The senior living industry must act now to bring technological innovation into operations, or risk losing the ability to adequately grow in the future, according to Wellpointe Inc. Co-Founder and CEO George Kutnerian.
The industry must shift from a mentality of asset-buying to platform-building, and without enterprise-grade technology in senior living operations, providers face an uphill battle maintaining quality within operations.
“I would say we’re in an arms race now within the industry, whether people realize it or not, it’s time for the industry to bring that technical talent,” Kutnerian said during a recent episode of the Senior Housing News Transform podcast.
Kutnerian’s company, Wellpointe Inc., is a residential assisted living operator that has taken steps to create a technology incubator space known as Wellpointe Labs. The concept is meant to spur innovation in the company’s operating model. From Wellpointe Labs, the company recently launched a medication order management system, affectionately dubbed MOMS, to help streamline and automate medication orders across its growing portfolio of residential assisted living properties.
“Wellpointe Labs is about controlling our own fate and being in the driver’s seat, as opposed to waiting for the solutions and the market to catch up to what our vision is, and there’s no time for that,” Kutnerian said during the podcast.
To support Wellpointe Labs, the company recently hired a data scientist to support the company’s technological innovation efforts.
“The important thing is that while we’re looking for more senior engineers to lead our efforts,” Kutnerian said.
In 2025, Wellpointe added 114 units to its 66-community portfolio with the goal of reaching 95% stabilized occupancy later this year. That comes as Wellpointe has over 80 new units the company is expected to add by the end of the second quarter in 2027. Beyond that, Kutnerian sees an opportunity to add 200-plus units per year driven by strong senior living demand and the company’s evolving operational model.
Editor’s note: The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
On Wellpointe’s priorities for 2026:
I think to really adequately touch on priorities for this year, we have to pick up from where we left off last year. Last year in 2025, we brought 114 units to market over the course of the year and we’ve had a very strong lease-up. We’re looking to finish that up with 95% stabilized occupancy by the end of August 2026.
We also have over 80 units in our active pipeline that we’re working to bring to market over the course of 2026 and by the end of 2027. To support the future lease-up of this pipeline, we’re investing in building out a community outreach team across our markets.
Until recently, the approach in our markets has been to have our executive administrators handle sales with the support of our back-office. However, given our overall growth and the fact that our recent growth has been within existing markets, having those executive administrators continue to be responsible for sales isn’t scalable anymore.
With a dedicated community outreach specialist team across our markets, we’ll be able to focus day in and day out on building and nurturing local relationships. This team will continue to have the same back office support that we’ve been providing to our executive administrators, a change of approach to better enable scaling within our existing markets.
From a capital markets standpoint, we’re taking our first portfolio of locations to HUD for permanent financing. That’s a major priority and we’ll be submitting our HUD application by the end of April 2026. We believe HUD’s acceptance of both the small home model generally and our sponsorship specifically will significantly de-risk bridge debt, which we think will unlock more institutional debt flow to the small home model and to WellPointe as a sponsor. If a reliable and repeatable pathway to HUD can be established, banks and private credit will increasingly view the small home model and leading sponsors on parity with traditional freestanding assisted living assets. The more capital we can get to flow to the small home model, the more supply we can bring to market to help meet demand.
Zooming into operations more specifically, we’re currently focused on business process orchestration and automation across the entire organization to enable scaling with quality. We’re also focused on the continued implementation and refinement of technologies to help remove the black box that’s traditionally enveloped assisted living communities.
On Wellpointe seeking HUD financing:
With HUD, the appeal there is that it’s very long-term financing, fixed-rate and fully amortizing and it’s generally the lowest cost of capital in the marketplace as well. It’s a really great landing spot if you can get there. HUD does have a high bar, so that is something to be mindful of, but if you can get there, it’s great.
We believe we’re going to get there and it really emboldens the model because the transitional capital, or the bridge capital, if you will, is looking at HUD because that’s their takeout; that’s their off-ramp. If that risk is out there that it’s not going to get to HUD, it makes things a little bit more dicey for them. To our credit, we’ve been very successful in securing bridge financing, but this will be the real proof point. If we can get to HUD, then that takeout financing is going to be completely de-risked, which I think opens up a lot of sources.
On Wellpointe’s medication order management system:
The medication order management system, which we affectionately call MOMS, represents the end-to-end automation of medication order processing that previously was completely manual. What it looks like is the automated orchestration between multiple systems, beginning with an order in an email inbox, which then gets extracted and read within our AWS cloud environment using Claude, and ending with a personalized HIPAA-compliant SMS message to a resident’s loved one. The core systems involved include the email client, an enterprise content management system, EHR and an SMS messaging system, and the process is driven by an enterprise business orchestration platform that we leverage with Claude within that AWS cloud environment.
