Paper And Excel Can't Flag An Allergy At The Table

It's a list someone has to remember to check, on a good day, when the dining room isn't full and the server isn't three tables behind. On a bad day, it's the piece of paper nobody had time to open. A spreadsheet is a fine tool for tracking inventory. It's a poor tool for keeping a server aware of a resident's dietary restriction in the three seconds before they take an order.

The harder truth is that in senior living dining, the person eating often isn't the best source of that information. Residents with cognitive decline can't always reliably say what they can't eat, and a new or per-diem server has no way to know that without the system telling them, table-side, before the order goes in.