Raising Tech is your guide to understanding the role technology plays in your community, where to invest to transform culture, and how to bring your team and residents along the journey. Tune in for tech trends, hot topics and meet the people behind the tech landscape in senior living to gain practical technology knowledge you can apply in your community today.
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Welcome to Raising Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Amber Bardon. Today, our guest is Mary Greer from Engrain.
Engrain's suite of tech products is improving the sales process of senior living communities with innovation, integration, accessibility, and they have the results to prove it. Communities all over the country are using TouchTour, TouchTour for iPad and Sitemap, not only to showcase amenities and lifestyle, but to convert prospective residents to residents.
Mary, welcome to the show.
Hi, thank you for having me.
So Mary, tell me everything about you. Where were you before you came to Engrain? How did you come to Engrain? What's your role there?
I came over to the Engrain team in 2016. I had been a client for many years and both the multifamily sector and also in senior living.
So having utilized the products over the years, it was a smooth transition to come over to the Engrain team. And when I did part of my experience in the past was in senior [00:01:00] living and being very passionate about this market, I felt that we had a tremendous amount of growth opportunities that we could add more value into the senior living market.
So we've expanded and grown over the last almost 8 years serve close to 600 communities. we work with some of the top providers and consultants within the industry. Some of our clients include LCS, Graystone and Greenbrier are wonderful advocates of ours.
We work with Sunrise Senior and Atria and many others that put their trust in us to provide some really wonderful technology sales solutions for their teams.
Congratulations. It's a lot of growth.
So high level explain what is Engrain? How does it work? Give us all the details on that.
So the Engrain umbrella encompasses interactive solutions and what we call data visualization tools. In layman's terms we have a couple of different products here. It's our TouchTour solution, which ultimately was probably the 1st that drove heavily into the senior living market, given the focus on that in person sales experience within the communities TouchTours and interactive touch screen, sales enablement tool that lives in discovery rooms and sales centers.
And it gives a counselor essentially everything they need at their fingertips to paint a picture of lifestyle within a community, give everyone all of the aspects of what sets them apart and makes them special and take them through the full discovery journey in identifying the best option for that perspective, resident, or in many cases, it's an adult child
that's helping a family member with this choice. And so we help with TouchTour and narrowing down that search to find the right home and create a sense of urgency as well as they're working through this decision and making sure that, yes, it's a big decision for them, but helping them.
In feeling confident in that decision that it is the right move for them. So that's our TouchTour solution. We have it in an iPad format as well for a wonderful walking tour compliment. I always say it replaces that big binder of floor plans. If they're walking a community that can have everything that TouchTour offers essentially in the palm of their hands.
And then we offer interactive community maps. That's our site map product, which is a solution that is designed to add a community map to any website. These can also be utilized on site by on site sales team members, and it's a component of our TouchTour product as well. But the site map is ultimately, a great way to give a prospective resident some context, some additional context on the website as to the community or the campus as a whole. So where are the amenities that they would participate in? What homes are available that they would be interested in exploring and ultimately getting them to schedule that appointment and come in the door.
So it's great for that empowerment for perspective residents and their families to do a little bit of digging, which they want to do ahead of visiting the community and giving them enough of a taste to entice them to come in. So with that product, we are able to explore whatever level of transparency our clients are comfortable with. Some show inventory on the map, so they will show everything that's available or reserved and even pricing details while others maybe tease information and don't necessarily show the inventory or they may not show any pricing detail and they want that
customer to engage with a counselor before exposing that. So that's something that we can work through with each community and identify what the best representation of them would be within the sitemap.
That sounds really interesting. I know that's something a lot of our clients have asked for us. It's really great to know there's a product out there. So Mary, I think when it comes to senior living sales and marketing, we've seen so much change in the way this is handled. We've gone from a lot of referral based and just being in the community to really this huge shift. A lot of sales and marketing is a lot more website based and SEO and driven more by possibly the families.
And I think this has been a slow shift for the industry in a lot of ways. A lot of communities still rely on relationships. So from your perspective, what would you say over the last five to 10 years? How have you and Engrain see this technology evolve as it relates to the sales and marketing process?
Yeah, that's a great question. So I think that a big shift happened ultimately one that we don't like to think fondly of in other ways the shift with everything as it relates to COVID. I think that was a big impact on the communities in general, and the mindset of this exploring of more technology and more innovative ways that they can sell that
extend outside of sitting at that table and having that in depth conversation within the community. I think that it was forced upon communities to have to go outside the box of the traditional way of And in doing so I think communities were really tested in that. They had to see what was out there.
And I will say that clients that had already taken that step towards technology and were using our solutions were able to pivot easier because they already had the TouchTour, for instance, which could be shared via zoom. So they were then hosting zoom meetings and remote consultations with perspective residents.
