This article is sponsored by LifeLoop. In this Voices interview, Senior Housing News sits down with Rob Fisher, CEO of LifeLoop, to explore why creating a strong innovation strategy is essential for ensuring the long-term success of senior living communities, particularly in the face of the industry’s most pressing challenges. He also discusses the growing emphasis on value-based care, highlighting how operators are prioritizing whole-person wellness and the transformative role technology plays in this evolving landscape.
Senior Housing News: Rob, you are new to senior living but have an impressive tenure in digital health care. How do you align those experiences and trends to what you’re seeing in the senior care industry today?
Rob Fisher: While senior living may be a new industry for me, I’ve found my 20 years in digital health care has prepared me well for this role. I joined LifeLoop in April this year and intentionally spent my first six months with the company learning, listening, and downloading with leaders from across the senior living space. First and foremost, the passion and dedication of the people working in senior living is abundantly clear—this industry is not without its challenges, and the people who choose to dedicate their careers to improve the lives of older adults should be recognized and celebrated. This likely comes as no surprise to my team as over my time at LifeLoop, I’ve communicated how essential people and culture are to my leadership style.
Over the course of my career to-date, taking Curaspan through a series of acquisitions that ultimately resulted in a sale to Wellsky, I saw first-hand how technology was transforming the traditional health care model for the better. Senior living is of course experiencing the same transformation, but what is most exciting is senior living operators are embracing innovation. As I’ve spent time speaking with operators, senior care providers, and longevity economy thought leaders, there are three clear parallels from my time in health care that are driving senior living forward.
The first being the slow but growing technology adoption curve. The pandemic catapulted senior living into a period of adoption this industry had never seen, and that thirst for innovative solutions remains. However, the industry still has a way to go—technology providers need to do a better job of curating innovation to suit the unique needs of senior living operators and the older adults they support and aligning that value to their business and care objectives. When it comes to how we define value, this is something I’m personally quite passionate about and brings me to my second point. The Value Based Care (VBC) model was a key part of health care development in terms of care transitions for patients, and it is starting to gain traction in senior living. In particular, how the industry views and delivers on “whole person” wellness for older adults beyond clinical needs, incorporating engagement and other dimensions of wellness that impact overall health.
Lastly, a focus on exceptional service. We’ve seen this evolution in health care in recent years as patients have more options than ever before to access care and resources–direct-to-consumer brands, virtual providers, payor structures, and more. This naturally drives a need for exceptional customer service to the top of the priority list. This is also true in senior living and how we support our customers by being not just a vendor, but a strategic partner who is invested in their success.
Value-Based Care has been gaining traction in the industry over recent years. Why do you think this model is so important and distinct from how operators have viewed resident care to date?
It all boils down to quality outcomes. VBC continues to make a wave through health care and the Medicare population because CMS has stated its public goal to move all Medicare beneficiaries to a VBC model by 2030. In essence, that means no more pay for volume but instead, pay for value. Medicare beneficiaries will be in one of two main models: enrolled into a Medicare Advantage plan where the health plan will bear the financial risk, or as a patient under the care of an Accountable Care Organization where a provider organization manages majority of the financial risk. In both instances, the real objective is to provide proactive wellness care in an effort to drive down unnecessary ED visits or acute admissions where cost of care is incredibly high and highly variable depending on region. In order to provide wellness care, you must visit with your member/patient in their resident setting for best results.
We hear it constantly from our customers, the residents they support, other providers in the industry, and so on—residents need and want to be treated as the unique individual that they are, and that is reflected in their senior living experience. The Value Based Care model provides a roadmap for operators to deliver on that by prioritizing and integrating elements of wellness into care and experiences that have not traditionally been a focus of congregate senior living. What’s so exciting is the essential role of technology in enabling the consistent, confident, and scalable delivery of this next-level personalization. We have opportunities to personalize the experience of residents that they’ll be trading in medications for an authentic sense of community which bolsters wellbeing.
Community staff need solutions that enable them to efficiently learn about resident preferences, store that information, and make it usable to deliver personalized care and experiences. The more a resident feels connected to their community and the opportunities they have to engage with one another through socialization, mutual interests, and activities that connect to their passions, the more they’re engaged in all that community life has to offer. This increases physical activity, stimulates intellectual and mental health, and provides so many other benefits that improve overall wellbeing. These health benefits cannot be overstated or underestimated, especially when studies point to things like social isolation being as dangerous to older adult health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
Technology is the bridge that helps communities overcome many of the barriers that make resident personalization challenging, opening new doors to deliver truly differentiated and meaningful experiences for seniors.
Similarly, senior living has been experiencing a “boom” in technology and innovation adoption, most notably since the pandemic. What do operators need to prioritize — or avoid — to be successful with technology investments today?
It’s exciting to see the industry embracing technology and how many innovative companies are turning their efforts toward supporting older adults. Operators have an increasing number of options to adopt solutions that can benefit their residents, staff, and communities, which can be an overwhelming endeavor for an industry largely unaccustomed to digital transformation. The most important advice is, no matter where you are in your digital transformation journey, approaching technology as a strategy versus an amenity or cost center is absolutely essential to success.
Viewing innovation through a strategic lens enables operators to harness its true value and apply it to areas of need specific to their business and their people. Adopting technology for technology’s sake only results in more issues—lack of adoption, inflated tech stacks, vendor management, added costs—but approaching technology as a strategic investment sets operators on a path that prioritizes solving the right problems and right-sizes costs and resource planning.
Of course, “buying technology” is not a simple task. Operators must balance costs, project ROI, assess infrastructure, manage onboarding and ongoing adoption—all these considerations mean buying an off the shelf solution isn’t going to work. This is why solutions that are curated for senior living operators are so essential; the solution must deliver tangible value without adding burden or complexity to the already overwhelmed community staff. Further, the user experience is predestined to seamlessly wrap around the existing workflows of community management and resident engagement.
