MorningStar Senior Living needed scheduling help. That much was obvious. The Denver-based operator wasn’t unique in this regard; staffing challenges, and related scheduling difficulties, are an industry-wide headache.
To solve their issue, MorningStar made the call that many top operators are starting to make: AllieHealth. The AllieHealth platform uses AI to optimize labor and capture NOI by automatically aligning scheduling, budgeting and performance in one intelligent platform, integrated with EHR and HRIS. They quickly made a believer out of MorningStar.
“We partnered with AllieHealth with six communities to start off, just to see how it would go,” says Chris Livesay, Chief Human Resources Officer at MorningStar. “It went like gangbusters, and now we’ve finished up implementation for the whole company — 37 communities.”
About 2100 miles northwest, in West Linn, Oregon, Anthem Memory Care is also piloting the AllieHealth scheduling platform. They started with five communities and also expanded to its entire portfolio.
“(AllieHealth) just makes visibility so much easier at all levels,” says Michael Zywicki, Vice President of Programs and Engagement at Anthem.
Count MorningStar and Anthem among the operators using AllieHealth to optimize labor spend, improve their staff management and automate scheduling.
“I think we’re trying to solve the same issue everyone’s trying to solve: how to get a hold of our staffing situation,” Zywicki says. The end goal, he says, is reducing overtime and burning, and hence turnover. Here is a look at how AllieHealth is helping operators achieve these goals.
“They just jumped right in” — what MorningStar and Anthem found
Change isn’t easy. Fortunately, working with AllieHealth is.
“Any time there is change, you’ll see a fair amount of struggle just because it’s new and people have to learn it,” Livesay says. “But AllieHealth came in and they kind of became our staff, if you will, just taking the initiative.”
Livesay notes that AllieHealth created an ease of use for both main stakeholders in scheduling: the managers who are running scheduling, and then the team members who rely on those schedules.
“AllieHealth came in, they asked the right questions and gave great feedback,” Livesay says. And his new role in light of this outside leadership? “I just made sure all the right communication was happening,” he says. “They just jumped right in, so it was super easy on our part.”
“We have a level of care structure that guides our staffing within the organization, and now we have true visibility within our staffing needs,” Zywicki says. “That’s updated daily and it’s live to what we’re doing in our EHR. That’s been a great adjustment, and solves a lot of our problems.”
3 key takeaways for MorningStar and Anthem
MorningStar and Anthem both turned to AllieHealth for scheduling assistance. They’ve seen several wins.
1. Labor and staffing no longer go by the gut
Anthem’s first question in their pilot was simply how easily their staff would take to the platform. “That was the key metric: are they using the program?” Zywicki says.
The answer was a resounding yes: Anthem averages 80-90% participation from all managers and staff.
“We’ll be able to hone in on just maximizing our staffing and ensuring that we’re not overstaffing or overusing our staff,” he says. “We’re smarter in our labor and more proactive.”
That is MorningStar’s experience too. “AllieHealth gives you numbers,” Livesay says. “If you talk to any executive director or any department head, they can tell you which team members are showing up when they’re supposed to. AllieHealth has made it so that you can go outside your gut for data on staffing.”
2. Financial and operational stability are on the way
With access to data, and confirmation that staff members are using the platform, operators can begin tackling their biggest challenges.
“The reason we wanted to put a scheduling tool like that in place is to measure labor,” Livesay says. “Are we scheduling people into overtime? Are we missing lunch periods? They can add up, fast.”
The AllieHealth system studies MorningStar’s scheduling and work data, and then analyzes that data with AI to see whether a given staff member is likely to take a given shift or call off, revealing early indicators of performance or burnout.
“Overtime can kill your budget,” Livesay says, “and they make the dashboard super intuitive.”
3. The right technology partner is critical — and today, it’s possible
With the right technology partner, scheduling can be automated, not simply removing manual work but automatically optimizing the labor spend to ensure that schedule aligns with budget. If the devil is in the details, those details are live insight — the ability to have live alerts on what actions are needed in the moment, rather than simply reviewing reports in retrospect. Managing staffing is like driving on the highway: you cannot use yesterday’s traffic pattern.
Those capabilities are what make technology right. How the people behind the technology work — that’s what makes the partner right.
“AllieHealth? They listen,” Zywicki says. “Their team is dynamic. They see when changes are necessary for their program. We’ve had one-week turnarounds. They’re open to hearing about our business and our needs and make changes rather quickly.”
“This is not just a job for us — we care about this. And that’s AllieHealth, too,” Livesay says. “They are invested. They’re passionate. They’re losing sleep over how the solution is working. The product looks a lot different now than it did just a few months ago because of what they’ve learned from us. Those are the two things that matter: caring, and shifting the product to fit our needs.”
This Views is sponsored by AllieHealth, an operational platform that captures NOI and delights staff, with AI scheduling and care revenue solutions, seamlessly integrated with EHR and HRIS to optimize care demand and labor spend. To learn more, visit alliehealth.com.
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