They didn't see as much of a halt in many cases. We're serving new developments or expansion projects where they are under a very specific deadline to hit those conversion goals. And fortunately, they didn't have to pause in many ways that other communities did because they weren't necessarily prepared or didn't have the tools to be able to consult remotely.
So I think a lot of it shifted with that and ultimately hasn't really changed a lot. We see a lot of communities still hosting a lot of remote meetings, having family members in all different areas of the country. You have to be To accommodate the needs and not expect someone to fly in for a visit.
I think technology has shifted a lot because of those reasons. And then from our perspective, if you had asked me 5 or 6 years ago about transparency and our interactive maps on the website, for instance, I would have said. Clients are very hesitant. Our clients don't feel comfortable in putting on the website any pricing details, especially not their inventory.
They're even hesitant to show floor plans sometimes. I would have said that 5 years ago. Today, we are seeing a massive shift in this mindset of everyone understanding that today's consumer, seniors included in that, they expect transparency. They expect immediate gratification and being able to get the information that they want and need.
Anytime they want it and whether, an adult child is using her few minutes at the end of the night to watch Netflix and search for a place for her mom. She should be able to find out the information she needs without necessarily calling a sales counselor during business hours when she doesn't have time to step away.
And a senior in that regard also wants to. Dig in and do their research themselves and they're getting more comfortable being online and going website to website and I'm hearing from industry leaders that they are seeing a significant increase in qualified leads and activity when they expose a bit more.
And they're seeing far less bounce rates when people are frustrated by not getting the information that they're looking for when they need it. So that, I think, is the biggest shift here is going more flexible in the touring and discovery conversation process, but then also that exposure of more information online earlier.
COVID definitely had a major impact with that. But like you said, this goes back to even further than that as communities make that transition from in person tours and having that in person relationship. So like you're saying, where you can browse and buy anything on the internet these days and Engrain seems like a really vital tool to help with that transition.
Tell me a little bit about how does Engrain work with the other sales and marketing technology out there such as CRMs and I'm really interested actually to know do you also integrate with resident engagement apps because I'm thinking about that as you're talking lot of resident engagement apps are used for prospects or maybe some of the way finding with the map.
So can you talk a little bit about that?
We want to partner with anyone who will partner with us. Ultimately, we play nicely in the sandbox with everyone. So we encourage vendor partnership in terms of content sharing is 1 good way that many communities are investing in a lot of virtual content, like virtual tours and even in, of course expansions or new developments they're engaging with wonderful renders that are creating these conceptual images and videos.
That's a perfect compliment for our software because we ultimately can add all of that into our experiences. And so that collaboration is wonderful. For communities that are making that investment we can utilize that even having rendered views from the apartments, goes the long way when you're trying to paint the vision of someone's life in a community that doesn't exist yet.
It's not tangible. So that's something we would encourage is, we would love to work with those providers to enhance our product, of course, and the customer experience, and then CRM integrations. We work with the majority of the major CRMs within the industry. So from an inventory management perspective, it makes it really seamless for on site teams because there's no extra step for them.
We can integrate with WelcomeHome and Align, Yardi. Even Salesforce integrations have been possible in the past. So we're willing to connect those dots through integrations to really make it a wonderful and seamless process. We also have an exciting feature in our TouchTour product that allows the sales counselor to actually take a reservation right from the screen.
So it holds that apartment off the market. It creates excitement, of course, when they decide on that apartment, they're able to commit to it right there allows them to take a little bit more ownership. I think of the decision and then we, of course, again, true up with that CRM to make sure their inventory
all connected. And that main source of truth is the CRM. In terms of resident engagement apps, we again are very open to collaborating with different vendors and different providers in the industry. We see a lot of CTAs. Also utilized or a call to action buttons on our sitemap product that would call out that chatbot would call out whatever that communication that they're initially having there, even integrating something like HeartLegacy, where you've got that communication back and forth, we're more than happy to partner and champion those relationships.
That sounds really great. So if a community is interested in implementing and Engrain, what do they need to know? What type of technology do they have to have in place? What are the prerequisites? What would they need to do to get set up with the system?
Sure. So first of all, they need to contact us for a demo, because we would definitely want to take them through all of the different nuances of the product.
But in terms of getting it set up. The most important things are we need some kind of level plan map. So we create, we can stylize them. We can make them look pretty, but we need some kind of either architectural files, something that shows where the communities are located. Because that's the most important part of what we do here is that mapping visualization piece to show where each home lives, and then the floor plans that are attributed to that home.
We can make them look nice and stylized and add additional context for amenities and things like that. And then we would need the floor plans, of course, that reside in those homes. And then any extra content is gravy, right? As I mentioned, if we have virtual content views from the windows, finish packages.