For example, the workflows between creating content, distributing it to residents, and how the resident engages with it—signing up for an event, watching a video, playing a game—those nuances are accounted for with a solution that understands how those pieces need to work together to deliver an optimal experience unique to older adults. This value is magnified when considering multi-site organizations that need to accomplish those objectives on a much larger scale.
With respect to multi-site operators, what does a sound technology strategy look like, and have you identified any trends in this adoption or implementation approach?
Multi-site operators stand to exponentially benefit from technology. If you look at the challenges a single senior living community is facing today across staff recruitment and retention, resident engagement, and community management, then multiply that by dozens of locations across multiple time zones and brands, those challenges become significant barriers to success. Larger operators need to standardize enterprise-level solutions that account for efficiency, scale, visibility, and control, without the complexity that often accompanies them.
Cogir Senior Living is a prime example of how an operator strategically deploys technology to accomplish portfolio-wide problem-solving, while adding enhancements that benefit staff, residents, and their families. The organization manages over 80 communities and has acquired several senior living brands in recent years. The corporate team assessed solutions to meet key business objectives including aligning staff processes, improving resident and family engagement, unifying branding, the ability to leverage data-driven insights from community performance and the resident experience. Cogir ultimately partnered with LifeLoop to improve resident engagement, staff operations, and family communications.
The result of this strategic technology partnership enabled Cogir to seamlessly standardize systems, communicate and maintain brand standards, deliver a world-class resident experience, and enable a data-driven approach to inform future improvements portfolio-wide. Cogir now has a solid technology foundation that future proofs the organization to charge ahead on its growth path.
Ultimately, a sound technology strategy for operators of any size, but especially for larger organizations, begins with aligning solution capabilities to your organization’s goals and ensuring you’ve engaged a technology company that is your partner—a company that is continuously invested in your success.
As technology adoption in the senior living space evolves, what role will emerging technologies like AI, AR/VR, and robotics play in senior living’s future? How can operators take advantage of this type of innovation?
Emerging technologies are of course a sign of the next frontier in senior living innovation, and they present immense potential when implemented the right way. It’s important to recognize that not all operators are on the same path when it comes to digital transformation, so when we start to see things like VR/AR and Artificial Intelligence trending, the natural question that many operators are asking is, “What can this do for my community?” And that is exactly the consideration they should be making when approaching any type of innovation, but especially those that have yet to be widely implemented for the unique use cases of senior living. These innovations must be curated to serve a meaningful purpose for senior living.
This brings me back to one of the points I made in the last question, that technology is only valuable when it is clearly aligned with your organization’s defined goals and then implemented to execute against those objectives. Let’s take AI for example, as it’s currently the hottest trending emerging technology in senior living.
While AI is not a new technology, it is undeniably gaining considerable attention in senior living. We’re seeing it discussed at every industry conference and as a consistent topic in key thought leader circles, yet only 9% of senior living operators currently use AI-aided technology (LifeLoop 2024 State of Senior Living & Technology Report). While 34% of senior living executives plan to adopt this type of technology in the future, it’s clear that for many operators, the through-line between the potential of AI, and how and why to actually implement it, is not yet clear. This is where we, as a strategic technology partner to our customers and this industry at-large, have to do the work to break down the allure and make it tangible and meaningful for operators.
LifeLoop focused its efforts here well over a year ago when considering how AI could benefit our customers, and we’re excited to have officially released AI-enhanced LifeLoop solutions in October 2024. Our approach embraced this method of weaving the power of AI throughout the LifeLoop platform to essentially supercharge the existing staff and resident workflows communities are already accustomed to. This accomplishes three key things: mitigating the onboarding and training burden on staff, applying AI to address key pain points that staff and residents are already experiencing, and maximizing the long-term value of AI rather than creating a ‘flash in the pan’ feature.
The result of this intentional AI implementation is faster time to value and increased adoption. This was evident by achieving 1,400 engagements with our AI-enhanced Calendar Management feature within the first 24 hours of release, and a New Perspective Senior Living staff member commenting that the AI enhancement saves her up to a full day of time each week. This is how we, as good stewards of innovation, identify, curate, and deploy emerging technologies to deliver value for senior living operators.
Defining an innovation strategy and the right technologies to support it can be a daunting task. What advice would you give to operators to optimize this process?
I’ve talked about the importance of mapping technology investments to your organizational objectives—that is number one. That also comes with the understanding that this can be an intimidating venture for operators without a technology strategist on-staff to illustrate how technology can be applied to gaps and opportunities. This is where a crucial companion piece of advice comes into play; senior living operators should identify and assess technology companies that offer partnership over transactional relationships. The partnership approach ensures that communities receive proper technology consultation, implementation support, staff training, and continued innovation and customer support that meets the needs of all of their stakeholders. While we spend endless hours developing technology to create efficiencies for our customers, we still believe strongly in the accelerated results from human connection – and it’s because of this our people remain our secret sauce.
A technology partner will help you overcome that knowledge gap to effectively identify how solutions can problem-solve and provide enhancements to what you uniquely care about in your community. This is the key to long term innovation success.
Finish this sentence: “In the senior living space, 2025 will be defined by…”
…a blend of personalized care, implementation of AI solutions to drive staff efficiencies, and holistic wellness, prioritizing both physical and mental health to foster community, connection, and independence.
Editor’s note: This article has been edited for length and clarity.
LifeLoop is the leading resident and staff experience solution for senior living and is currently supporting over 500,000 residents at 4,700 communities across the nation. Download LifeLoop’s recently released Future-Proofing Senior Living Communities guide for innovation best practices and roadmap insights from top senior living operators.
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 [email protected].