New research shows that when senior living residents attend at least one meaningful community event per day, their quality of life rises dramatically.
So with community event calendars typically loaded with opportunities for residents to get involved, why don’t they?
“That’s a great question, and probably the first question I asked myself when I joined,” says Lauren Blacker, Corporate Director of Wellness and Life Enrichment at Senior Resource Group.
When Blacker came to SRG, the Solana Beach, California-based developer, in January of 2022, her goal was to improve the daily experience of residents and overall wellness — areas like having a sense of purpose, reducing isolation, maintaining physical fitness and nutrition, developing friendships and ensuring cognitive wellness. She led a committee that evaluated seven possible wellness platforms in senior living, getting her choices down to two.
“And right at the last moment,” she says, “I was introduced to TSOLife.”
What swung Blacker and SRG to choose TSOLife was the company’s industry-leading capabilities to capture resident data and analyze it. TSOLife’s resident insight and experience platform is designed to empower senior living operators with actionable insights that facilitate real-time data. Since 2019, the organization has worked with 1,500 communities in 48 states to generate an average of more than 150 data points per resident over 175,000 residents.
Operators who work with TSOLife can use that data the way SRG does: to tailor any number of decisions about residents to the residents themselves.
How SRG built a resident-centric activities calendar
The connection between SRG and TSOLife came when one of Blacker’s colleagues on their evaluation committee told her that TSOLife checked all of the boxes they were looking for.
“They came in the 11th hour and delivered on what we didn’t even know we needed,” Blacker says. “We were just blown away by their AI platform, which was going to do all the intelligence work that we were spending hundreds of hours trying to determine.”
On a practical level, what SRG was able to gain from TSOLife was insight into all of their residents. Blacker uses the example of a building with 400 residents. Each of those residents has a connection between the time they spend at events and their quality of life. That means each of those residents needs to be considered as an individual — a Herculean task for any operator.
Part of the TSOLife solution is their inclusion score. Blacker or another team member interviews the residents individually, using AI to capture data within the conversation in real time.
Instead of recording the conversation and then manually entering all the data points for each resident into an Excel spreadsheet, Blacker can simply focus on having a personal conversation with the resident. She learns about their lives. She listens to them explain who they are and who they want to be.
The conversation gets uploaded into the resident’s profile, and TSOLife’s AI evaluates whether the resident’s interests are represented in the activities calendar. If not, the system suggests activities they can add.
“That is amazing, and it’s something we didn’t even know you could do,” Blacker says. “It takes all the guesswork out of the operator with the end goal of creating an engaged, vibrant, amazing experience for our residents.”
3 key takeaways for SRG
Research from TSOLife shows that when a senior living resident’s quality of life rises, length of stay increases. The collective effect can mean more than $1 million in additional retained revenue.
Blacker and SRG know that those effects are on the table. Here are three key takeaways from TSOLife’s approach to resident wellness.
1. If residents aren’t attending activities, the activities might be wrong
Perhaps the key benefit of the resident intelligence that TSOLife delivers is that it gives staff members the ability to personalize engagement.
“Make sure you’re promoting the ‘Why’ for residents to participate in activities,” Blacker says. “Make sure you’re having activities that represent their interests.”
This isn’t restricted to activities, but also activity settings and characteristics.
“We found through TSOLife that some residents don’t love big crowds,” she says. “When you ask the question, ‘Do you like a small group or a large group?’ — we were surprised how many residents preferred small groups. So maybe you need to do five more activities in smaller groups and they’ll be more likely to come to that event because they don’t like coming to an event with 75 people in it.”
2. If residents aren’t attending activities, they might just need encouragement
Once Blacker and SRG had the data they needed, they could then deliver a human element to each resident.
“Be a cheerleader,” Blacker says. “Sometimes residents just need encouragement.”
When SRG learned about the need for smaller activity sizes, they were then able to use that in their appeals to residents, because they had a better sense of the impediment to resident participation.
“It doesn’t matter what age you are — we all need someone to say, ‘Hey, come to the party.’ Or, ‘You’re really going to like this!’” she says. Resident feedback about activities would include notes like, “I never really had time to explore my artistic side. Thank you for inviting me to that. I found out late in life that I’m a painter.”
That type of validation is invaluable, she says.
3. Each on-point increase quality of life predicts 85 additional days of stay
Senior living operators are in the business of providing a beautiful lifestyle and experience for seniors as they age. But they are also in business. And where all of this engagement leads is higher quality of life and longer length of stay.
TSOLife has a point system that quantifies quality of life. Their research shows that every point that quality of life increases drives an average increase of 85 days of length of stay. That’s just under three months per resident. Scaling across a portfolio can have a major impact.
“TSOLife intelligence shows us when a resident is struggling,” Blacker says. That is even the case when a resident is attending activities. To the eye of a staff member, the resident might seem happy because they are engaged.
“But they are struggling with social relationships,” she says. “They don’t have any friendships where they feel that sense of connection. We wouldn’t have known that if we didn’t study quality of life. TSOLife allows us to engage at levels we would have never known.”
The system, she notes, gives operators information about residents that they might not always want to share. That can even lead to empowering residents to lead their own activities.
“This is that sense of purpose. There are people who feel like they still have so much to offer,” she says. “They’re allowing us to benefit from their years of experience, knowledge and excitement about what they’ve done in their life. Run programs, activities, even do intergenerational events.”
And where that leads is one of the best places for Blacker and SRG: “You just see them light up,” she says.
This Views is sponsored by TSOLife. To learn more, visit tsolife.com.
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