All of that can be utilized to only enhance the products more and help with that visualization of each home and what sets it apart. And then in the TouchTour solution, we often want to speak to really that provider, who they are, what makes them special, what Is really a major component of someone moving into a community is understanding what type of service and care they're going to experience.
So [00:15:00] we also play very heavily on that as a big portion of the TouchTour experience and setting the stage for expectations that future resident would have moving into the community. Photos, videos, all of that can be added for extra. And we even focus on the surrounding area. So local points of interest can be highlighted too.
So you can literally dive into all aspects of that property and the attributes.
Yeah, that's such a great idea, especially if it's a family member who lives in a different area and they're not that familiar. I can see how that would be really helpful. So Mary, earlier we spoke about where have we been coming from, how things have changed in the past five to 10 years.
Now I really want to get your insight on what does the future hold? Where do you see the industry going in the next five to 10 years as it relates to sales and marketing?
Sure I think we're going to definitely stay on the tech train. I think that nothing about that is going to change. If anything, it's just going to grow.
Their communities are already adding more technology across all aspects of their communities and their campuses from robots delivering drinks to, of course, interaction and resident engagement with technology as well, and communicating with those family members. I don't think that that is
going to go away. If anything, it is going to just grow more and, we're going to continue on our end to build in features and update our solutions to make sure we are. Ahead of the curve of anything that we anticipate a counselor might need in their conversation that a resident or future resident may want in their search as they're utilizing our solutions.
I think that it's just trying to stay ahead of the expectations that are coming our way because we have the boomers. That are coming strong and we have to make sure that the communities are prepared for that as they're considering the experience that they have from the moment they engage with their website.
All the way through the end of their time, really within a community, and they need to think about how they can impact their life and make things easier and technology. While we put up a fight, sometimes, you It's intended to do that. So I think that we're just going to see more and more growth there.
As we will with everyone's life, right? We're very spoiled right now, but we're going to get even more spoiled as time goes on.
Yeah. Along those lines, do you imagine a time in which someone in another part of the country could actually make a deposit and select their apartment using your technology without ever speaking to somebody at the site.
In fact, they do it all day, every day right now in multifamily. So the multifamily market is ultimately where senior will go at some point, not anytime soon. It's not going to be an immediate thing and it won't be all aspects of senior living for a while, but active adult and 55 plus. They are basically compare them to, of course, your 20-30 somethings again, they're wanting fast, efficient, easy to use.
So I don't think that there is anything stopping an active adult or 55 plus potential resident from going online and leasing online today. I really don't. We work with providers. Graystar is 1 of the leading providers in that 55 plus market. We work with Sparrow. We work with many others that are already
opening that door for them to go ahead and apply. We have integrations with application and CRMs right now in the multifamily space where to your point, they just go on, they pick their apartment, they don't talk to a soul, they find what they're looking for, and then they drive their moving truck on up in a few weeks.
So I definitely think that is on the horizon, depending on the segment of the senior market, it'll come sooner rather than later, but it's definitely going to come at some point in the future for everyone.
I imagine that is a little bit scary for some of our listeners who really like that personal touch
having come from the industry, it's scary for me too.
Because my favorite thing was sitting across from the perspective resident. I loved that conversation and that discovery. And I do think it is an intimate conversation. So that said, I tread lightly saying that will come eventually, but people still want the personal touch, and that's not going to change in the senior space at all.
We can still have a personal touch, but incorporate technology. So I was still able to have an in depth discovery, connect with people, but have my screen there to support me. It didn't do my job for me. It was just there to tap and touch through photos and let them touch it and let them move around the images and add their furniture to their floor plan.
Like it was fun and it was engaging for them and I didn't lose that connection. When you spread floor plans across your table, you may lose a connection, but I didn't. I had them put their furniture in it. So it's a different way of looking at it again. It's not scary. It's good.
Yeah, I agree. I think it's exciting at the same time for sure to think about how we can improve the process and capture a market that we can't today because of needing that personal connection.
So definitely something to look forward to and see how that evolves. I know. Mary, is there anything that you haven't told us yet about Engrain that you think our listeners should know?
I think that we offer these tools that I've talked about today are really those sales enablement tools.
They're the ones that are more prospect facing that are strictly to the sales side of things. We also offer data visualization from an asset management perspective as well. So if someone were to explore our website in more detail, you would see that we can also take data and put it into a map format to provide great context.
As to really anything you would want to factor in location into a property kind of visualization tools. So where is occupancy higher? Where is it lower? What views? Maybe are we missing? Should we have an amenity premium on that 1? because those are all leased up very fast, or they've sold very quickly.
