This article is sponsored by Yardi®. In this Voices interview, Senior Housing News sat down with Fil Southerland, the company’s director of healthcare solutions, to talk about the biggest changes in senior living technology during the COVID-19 pandemic, how technology needs are meeting new healthcare demands and his experience growing up in Idaho while his father operated assisted living facilities and built his own technology platform to support them.
One of the early outcomes of the pandemic was the
increase in technology adoption. What are the biggest silver linings in terms
of senior living technology?
Fil Southerland: COVID has
definitely been particularly hard on our industry and the residents we’re
caring for. I think what it’s really highlighted is the incredible resilience
of the organizations and their staff members that we work with. I’ve been
particularly impressed with the amount of rapid innovation and technology
uptake within the industry. It’s been inspiring to see how much we’ve
progressed since the onset. For example, we’ve seen telehealth come to the
forefront as a new expectation of physician offices, and this technology growth
has spurred innovation within the senior living industry as well.
Yardi’s
contribution is a broad-based platform that helps providers efficiently manage
everything from the care-related side to operations to finances. We’ve
continued to add new clients at a rapid pace and we’re also seeing our existing
clients working to automate and streamline a lot of their workflows.
I think that kind
of technology adoption is a necessity now. Over the long term, we’re hopeful
that it will produce a lot of good dividends for the industry in terms of care
coordination and personalization, wellness, operational efficiency and risk
mitigation.
You just named a number of areas where senior living
technology is changing due to the pandemic. Which of these changes do you think
will last?
We’re seeing
lasting impact in many areas. I’ll highlight three. The first is marketing and
admissions. Previously, residents or family members had to come into
communities to sign leases or changes to service plans. Yardi has a solution
that allows all of that to be done online. We’ve seen a lot of interest in
that.
Turning to the
second area, families considering a community are really concerned not only
about amenities but how the wellness programs are working for their family
members, the quality of care provided and how they can participate in that
care. There has been a lot of advancement there. Families are working hard to
stay engaged and work with the community staff to remain connected at a
distance.
And finally, on the
care side, I have seen a lot of innovation with interoperability. CMS and CDC
have reporting requirements that we’re helping facilitate. We’ve brought online
the ability to exchange health records via the Carequality network, which is
also notable. As residents transition through care, Yardi can work effectively
with third parties to exchange health records with an increased emphasis on
coordinating between the different care settings.
A lot has changed as a result of the pandemic, and it
seems like that longstanding debate in senior housing about hospitality versus
health care has been revived. What have you heard from operators since March
about their increased health care technology needs?
We’ve seen more
sophistication about technology in organizations that emphasize the health care
side as well as those that place a premium on hospitality. We’re also seeing
increased coordination among hospital systems, skilled nursing communities and,
to some extent, assisted living. We weren’t sure what to expect when COVID hit,
but it’s turned out to be an acceleration for Yardi with the technology uptake.
We work with a
diverse client base ranging from independent care to assisted living and
skilled nursing. A key trend our clients are reporting is a lot more
coordination between health care entities, as well as regulatory entities, at
the local, state and national levels. Everyone is focused on care outcomes as
well. Having a way to facilitate that across those spectrums is important, as
is being able to prove to families that this is a safe and welcoming
environment that respects resident preferences in their care decisions.
What is your major takeaway on how operators have
responded to the challenge?
It’s really been
very inspiring. This industry is a group of people who show up and care for
others in the face of a lot of challenges — and often without a lot of
recognition. To see them continue to adapt to new regulations and reporting
requirements, and innovate through that, has really been heartening. Clients
are pushing forward through this at the community and organizational levels,
and the progress has just been tremendous over the last three to six months.
I want to shift gears and get into your own story. Tell
us about your father and how he created the healthcare platform ALMSA.
My dad has always
been an inspiration. He was a pioneer in the assisted living industry. He
started a management group in Idaho when I was about eight years old, so I’ve
been in the industry for a long time. He had seven communities and my brother
J.R. and I were involved from a very young age on the operational level,
working with staff, talking to residents, doing maintenance— pretty much
everything. As we scaled up the organization, we found that we were driving
from community to community throughout the week, and it just became, over time,
unsustainable to continue to drive so much and expand with so many paper-based
processes.
Around 1996, Dad
made the decision to start a software company, ALMSA, to manage assisted
living. We used it internally for about four years. Over time, to fund the
growth of the business, he sold off the communities one by one. We expanded
first in Idaho, then nationally, and became one of the first internet based EMR
systems focused on long-term care.
We had a modest start in the early
days of the internet with clients still using dial-up modems. Over time, the
platform became much more sophisticated, and utilized by national providers. In
2012, we were acquired by Yardi. The momentum has continued from there.
How does that experience motivate you in the work that
you do today?
What has always
stayed with me is the human factor. One of the things we would do as we visited
my father’s communities was sit and talk with residents and listen to their
stories. We would usually do that on the front porch, and it was always
interesting to hear everybody’s background.
We’ve really tried
to empathize with the experience of both residents and staff members. With
Yardi, the platform has grown much more in sophistication, but I think a lot of
the original concepts are still built into the platform that we have today. One
example in Yardi EHR is the resident storyboard, where we surface a resident’s social
background alongside their care needs, so that caregivers can quickly get to
know those they’re caring for.
The emotional component of what senior housing operators
have to do has never been more important. What is the top way that technology
can support the emotional needs of residents, staff and families?
We’re an industry
where the care and operational decisions of our clients really matter in the
quality of residents’ day-to-day life, so Yardi’s goal from a technology
standpoint is just to listen and recognize the needs of our users. We do a lot
of development based on user feedback. That’s really where we’re focused, and
our goal is to give users the information they need to make the best decisions.
At the end of the
day, what we want to do with the technology is provide information to the
frontline staff, operators, corporations or organizations so that everyone can
make the right human-level decisions and operate efficiently in a way that
provides the best care possible.
Lastly, we don’t know what will happen with the pandemic
moving forward, but what are the biggest lessons that Yardi has learned that
you think will influence the way the company operates in 2021 and beyond?
Very early on
during the pandemic, we knew it was important to us to maintain the human
connection, even though it couldn’t be in person. We reached out to our clients
just to see how everybody was doing. It wasn’t to make a sale. We wanted to
hear everybody’s needs and be there through this. I think that’s something that
we’ve continued — really just listening to people.
In terms of our own
team here at Yardi, we transitioned to work-from-home within a period of just a
few weeks and we’ve been able to see the teams stay cohesive. I would say our
coordination and productivity have stayed steady, if not improved. That’s been
really heartening to see. In a way, it’s just a privilege to be here at this
moment in time, where we’re able to provide a technology platform that helps
other teams face this challenge that’s out there and, I hope, come out better
on the other side.
Editor’s note: This interview
has been edited for length and clarity.
Yardi®
develops and supports industry-leading investment and property management
software for all types and sizes of real estate companies, including senior living operators.To find out how Yardi’s technology can help you, visit yardi.com.
The Voices Series is a
sponsored content program featuring leading executives discussing trends,
topics and more shaping their industry in a question-and-answer format. For
more information on Voices, please contact sales@agingmedia.com.
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