Senior living providers face myriad problems and challenges, particularly in light of the Covid-19 pandemic. But these problems are not insurmountable, and companies across the industry are devising creative solutions.
In this series, we’re surveying industry leaders to highlight these actionable solutions. For this edition, we asked leaders with Discovery Senior Living, Cascade Living, United Properties, and Veritas Senior Living:
How are you using data to improve operations in your communities?
Tom Costello, Chief Financial Officer, Discovery Senior Living
Bonita Springs, Florida-based Discovery’s portfolio includes 69 communities
The data capture tools we use are common tools that many operators have access to. Our business intelligence unit takes the data being captured by these third party applications, and aggregates it such that we can transform it into usable information. We’ll use a variety of tools to do that — the most common one that we use is Excel. We have a couple guys in the business intelligence group that are able to do a lot more with Excel than your typical average [user]. They’re getting more into some of the power query aspects that Excel offers which is great, but is somewhat limited.
They’re also starting to explore using tools like Python, some statistical regression modeling tools — a lot of these things are widely available.
The trick [working with multiple platforms] is the different systems [we use] are going to capture the same data. For example, if you want to capture customer information, you’re going to capture their first name, their last name, their address, date of birth — all basic demographic information about a resident or a prospect. The problem is, every system is going to call that something different. Our business intelligence group spends a lot of time building the relationships between data, and how they relate to each other.
The first step is establishing a baseline. Does this [metric] need to improve by X percent? Once we’ve established that baseline, you can look [for] efficiencies. Right now, one of the things that we’ve been working on is improving response times for work orders. We’re looking to improve resident satisfaction by how responsive we are to their requests, and how does that response time compare to our resident surveys. We love our maintenance department. They’re so responsive, and the data is telling us that they’re closing their work order tickets in less than 24 hours. This is where that metadata in comparing different datasets comes in. Once you’ve done that first pass and say, “It looks like Community X is knocking it out of the park. Resident satisfaction is high. They’re closing out tickets in 24 hours.” It becomes a less of a data. question and more an operational question of what are you doing? What’s your process? How are [maintenance directors] managing their staffs? How are they allocating resources
It’s not a mandate to say we need to improve this by 10%. It’s who is doing it really well, and how we can replicate success in other areas.
Michael DiGiacomo, Vice President of Senior and Student Housing, United Group of Companies
Troy, New York-based United Group owns and operates nine active adult communities, and has seven more in development.
We are constantly utilizing data collection methods and reviewing the results to hone our organization’s approach and ensure our marketing, messaging and lead conversion efforts are proceeding as effectively and efficiently as possible. Between analyzing the performance metrics of ad and social media spends and utilizing a variety of software and programs to identify quality leads and convert into signed leases, we are utilizing data to inform our strategy, outreach and promotional efforts on a daily basis.
During the pandemic, we were among the many in our field who noticed an initial decrease in move-ins at our properties – not entirely unexpected given the Covid-19 restrictions in place across the country preventing us from face to face meetings with prospective residents, Fortunately, our data collection and efforts to prioritize our online presence and lead collection in the face of these unprecedented times appears to have resulted, not only in an increase in traffic and demand, but a pipeline of qualified, quality leads. Now that we are heading back toward some semblance of normalcy and seeing many pandemic restrictions easing across the nation, we’ve seen these efforts paying dividends through a recent increase in signed leases and are looking forward to continue building on this momentum as society continues to head towards this new, post-pandemic normal.
Over the past year, UGOC has utilized several methods and platforms to collect data, cultivate and convert leads and improve our ability to respond and communicate with prospective residents through digital avenues. We’ve used programs such as Entrata, Yardi, Perq and Google Analytics to improve lead generation integration on our webpages, and have worked tirelessly to improve our presence, responsiveness and communication on social media by analyzing metrics and utilizing program like OneDay to create engaging video content and personalized messages.
Data analysis is crucially important to our efforts here at UGOC. Not only does this information play a critical role in identifying quality leads and converting them into signed leases, but it also provides us with invaluable insight as to where these leads came from, and the effectiveness of our marketing and promotional efforts. This in turn allows us to strategize how we invest our time and investments to ensure we are prioritizing the methods and specific leads that have the best chance of paying dividends for us in the long run, a distinction that is more important than ever given the current industry climate.
Matthew Fox, Founder and CEO, Veritas Senior Living
Signal Mountain, Tennessee-based Veritas operates five communities in five states.
As we continue to grow, [data analysis] will become paramount.
We are participating in a pilot with Bateau, a startup software company that is working to take all of our information out of the CRM and piecemeal all that data to give us a dashboard. We’re filing incident reports online with them, instead of doing the old paper versions. They’re [importing data from] our call systems and, as soon as we get to an [electronic medical record platform], they’re going to be pulling that information.
We’re not as far along as we’d like to be. We had plans this year of going to an EMR and electronic health records. We pushed it off a few months, because we felt, coming out of the pandemic, we’ve got to rebuild occupancy like everybody else in the industry. We’re not going to put anything on our plate that was going to distract us from rebuilding occupancy.
We’ve also bought communities that were [previously] mom-and-pop operators that had literally no technology. As soon as you acquire single-site communities, they haven’t typically been technology-focused. You find yourself in the first year just trying to wrap your hands around operations, improve occupancy, improve efficiencies. Now we have economies of scale and the size to start implementing technology on a bigger scale.
Dale Zulauf, Co-Founder and Principal, Cascade Living Group
Telluride, Colorado-based Cascade operates 31 communities in five states.
We were always looking for the latest and greatest when it came to technology. We were looking to digitize our policies when Bateau reached out to us about a year before Covid-19. [With the pandemic], policies, procedures and regulatory guidelines either were absent, or they were changing daily, for all providers. And it became difficult to manage.
We started using Bateau’s policy management feature in [spring 2020]. It creates an online repository of any policies, procedures, and expectations that a provider wants to put in there. We have, at any given point, 50-plus protocols, policies and procedures, related to Covid-19. When we set this up — and it continues to this day — our executive directors on a daily basis receive automatic emails they have to review and confirm that all 50-plus protocols are in place that day.
It’s been a total game changer for us in managing the crisis in a very effective, efficient way. Our goal, first and foremost, was the health and safety of our residents and staff. This allowed us to do that knowing that those protocols were in place. It has given us detailed documentation to show that we’re in compliance. Should we need documentation for anything else years from now, we now are comfortable knowing those protocols are in place on a daily basis. Likewise, executive directors are finding great value here, because it only takes about four minutes each day to acknowledge that the protocols are in place.
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