So we can provide really great data insights within our visualization tools that far extend beyond the in person or digital world of the prospect journey, but also aiding those on site or asset managers and those kind of coaching and managing their teams to help facilitate all of that and fill up the buildings faster, of course, is always our goal or keep them occupied, retain that occupancy.
Thank you so much for coming on our podcast. And please let our listeners know, where can they find you? Where can they get more information?
Yeah, you can visit our website at Engrain.com. That's E N G R A I N dot com. It's not bread. So if you find a bread website, that's not us. We're data visualization. So, you can look at Engrain.Com and there are demo links scheduled on there. You can also reach out directly to me if you'd like, and I can facilitate that conversation.
So Mary@Engrain.Com and you'll reach me and I can connect you and schedule a call to talk through individual needs and what someone might be interested in exploring with us.
Mary, thank you so much for joining. It was so nice to meet you. And for those of you who did not catch our last thought leadership series, it's also on YouTube and you can hear more from Mary on that as well.
Thank you so much for having me today.
You can find us online at RaisingTechPodcast. com where you can see all of our episodes and contact us to provide feedback or submit an episode idea. We are on social media everywhere at Raising Tech Podcast. If you enjoy Raising Tech, please leave us a review and share with a friend. Music is an original production by Tim Resig, one of our very own Parasol Alliance employees.
As always, thank you for listening.
In this episode, Mary Greer, Director of Sales at Engrain, sits down with Parasol Alliance's Founder & CEO, Amber Bardon to talk about Engrain's tech products like TouchTour, TouchTour for iPad, and Sitemap, catering to Senior Living communities, improving sales processes with innovation and accessibility. Engrain's TouchTour facilitates in-person sales experiences, while Sitemap provides online community maps.
Find out how Engrain collaborates with various sales and marketing technologies, integrating seamlessly with CRMs and resident engagement apps by tuning in for the full episode!
You can learn more about Engrain on their website and also on LinkedIn.
Amber Bardon: Welcome to Raising Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Amber Barden. And today my guest is Jeff McSpadden. Jeff is the co founder and CEO at Composure, which is an evidence based digital audio company that delivers custom soundscapes for senior living communities to improve sleep and drive health outcomes for older adults living with dementia.
Thanks Jeff, I am so excited to have you on the podcast today. As we were chatting a little bit before we started recording, we've had a couple of other entrepreneurs in the space. You've done some other things with environmental around lights and flooring. And I think sound and the impact sound can have, I'm really interested to learn about today.
So welcome to the show.
Thank you. I'm happy to be here. Good to meet you and glad we can dive in.
So tell me a little bit more about your story. So you're an entrepreneur and you have a background as a musician. So tell me about the journey that led you to starting composure and where you're at today.
Jeff McSpadden: Yeah before I'll go in reverse order a little bit, just before starting the company I worked for about 15 plus years as a composer writing original music for film, TV and advertising. And there's a kind of an interesting phenomenon that generally gets taken for granted when you're watching a movie or TV show, and it's that sound element is actually doing quite a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of engaging you emotionally queuing you in lots of different ways that are all very purposeful to the story.
Sound is a very powerful force. It changes our reality. It influences how we behave and how we feel. And to me, I got really interested in how we can leverage that power outside of the realm of entertainment and take it into the realm of health care.
And that really was the genesis of me wanting to start a company in this space and really see how we can impact some real change. Prior to that, I worked as a performing musician for a number of years. I'm a recovering trumpeter. That was my full time thing for quite a while starting at the age of 16.
But the thing about playing on stage is understanding how connecting with people through music is really done and the difference between playing at somebody or performing music at someone and getting them involved and if they are involved, all of a sudden, the entire room just elevates.
The entire venue, it goes from an ordinary setting to an extraordinary experience. So it's a really powerful force that I've learned a lot about and I just live and breathe and everything that comes through the ears, if you will.
Amber Bardon: Tell me a little bit more about how did you take that experience and that knowledge and connect it to healthcare and then specifically senior living.
Jeff McSpadden: It's funny. I think one of the first things I started really examining is This concept of what I did in media, which was essentially film scoring, right? if you understand the concept, it's creating purposefully and intentionally creating music experiences to support a storyline or to tell the, the the parts of a story that aren't being done on screen and and by actors and the concept of scoring a story Felt like it could also make the leap into functionality in our lives.
Like, how could we score certain experiences in our life? Solving for chronic sleep issues amongst a population living with Alzheimer's and dementia. There's a lot of challenges there. If the thesis was, if we could properly kind of score that experience from awareness of bedtime all the way to waking up refreshed in the morning we might be on to something, right?
And we wanted to give that a try and actually approached it through a clinical research trial first that that came out with some pretty inspiring results.
