In last week’s blog post, we discussed how consolidating technology can drive efficiency for standalone senior living communities. In this article we shift our focus to the enterprise level, exploring the benefits of a comprehensive solution for multi-site senior living operators.
For executive leaders who oversee a portfolio of senior living communities, driving a successful technology adoption strategy involves balancing a future-oriented outlook with immediate operational realities. Communities need to have the right solutions to attend to day-to-day operational demands; as well, they depend on corporate leadership for guidance on technology best practices to drive efficiencies.
Despite the value of driving a holistic technology strategy from the top down, many corporate leaders leave vendor procurement and adoption to the community level for a handful of reasons. One is that community operators have the best understanding of their campus’s unique operational needs and which solutions can address them. Another reason is that leaving technology adoption decisions to community leaders helps empower them and foster their independence.
While it’s important for communities to feel empowered to maintain their independence, it can’t be at the cost of operational performance. When creating a technology strategy, it’s crucial to create it with long-term scale and efficiency in mind.
From our experience working with executive leaders managing portfolios of 20 communities or more, we found that consolidating technology across communities is the best way to drive efficiency, staff retention, growth, and positive resident and family experiences.
Standardize operations best practices
Even within the same portfolio, individual senior living communities can vary widely. From location, to staff count, to level of care, there are multiple factors that influence each community’s operational capabilities. From the corporate level, one of the best ways to unify multiple communities under one operational strategy is to standardize the technology solutions they use.
One way technology standardization helps communities thrive is by reducing the overhead to onboard new staff. Training and onboarding staff on technology involves a significant upfront time investment. If each community is using multiple point solutions, the time to train staff is proportional to each solution used. With one comprehensive solution, on the other hand, each community can reduce the time spent training staff so that they can acclimate to their role and immediately begin making an impact.
It’s also common for staff members to switch to different communities within the same portfolio. If each community within the organization is using the same technology, it’s much easier for staff to transition between communities and get ramped up with greater speed.
Technology needs can also vary by level of care. A memory care community may rely heavily on clinically-backed engagement content, while an independent living community may leverage communication features more. By having one comprehensive solution that scales across levels of care, executive leaders can help streamline operations and reduce administrative burden that comes with switching between solutions.
With consolidated technology, staff can spend less time on redundant tasks and more time on rewarding engagement with residents. We found that 79% of CEOs believe a consolidated platform would improve staff satisfaction, driving home the argument that streamlined processes can help make staff lives easier and therefore staff will stay their positions longer.
Maintain brand consistency
When it comes to managing a portfolio of senior living communities, having a consistent brand identity is crucial for maintaining cohesion. Not only does it unify the communities under a single brand voice and image, but also promotes recognition and trust among prospective residents and families.
Technology can play a big part in branding lift, from designing calendars to distributing community newsletters. But if each community is using its own tools to distribute multiple forms of content and communication each day, it leaves room for disjointed messaging and inconsistent visuals.
Streamlining branding technology across communities can reduce time spent on asset creation and promote greater brand consistency. The right solution can make it easy for corporate marketing teams to create professionally designed, on-brand content and distribute it to all communities with the simple click of a button. And when prospective residents and families visit communities within the same organization, seeing consistency in digital signage and communications can help create an impression of cohesion and professionalism.
Better compliance and security
For corporate leaders in the senior living industry, just as important as creating a positive staff and resident experience is ensuring each community’s compliance with regulations and security requirements. From the threat of data breaches to HIPAA violations, technology can expose communities to a number of risks.
Working with multiple technology vendors creates more opportunity for risk exposure. For one, leaders need to request a recent HIPAA audit and GAP list for each vendor they work with. Working with vendors also means sharing sensitive information, which increases privacy risk exposure. Different technology vendors also follow their own security protocols and compliance requirements, making it difficult for executives to ensure their data and systems remain fully secure and comply with industry regulations.
By consolidating technology solutions, multi-site operators can reduce the overhead that comes with managing multiple vendors. By reducing the number of systems that need safeguarding and monitoring, IT teams can focus on a unified environment, making it harder for cybercriminals to exploit vulnerabilities.
When evaluating a comprehensive solution, it’s also important to consider their industry expertise. The senior living industry comes with its unique set of regulations and security best practices. By selecting a single tech vendor with senior living industry expertise, corporate teams can save time in the vetting process and rest assured knowing their vendor has the security measures in place to stay compliant.
Streamline data
Your portfolio is only as strong as your weakest performing community. In order to drive portfolio-wide performance, corporate leaders need to be able to access accurate and actionable data across their communities.
The best way to get a holistic view of portfolio performance is to have data available in a centralized location. By integrating various data sources and operational functions under one roof, a comprehensive solution can help streamline the data collection, analysis and reporting process and help leaders identify broad trends across community operations.
Part of a proactive community management strategy is the ability to access and analyze leading indicators. Metrics such as staff satisfaction and resident engagement provide insight into future performance, and offer the opportunity to proactively address issues before they impact business outcomes. With a consolidated technology solution, corporate leaders can get insight into leading indicator trends across communities, and have time to implement strategies to mitigate issues before they escalate.
A comprehensive technology solution can also enhance data accuracy and consistency. By incorporating various functions such as operations, communication and content into one solution, the system can reduce the risk of data discrepancies and errors that can occur when using disparate point solutions.
With the ability to collect data on leading and lagging indicators in real time, multi-site operators can create proactive operational strategies that result in positive business outcomes and stakeholder trust.
Maximize resources at scale
Standardizing technology across a portfolio of communities can help corporate leaders streamline operational and strategic processes, driving greater efficiency, consistency and transparency. When communities are aligned with a comprehensive technology solution, they can better serve their staff, residents, and families.
And by driving efficiency at scale, multi-site operators can then free up bandwidth to dedicate towards proactively optimizing portfolio performance. Whether that looks like nurturing relationships with other industry leaders or implementing future-looking innovations like AI, senior living executives with more bandwidth have a tremendous opportunity to shape the future of the industry and drive positive experiences for older adults.
A comprehensive solution for senior living enterprises
When evaluating a comprehensive technology solution, finding a forward-thinking vendor with the ability to scale is key. LifeLoop is the trusted technology partner for over 4,800 communities across the US, over a third of which belong to portfolios of 20 or more. We offer senior living organizations enterprise-level features designed to drive efficiency and consistency across multiple communities.
Get in touch with one of our account managers to see how LifeLoop can help your organization drive positive community outcomes today.