Done manually by a person, processing a medication order would take someone in our organization about 15 minutes. There are multiple tasks involved with processing a single medication order, so it’s not one order, one task; it’s one order, multiple tasks, and one task has to be completed before starting another because a person can only do one task at a time. The tasks can be done in parallel because they’re not actually dependent on one another, and so this takes processing an order from 15 minutes down to just seconds.
Because a person has to finish one task before starting another to process a med order, this also means that a person can only work on one medication order before moving on to the next order. If you have multiple medication orders coming in simultaneously, you start to bottleneck. So not only are we cutting down processing time from 15 minutes to just seconds per individual order, but we’re also increasing throughput because MOMS can handle multiple medication order process instances simultaneously.
The volume of medication orders we’ve processed with MOMS from June 2025 through March of 2026 has increased by 63%, and the system performance is the same, so what we’re getting is consistent quality while we scale.
On troubleshooting and testing of MOMS platform:
There’s a ton of testing involved with this before you go live and go into prime time. You have testing environments, and you do a lot of work in the testing environment before you get out to what we call production. The way we’ve designed the process is that if anything is wrong or anything is off at all, along a variety of different factors, the process basically just stops. It stops, and then you have a person involved, so there is a human in the loop, a term that gets used a lot.
What we find is most of the errors are not actually related to the medication itself. It’s some kind of process error from legacy human intervention. For example, a folder in our enterprise content management system was saved incorrectly or the name of the person was incorrect, so when the system goes to automatically save it in that folder and the name doesn’t match, it stops.
What was really interesting is we discovered clerical errors and things like that. It was very interesting because that’s not what I was necessarily expecting, but there are a lot of safeguards around it. Generally, the process goes all the way through about 85% of the time on average, and about 15% of the time there’s a human in the loop for one reason or another.
On the goal of Wellpointe Labs:
Yeah, absolutely. Just like the results I shared, quality at scale is a key goal for Wellpointe Labs. We’re looking to remove the friction points that come from scaling. Historically, there’s this tradeoff between quality and scale. We want both quality at scale. Another thing that’s really important is personalization at scale. Person-centered care is a core tenet within our small home model, and while MOMS generates automated messages or notifications to family members, those messages are highly personalized. You can’t even tell that they’re automated.
We’re also actively working on automating the move-in process, and that’s a project we call RAP, which is short for Resident Admission Process. When you’re scaling and doing a lot of lease-up, that’s a lot of move-ins in a condensed period of time, so that’s another area we’re actively working on tackling. We’re not live on that system yet, but we’re going full tilt on that right now.
We also have a backlog of more experimental technologies, but building an in-house technical unit is a significant financial investment. Right now we’re primarily focused on the lower risk high-value use cases and processes in the near term, and as we prove those out and generate value from them, we’ll start to lean into some more experimental cases. For now, we’re tackling those lower risk high-value items.
On how the industry must evolve:
I see the most significant development within our industry specifically has been the emergence of technologies that are helping prevent and better respond to falls, including wireless e-call button systems that are more quickly connecting residents with staff when they need help. Wellpointe has been an early adopter of this type of technology. A couple of the leaders in this space generally are Inspire and SafelyYou. Full disclosure, we use Inspire, but being able to pair these devices with cloud native and user friendly enterprise software that supports multi location operations has dramatically improved operational visibility, and by removing black boxes from our operations, we can then remove the black boxes for our customers as well, because we have more information available to share. At the end of the day, operators can only share what they actually have, and so we have a lot more today than we did just two years ago.
And then I would say, at an industry agnostic level, we see the shift away from human citizen development, which is where business users build lightweight automations using tools with great user interfaces. This was the low code era, and the user experience was basically the differentiator, but low code, in my opinion, is a dead end road for scaling organizations. The low code era is now ending in favor of enterprise platforms that work directly with AI clients like Claude and drive end to end business orchestration with agentic workflows. And then with agentic AI, we can now begin to shift from deterministic to non-deterministic processes, and the important piece here is that business users with domain expertise are totally relevant here. From my perspective, agentic AI will be most effective when AI is combined with the domain expertise of subject matter experts. So, it’s not AI versus humans, it’s AI with humans. It’s basically a form of hybrid intelligence.
