By Lynn Peisner
ATLANTA — How are today’s seniors housing operators using data to drive sales and increase occupancy? This was the question posed to a panel of experts speaking at the 12th annual InterFace Seniors Housing Southeast conference, held at the InterContinental Hotel in Atlanta’s Buckhead area on Aug. 27.
Data can paint a big picture, depicting the true nature of demand in a market.
“We like to think of it as a novel,” said Nick Jasmon, vice president of business development for American Healthcare Management Group. “What’s happening in your buildings is the main story, and the data is the prequel.”
Editor’s note: InterFace Conference Group, a division of France Media Inc., produces networking and educational conferences for commercial real estate executives. To sign up for email announcements about specific events, visit www.interfaceconferencegroup.com/subscribe.
Data on length of stay, move-in/move-out patterns and acuity changes can help forecast occupancy levels more accurately. For example, Jasmon noted that data can show how move-in ages are changing over time.
“We’re seeing that our independent living (IL) residents are getting older,” he said. “Some of our IL residents are in their 80s. When we talk to them about moving to assisted [living], they reply, ‘no, that’s for old people.’”
“For assisted, we look at how long they are waiting to make that move and evaluate if there is a financial strain related to the move. We put that together to evaluate how long it takes to move to assisted, and, at that rate, will we be able to hit our NOI (net operating income) and revenue goals? Or do we need to pivot and change the operating model so we can meet our market where it is?”
Kristy Yoskey, panel moderator and vice president and market leader of senior living for PointClickCare, explained how the software solutions company uses a care quality tool called PointClickCare Connect to exchange clinical data. The program is a national health data network with more than 4,200 hospitals, 600,000 care providers and 1.4 million active resident and patient records.
“We’re starting to build in frailty metrics to the assessment, then we ask, ‘What’s the history of hospitalizations? What’s the history of ED (emergency department) visits?’ So you’ve got a prospective move-in saying, ‘mom has never been to the hospital. Mom doesn’t frequently fall. Mom hasn’t been out to the ED.’”
“You can log into Carequality (a health data exchange service) for that prospective move-in, and you see 18 ED visits and two hospitalizations. This may be a match for assisted living (AL) and not IL,” Yoskey continued. “Getting as much information as you can from someone gives you a good prediction of where they are, but seeing and believing isn’t always the same. So from a tech perspective, we can be more predictive of finding out where they are going to be successful.”
David Sawyer, founder and CEO of TSOLife, said predictive modeling is becoming more advanced in the industry.
“Where we are with technology is quite fascinating. Based on a pre-assessment, you can almost forecast the expected length of stay and expected cost to maintain that resident in your community,” he explained.
Sawyer also said that some of the indicators his company tracks are quality of life and self-rated health. A resident with a very poor quality of life will stay in a community anywhere from six months to a year, he said. Residents with a very good or an excellent quality of life can stay up to four years.
“You can get really specific data that will allow you to understand how valuable this resident will be for the community for the long run, Sawyer noted.”
Using Data to Drive Conversions
Data in sales and marketing can be used differently depending on the level of care, the panelists agreed.
“There’s a dramatic difference between independent living and assisted living,” said David Ammons, owner and principal of Retirement Living Associates. Ammons explained that a majority of seniors enter as independent living residents. For those prospects, data is used to track their shopping journey: Which websites are they visiting most? In which part of the website are they spending the most time? Which forms are they filling out?
“It’s completely different in AL,” he said, explaining that the objective is to determine if the level of care offered is a fit for that resident’s needs. “Independent is want to move, assisted is need to move. That impacts the marketing side and the data that we’re gathering. In independent, the question is are they ready, and in AL, it’s are we ready?”
As a vendor to the industry, George Karakatsanis, vice president of sales for Amba, is able to offer health data that can be used to drive sales. Amba is a tech solutions company that collects and analyzes information about sleep, health and activity collected from sensors in the resident’s unit. Its dashboard can show care staff if, when and how, for example, a resident has fallen.
Karakatsanis explained that if a resident tends to fall mostly at night, Amba’s technology will detect when that resident gets out of bed in the evening, alerting staff to do a check-in at that time.
“We’re going to predictively get there first before it (the fall) even happens, and we short-circuit it,” said Karakatsanis. “This allows the owner to use that data for marketing — to be able to say, ‘we have a one-and-a-half-minute response time.’ So if you’re worried about mom not being attended to, that’s not going to be the case at our community.”
While data and technology go a long way in supporting occupancy goals, for most, sales must have a human touch to be successful. Jasmon said it’s important to focus on the adult child’s state of mind throughout the sales process.
“We have to realize as operators in this industry that nobody wants to buy our product,” he concluded. “Because if they buy our product, they have to admit to themselves or to their loved ones that they are on the back nine of their lives, and that is scary. We don’t want to put them through the interrogation they typically get, with questions like, ‘Why are you here? How did you find us?’ We like to ask adult children: ‘How are you holding up through all this?’”