Amber Bardon: So let's talk a little bit more about how does this work? So how do you take sound and incorporate it into a resident at a senior communities routine. And then what is the impact that you've seen music have?
Jeff McSpadden: Yeah. There's kind of two parts to how it's done, and I think that's what kind of makes Composure and our offering with our service SoundBlanket very unique is that we haven't just focused on one side of it.
It's both. And what I mean by that is in one side of it, there's the content, there's the actual audio and our sound sequences that we've created. And then on the other side, it's how it gets delivered. How do you operationalize that, with full understanding of all the needs, opportunities and challenges within these care environments, because frankly, we discovered very early on that if you just create another app you're already sunk because staff are too busy and it's not what they're trained on and relying on a caregiver to remember to use a new thing to aid in the care is you're a bit behind the eight ball already. It was really about first understanding, do we have a good sense of what the content should be? To drive change to actually help people sleep better. And if they slept better, what are the other outcomes? We'll see from that. And so we can talk more about that side of it.
But then once we had that fairly well understood, it was okay. Now, how do you get this to benefit residents in these congregate living settings. So what we've devised is a turnkey system called SoundBlanket, where we install networked speakers, one speaker per bed in these residences.
And we can remotely manage all of those speakers anywhere in the world. And generally, we're right now we're at sort of the 1 of this service, right? If you will, which means we're [00:06:00] relying on time triggers to deploy sounds at the right time. And then some other couple easy settings that can be set up right on when we on board a new community which makes it a very personalized experience for each resident.
Amber Bardon: Tell me a little bit more about the music. Is it custom created? What does it sound like? Can you describe it for me?
Jeff McSpadden: Yeah so in the entire sequence that SoundBlanket is comprised of there's only about 20, 23 minutes that is actually just music. The rest of the sequence, which actually is up to 8 hours long
is a frequency noise response approach, which I'll talk about in a second, but specifically about the music. It is all custom. We take my pedigree as a composer into consideration here. And a few other composers that we brought in early on to help us construct these.
We've developed proprietary musical sequences that play at the beginning of each evening around bedtime. And this musical part of the sequence is doing two things really well. One, it's used as a gentle environmental cue for bedtime with a few repeat exposures, people start to say,
oh, I hear this. It's very soothing. It's very calming. And I'm ready to start getting into bed and then it over a 20 minute period we're leveraging the power of music to help calm or relax or activate our sort of rest response. If you want to speak in more clinical terms, right?
To take a step back for a second, if people consider what sound does to our physiological systems and our neurological systems, it's really fascinating. If we listen to an unexpected, harsh, startling sound. It generally makes you jump, your pupils dilate, your heart starts to race, you get flooded with serotonin, the sort of, stress hormone.
Jeff McSpadden: And some of that is great. That's what's helped us survive as human beings for thousands and thousands of years. It's part of our survival mechanism. But if you flood your system of that too often, it can have some negative impact on your physical health, right? But the opposite is also true with sound.
So if you're exposed to very soothing, relaxing sounds, it actually triggers that rest and digest side of the equation. So you get into a more calmed state you get those endorphins and the pleasure hormones as they call it, right? And it's a very powerful thing. So what we decided early on was we were going to create this musical
introduction to our sequence to leverage what works really well you provide a very calming, relaxing experience to trigger that rest response. You can help people decrease their level of anxiety depression. There's a lot of things that kind of prevent us from falling asleep.
And then once that is done, and our residents are starting to drift off to sleep. That's when music starts to become less effective. Because our ears and our brains are always listening and when we are listening to music as we're starting to drift to sleep and are asleep, it actually synchronizes our brain to the rhythm and changes and variations in the music.
So it's not a full resting brain state. What we're trying to do is leverage sound to do the best it can for the various stages of sleep. So music's a great introduction. Then once the listener is drifting off to sleep, we switch over very gradually dovetail into what's called pink noise.
This is that frequency response I was talking about before, and we've actually developed a variation on pink noise with a couple sort of secret sauce elements there that we've studied and found to be very effective. But pink noise at its basis has been known to do two things really good.
It's a frequency that actually older adults hear fairly well, considering [00:10:00] the older adult hearing profile. Generally, we lose some of the high frequencies. The T's the S's all the sort of very high things that we hear. We aren't able to pick those up as easily. So pink noise fits in that sort of warmer middle to low range. It fits their hearing profile really well. And it's also been well understood, not just in our research, but other published research that it can go a long way in inducing deep way of sleep better, higher quality rest and adding a 3rd benefit there, it acts as a sound masking environmental element. So what I mean by that is, in congregate living and in hospital settings, the number 1 reason for sleep disturbance is environmental noise. People doing their job in the middle of the night.
