Shalom Village advances operational learning with OnSPARK
Shalom Village shares their experience working with OnSPARK
At Shalom Village, we are a campus of care that offers long-term care, assisted living apartments, and community wellness and social programs. Before joining OnSPARK, we were using clinical, quality and workforce data, fragmented across multiple systems, to gain insights to improve resident care. Joining OnSPARK was an opportunity to turn our existing data into better insights and lead evidence-informed decision-making across the sector.
Key benefits from the partnership
Reduction in manual reporting
Better understanding of operational needs
Identified scalable improvement opportunities in inappropriate antipsychotic use
The partnership
As a founding member of OnSPARK, Shalom Village has worked closely with the OnSPARK team and its research partners not only as a participating home, but also as a member on the Data Governance Advisory Committee (DGAC) and key informant group. As part of these advisory teams, we ensure the priorities of LTC homes are met by overseeing the ethical, secure, and accountable use of data, and the design and development of the OnSPARK portal.
“We didn’t join because we needed more data, we joined because we wanted better insight and to be part of this initiative that is going to drive evidence-based decision-making across the sector.”
The impact
After joining OnSPARK, the partnership reduced administrative burdens for our home. OnSPARK has helped us focus less on manual reporting and more on understanding trends and identifying opportunities for improvement by turning data we are already collecting into actionable, timely unit-level insights.
When trend lines in OnSPARK showed a sudden and steady rise in the potential inappropriate antipsychotic use, our leadership team used these insights to explore other signals in mental health trends, changes in physical health and activities, and unit specific data to hypothesize questions and guide targeted investigations. Using the findings, to drive down these trends, we implemented regular interdisciplinary reviews of medications to support weaning off antipsychotics, involvement of families and daily care provider team members, medication histories, and adaptations to activity offerings at Shalom Village.
Beyond trend lines, we have also been able to capitalize on the benchmarking capabilities within the Portal. Anonymized benchmarking against other OnSPARK homes allows us to better understand on a unit-level where we differ from peers and where scalable quality improvement and workforce planning opportunities may exist.
A commitment to sector-wide learning
At Shalom Village, our work with OnSPARK has empowered us to move beyond data collection toward evidence-informed decision-making, stronger workforce planning, and broader sector-wide learning to strengthen resident care.
“OnSPARK helps us move from collecting data to truly using it to improve care, support our teams, and contribute to the future of long-term care.”