And then for those that say, “Well, what about that great low-code user interface?” What I would say is you can build your own front end, which is reflective of the current shift we’re seeing from buying software to building software.
So with Wellpointe Labs and our internal capabilities, we’re beginning to lean into that shift. Wellpointe Labs is about controlling our own fate and being in the driver’s seat, as opposed to waiting for the solutions and the market to catch up to what our vision is, and there’s no time for that. At the end of the day, I would say we’re in an arms race now within the industry, whether people realize it or not, and it’s time for the industry to bring that technical talent.
On new staff added to support technology rollout:
We were in the market for a data engineer, and we made that hire. They actually started with us in just two weeks, but instead of a pure data engineer, we ended up poaching a more senior full stack engineer from NetJets who has data engineering as part of their background. Our focus is on highly experienced engineers with broad experience who come from operationally intensive organizations.
If you recall, we poached our Director of Technology from Nationwide Financial, so that gives you a sense of the types of industries we’re pulling our technical talent from. The important thing is that while we’re looking for more senior engineers to lead our efforts.
To complement that senior talent, we just hired an undergraduate in data science from my alma mater, UC Berkeley, and she’ll be starting with us this summer.
On general staffing dynamics in 2026:
Well, we need more direct care staff, that’s for sure, and direct care staffing is a major growth constraint for the whole industry. The bottom line is we can bring to market as many new units as we want, but if we can’t staff up, we can’t service those would-be residents. Fortunately for us, staffing has been one of the areas we’ve done very well with, which has enabled the growth that we’ve had, but as we continue to grow very rapidly, there’s a lot of pressure to keep pace.
At a high level, our long-term vision is to transform professional caregiving from a transient job into a purposeful career. That’s a long-term vision, a journey, not an overnight thing. Bringing that to the present day, we’re very focused on housing and transportation security for our direct care staff. We provide zero interest advances to help fund apartment deposits. We also provide advances toward a vehicle down payment, which helps promote carpooling among our employees.
Those are some of the key innovative ways that we are supporting our frontline staff, and we’re going to have to build on that. There’s a lot of work still to be done, but we’ve laid a good foundation that we’re building on top of.
On future growth opportunities:
I think in terms of challenges, staffing for growth is going to continue to be one of those key challenges for the entire industry. I also believe that scaling operations generally to meet demand is going to be an overall industry challenge, because scaling doesn’t just mean buying a bunch of existing senior living assets—that’s not hard. Scaling and integrating with quality those key aspects of operations, like medication management and the move-in process, are the types of scaling problems that need to be solved.
Those are challenges for Wellpointe, and I think those are challenges for the whole industry. At Wellpointe, we recognize what those challenges are, which is huge. You have to be aware of what the challenges actually are and what the key success factors are, because if you’re not self-aware of what they are, then you can’t really solve them.
In terms of future growth, we brought 114 units to market organically over the course of 2025 with the small home model. I don’t think that’s ever been done before with the small home model. We currently have an active pipeline of over 80 units that we’re looking to bring to market between now and the end of Q2 2027. From my perspective, bringing to market an average of close to 100 units per year and hitting stabilized occupancy would demonstrate consistent go-to-market execution on our part.
Moving beyond this year into 2027, we’re looking to work toward being able to get to 200 plus units per year organically. Those are some of the growth goals and what we have on the horizon, but basically everything we’ve been talking about up to now are the things we need to work on and execute on to make these goals a reality.
How the senior living industry must evolve:
Sure, I think there are multiple ways the broader industry needs to evolve, whether that’s the small home model or the traditional model. Since we’re focused on technology today, I’ll say the senior living industry at large can’t afford to wait for the market to bring it the solutions that it needs, so it’s really time to build and integrate systems that are designed to solve our problems. I think the industry needs to shift from a mentality of asset buying to platform building, otherwise I think we’re going to have a hard time scaling to meet demand.
For the outlook for the overall sector and the small home model, I’m very positive about the outlook for the small home model. I’m a little bit biased, but for us it’s a high conviction model. Wellpointe is at a point that we don’t have to do this model if we didn’t want to. We can do a more traditional model. We have the ability, the wherewithal and the resources to do that, but like I said, it’s a high conviction model that we believe in and that we believe is responsive to both consumer preferences and affordability pressures, and we’ve been proving that the model is scalable.
We’ve been successful, I think more than maybe anyone else, in bringing institutional debt capital to the segment, and I believe as we continue to execute, we help have more capital flow to the model and its leading sponsors, which ultimately translates to being able to serve more people who need housing and care, and that’s the end goal.