to five minutes. Printing and mailing costs have substantially reduced. A 90% activation rate among eligible financial contacts, with 216 families actively receiving digital invoices.
• NYGH Seniors' Health Centre: Half a day of manual envelope stuffing eliminated. Invoices were distributed to 183 families in minutes. Outdated address issues have been resolved through digital delivery.

Family Communication and Scheduling

• Rehab at Shannondell: Phone calls related to appointments reduced by approximately 70%. Transportation coordination improved, with families booking further in advance.
  “

  Engage⁺ has made scheduling appointments so much easier. It's a simple tool that creates a big impact, saving time for everyone involved.

  –Kelly Moore, Director of Nursing, Rehab at Shannondell
• Park Lane Terrace: Care conference scheduling has moved to a fully digital format. Responses now arrive before the invitation list is even complete.
  “

  I typically have responses before I'm even done sending. We don't have to pay for postage anymore. And because families can now review the care plan before they come in, they arrive with real questions, which makes the whole conference better.

  –Jessica Marcotte, Director of Clinical Services, Park Lane Terrace
• Richmond Terrace:96% of residents' families registered for the platform. 90% of those registered log in and use the platform every week.

Staff Morale and Culture

At Richmond Terrace, the portal became a channel for families to submit recognition for staff — compliments that were then posted on the home's "Shining Star" board. As Executive Director Lisa Rosati noted:

At Park Lane Terrace, Jessica Marcotte summarized the broader shift:

Reading these case studies together, one conclusion is difficult to avoid: the challenges faced by long-term care homes across Canada and the United States are not unique to any single organization. They are structural. Phone-based communication, paper consent processes, manual billing, and mail-dependent scheduling all carry the same costs, staff time diverted from care, documentation gaps, family frustration, and compliance exposure.

The opportunity cost of maintaining these systems is not abstract. It is measurable in hours per week, dollars per month, and in the quality of care that nursing staff deliver when they are not managing administrative volume.

Engage⁺ does not change the work of caring for residents. It changes the overhead that surrounds it.