And the 2017 OPTIMA Award winners are…

The 2017 I Advance Senior Care OPTIMA Award winners are here! The independent judging panel studied this year’s record-breaking number of entries—more than in the past decade—and chose the best of the best in quality resident programs and memory care delivery. Entries came from 14 states and covered the gamut of healthcare initiatives.

The OPTIMA Award competition, now in its 21st year, is one of the industry’s only double-blind competitions. The judges do not know the identity of the submitting provider and can judge solely on the excellence and outcomes of the project. The external judging panel also is independent of the award sponsors and I Advance Senior Care magazine staff.

First, in our original category, congratulations to St. Joseph’s Rehabilitation and Residence, Portland, Maine, winner of the 2017 OPTIMA Award for Excellence in Resident-Focused Care, sponsored by Omnicare.

St. Joseph’s unusual intergenerational living program is tackling three causes at once: increasing resident engagement, curbing the labor shortage and training passionate young people on the fast track to careers in the field of senior care. The program has become a way for the facility to maintain its staff for quality care, while students view it as the internship of a lifetime.

This year we also welcome our first OPTIMA Award winner for Excellence in Memory Care, sponsored by PointClickCare. Kudos to Issaquah Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, Issaquah, Washington!

Even though almost half its residents have some level of cognitive decline, the 140-bed skilled nursing center reduced its use of antipsychotics for residents with dementia from nearly 34 percent to just 3.5 percent in less than two years. In our upcoming story, we’ll show you how they created a successful performance improvement plan to reduce unnecessary medications, improve resident quality of life and train staffers ways to assess behaviors.

The editors of I Advance Senior Care will be traveling to each winning site in the next few weeks to learn more about the winning programs and share their ideas with readers—so stay tuned for our in-depth story coverage coming soon on iadvanceseniorcare.com and as the cover story of our Fall print issue.

Pamela Tabar

Pamela Tabar was editor-in-chief of I Advance Senior Care from 2013-2018. She has worked as a writer and editor for healthcare business media since 1998, including as News Editor of Healthcare Informatics. She has a master’s degree in journalism from Kent State University and a master’s degree in English from the University of York, England.