Other residents up and about needing care. These things will arouse the brain and our response system and wake us out of our sleep. By employing pink noise at the right volume for that resident's room, we can actually take away a lot of the distracting qualities of those intermittent noises through the night.
Great for sleep. Great for your ears for being exposed to for a long period of time and goes a long way and taking all that interrupted sleep elements out of the environment.
Amber Bardon: I was just woken up the other night by snow plows. I was staying at one of our communities in Montana and they were snow plowing the road at midnight and woke me up. Not sure how that went over with the residents either.
Jeff, I know that Composure has had some published research in memory care. Can you talk a little bit about what did you find out from that research? What have you learned? I
Jeff McSpadden: think the number one most surprising thing we learned was exactly how impactful better sleep is on the quality of life for people living with dementia.
If you know this population well, first of all, over 70 percent of people living with this degenerative disease experience regular sleep issues. as we all can attest to in our own lives, when you don't sleep well, you don't perform your best the next day. Now, imagine that in the context of already having lowered coping thresholds, lowered cognition as the disease progresses, you start to become nonverbal.
There's a lot of things that just add complexity to your day. So what we found was by focusing in on improving sleep, we saw a number of behavioral outcomes during the day improve. And I think that was what kind of gave us the big aha moment. It seems like a nice thing to improve somebody's quality of sleep.
Isn't that nice and cozy? And, you feel good. But actually where the rubber hits the road in a health care context is that if you improve a person's sleep, you actually give them a cognitive boost. The next day, you actually give them a physical performance boost. The next day, meaning potential for less falls, we saw increase in appetite and eating performance.
We saw all the activities of daily living start to improve, like bathing and dressing and, eating and all of those essentials. And what we were most proud of is we ended up having two statistically significant outcomes in this study. By contrast, this is just anecdotal, but a lot of file pharma companies that go out and do research on their new drugs and so forth never reached statistical significance.
So we're really excited about these outcomes. And what those 2 were a major reduction in daytime drowsiness. So that makes sense, right? We're actually impacting the quality of sleep at night. So you feel less drowsy during the day. But what it really means, if you unpack that is they're more alert, oriented and engaged during the day.
Let's say a community has invested heavily in their activities program, and they've got a lot of enrichment going on through the day. But if you've got a population that is just exhausted and would rather take a nap every time they sit in a chair. Then, how good is that? So we found that, better sleep at night lets them take advantage of a full quality of life during the day.
There's also another part of that I think McKnight's published an article last April about a relevance between excessive daytime napping and early end of life care considerations. So there's a deterioration that comes from excessive daytime napping. So we're excited about that measure being so drastically improved. But the next 1 that we hit statistical significance on had to do with cooperation with care. This is a big one for staff, right? And staff burnout ratios and those kinds of things, right? If you can improve the sort of relationship and the moments of caregiving in a memory care context that's huge, you're seeing less aggression, you're seeing less expressions of unmet needs or behaviors as some people call them, right?
Yeah. But when we looked at the data, it actually was interesting. What it said was, the people who in our study that [00:15:00] got the best rest And that saw the most improvements in their sleep were more likely to not accept care because they were feeling more independent.
They were feeling more able. They were feeling like I understand what you're asking me to do. I'll do it. I got it from here and that was really exciting. It's interesting to know how these cognitive boosts and cognitive reserves that sleek afford you express themselves.
And then we saw improvements and falls. The setting where we did our study was a very high performing setting, both on the resident side and the staff side during our study. So there was a very low incident count of falls to begin with but even within that, we saw a lowering in falls during our study.
It was a small one site study. And we're excited for the results we got. And we're looking towards other additional opportunities, expand our understanding with another broader study.
Amber Bardon: Yeah, it makes complete sense. We've all suffered from sleep deprivation and we all know intuitively that we don't perform at our best and we have brain fog and things like that, but I'm sure that's really exciting to you to see the actual scientific data back that up.
And let you actually see the impact that you're having on community. So if a senior living community is interested in working with composure, what do they need to know.
Jeff McSpadden: That prioritizing sleep for your residents is a vital part of fall prevention strategy or a prevention care strategy just in general.
We've talked to a lot of people in the space and what we've generally found is when you talk about sleep and where the sort of downstream negative impacts are. And when we say what are you doing about it? It falls in three buckets.
One is medications, and everybody winces a little bit when they talk about it, because we all know that's not a great approach. And so reducing that medication use is something that people seem to be very interested in. The other thing is Remote patient monitoring which I think is an amazing advancement in technology.
It really enables staff to stay more alert and aware of situations. But I don't see it yet being a super effective prevention technology. It's more of a detection and analytics. And then there's the kind of You know, do it yourself approach, which is, we know our residents really well, we know their personal preferences.
We know that certain things work for, Helen as opposed to John. But even those things are kind of staff intensive resource intensive sometimes. And, what works 1 night might not work another. So it's a hit or miss. So working with us, we found that we can be a really needed relief in the market because we've devised a system that not only deploys sound, which it does no harm.
There is no side effects. There are no downsides. There have been very little evidence of, what do you call like a negative response to what we're doing. And we're doing it and deploying it in a sort of technological way that we're not overburdening staff. The staff don't have to do anything.
It's a basically kind of a set it and forget it proposition. And it only gets better. With the regularity of the time schedule per resident for getting these sounds at night. And regular repeat exposure over time, it actually reinforces the benefits. So we've been trying to make it as easy to deploy and set up and use on a regular basis.
Amber Bardon: I really learned a lot from this conversation. So I'm really glad that we found each other and we're able to get you on the show and talk about composure. And I learned a lot of interesting information today. Where can our listeners find out more?
Jeff McSpadden: Visit our website.
It's Composure.Care. And I'm on LinkedIn. Composure is also on LinkedIn. If you want to find me there. And actually one thing I'm really excited about coming up is I've been invited to pitch at the senior living 100 conference at the end of March.
They're doing their very first shark tank like pitch session. Composure will be one of six companies invited to be there. So if anyone in your audience Plans on being at the conference. Come check us out Sunday, March 24th.
Awesome. Good luck to you.
Thank you. I'm excited and thank you for inviting me on. This has been great. I'm really intrigued by what Parasol is doing and the much needed benefits. I know one thing I didn't really talk about earlier is the tech. Sort of infrastructure that we look to align within our client base.
It's not strenuous what we need, but there are certain sort of baseline requirements and I'm super glad you guys are out there helping people understand the importance of those things.
Amber Bardon: Really, we're here to help build that infrastructure and backbone so that innovators and entrepreneurs like yourself and others out there can bring this technology to communities.
Jeff McSpadden: Yeah, I definitely think, you guys recognize as well as we do that COVID changed what's a priority in senior living. This sort of boon in recognizing technology is a very useful thing. A very empowering thing for these caregivers and environments. It's a really exciting time right now.
Amber Bardon: It is an exciting time. And I said that in other episodes and I'll continue to say that I think senior living technology is the most exciting technology industry right now because there's so much change coming.
Thank you so much for being on the podcast today.
Jeff McSpadden: Thank you, Amber. I'm glad we could get together.
Amber Bardon: You can find us online at RaisingTechPodcast.com where you can see all of our episodes and contact us to provide feedback or submit an episode idea. We are on social media everywhere at Raising Tech Podcast. If you enjoy Raising Tech, please leave us a review and share with a friend. Music is an original production by Tim Resig, one of our very own Parasol Alliance employees.
As always, thank you for listening.
In this episode of Raising Tech, our host, Amber Bardon, has a fascinating conversation with Jeff McSpadden, Co-Founder & CEO of Composure. They dive into how Composure leverages remotely-managed personalized soundscapes to enhance sleep quality within Senior Living communities.
Explore how Composure's innovative SoundBlanket effectively reduces sleep disruptions, promotes deep sleep, and ultimately elevates the overall quality of sleep for senior living residents resulting in enhanced behavioral outcomes and a reduction in daytime drowsiness and falls.
Raising Tech is powered by Parasol Alliance, The Strategic Planning & Full-Service IT Partner exclusively serving Senior Living Communities.
Amber Bardon: Welcome to Raising Tech Podcast. I’m your host, Amber Barden, and today our guest is Gregory Petrossian. Gregory is the director of sales for SkyPoint and SkyPoint is an AI platform for senior living operators to help them chat with their data. So Gregory, tell me, what does that mean? What does it mean to chat with our data?
Gregory Petrossian: First, I’d like to thank you for having me on this podcast. Appreciate you and Parasol for having me.
What does it mean to chat with your data? Now that AI is everywhere in the news and on your phone and social media. What generative AI has done is provide a means of being able to have a conversation. With a chat agent, right? And previously that chat agent used to be very deterministic, like example, you’re going to a customer service website, or, you’re on a customer service call and you’re like, pressing 1 to go to this tree or.
I have to give it my name, and it’s going through a tree of thought. What it means to chat with your data is using a large language model like ChatGPT that understands the context of your business and your business data and your data systems, whether that’s policies and procedures that have been tucked away in SharePoint or a network drive, or you have your data systems in Senior Living like Point Click Care or Yardie.
UKG, Sage, and the list goes on having an easy way to ask what is going on in the day to day operations and query these systems. That’s what I mean by chat with your data and having a natural conversation with that agent.
Amber Bardon: AI is definitely becoming a big buzzword in the industry. I’m starting to get asked about this a lot from our clients and people wanting to know, what does this mean?
What’s the impact? What do I need to do? And just as a side note at Parasol, we’re working on a white paper about this that will be coming out for everybody. Can we just talk a little bit about. What does AI mean? If you don’t mind giving us just a general overview and then how does SkyPoint view AI and how do you bring AI to the industry through SkyPoint?
Gregory Petrossian: Great question. I think if we want to look historically, the definition of AI has changed earlier. What was AI? It was traditional machine learning models that were able to predict or help score or provide some sort of risk assessment on data. And you had to go through arduous data science and machine learning and training, and this was the days of big data.
So then a I went making predictions on. Here’s the data on what I have today and can AI help predict what’s going to happen tomorrow. So what we call predictive analytics, when people are talking about AI today, it typically sounds like they’re talking about chatGPT or generative AI.
What is generative AI? We saw the growth and the popularity of large language models. These large language models are the engine to having these very natural conversations. It is the means of how we work with chatGPT. ChatGPT has large language models that enable it to have a natural conversation with us.
And then they’ve taken a corpus of knowledge or think of it like a library. They took the whole Internet. Fed that library of knowledge to this large language model that can have an eloquent conversation. And now, all of a sudden, I can ask questions about this library of knowledge of what’s been going on in the world about history legal.
Whether it’s legal work or different domains of knowledge. I can now have a conversation and it can help me do things. That large language model isn’t just about predicting the future now. It’s about help me do work in my certain work stream. Help me write this email. Help me write this procedure.
And so that’s the big leap we’ve made is now we’re not just trying to predict the future. We are actually having AI help in our day to day tasks. So that’s what generative AI is really helping us do. It’s not just being able to analyze what’s happening. It’s chatting with your data and doing something with your data.
And I think that’s always the missing piece for people is well, okay, what can it actually do? I think that’s also what’s scaring people, right? It’s we’re saying, Oh, is it going to take my job? How am I going to be able to pivot in this day of generative AI? And the term I really love to use and what Microsoft is making more popular is this idea of a copilot.
Copilot is there to enhance what you are doing as a human and how you can do it better, faster, more efficient. And so I think this era of copilots, this era of generative AI, something is going to help, whether it’s senior living operators or beyond, either work with their data and their systems, and then in addition to that, get their work done faster.
Amber Bardon: Yeah, I think you’re exactly right that people know it’s out there, but they don’t really understand what is the impact and how may it possibly change the industry. And I think, what we’re hearing a lot of is how can it help with workforce challenges, which is the big issue right now in the space is staffing challenges and being able to have alternatives to staffing inability to find people for staffing.
I don’t think that’s the focus of what SkyPoint does, but let’s talk a little bit more about what SkyPoint actually is. And how did you come to get into senior living?
Gregory Petrossian: SkyPoint as a platform is a means of providing, whether it’s senior living operators or beyond, the data and AI infrastructure, getting to the point of having a place where you can land.
And bring your data, unify your data and make it consumable for a large language model. So it knows what to do. And you can have that conversation on your business specific data. Again, whether it’s PDFs, audio files. System data that’s in tables and rows and columns. How do you make that consumable? You need a backend infrastructure to do that.
And I think in senior living, we’re seeing a leapfrog moment for operators because a lot of the operators I’m talking to lived in spreadsheets. They’ve never invested in building a data warehouse or a data lake house. Those terms typically go over their head. And so how do we allow that? How do we accelerate them to being able to have that infrastructure with clicks of a button?
How do we provide a fractional data and AI team to help them accomplish and tackle certain business use cases that are going to move the needle for them, rather than assuming every operator has the same problems and fitting them into a cookie cutter box. The way we approach it is really working in a design thinking process with the operators and saying, okay, where are the places you’re spending a lot of manual time and doing a lot of manual tasks.
Based on that, what data and what data systems can we bring in, how can we model and mold it, and then now provide a copilot experience or a reporting experience for a user that doesn’t then have to extract data into a spreadsheet or copy and paste data into a screen. How do we get them to actually making decisions and taking actions without having to worry about that back end process?
Amber Bardon: Can you just walk me through if I’m a nurse what does this mean to me? What am I doing differently than what I do today?
Gregory Petrossian: I think some of the use cases that I’ve seen in senior living or long term care is a nurse is having to wade through tons of different documents as they’re looking to admit a patient, let’s say or understand, what’s going on with this patient.
What have they done for the past week or what’s their care plan? What’s their meal plan? And then have to actually put those things together for the resident or the patient. And what the copilot can do can be the means of putting together that care meal plan for them much more quickly, putting together a rough draft.
It can look across the different systems, the chart notes, and typically you’re getting PDFs, whether it’s from the emergency care, like the emergency unit that they had to go see 2 weeks ago, or, hey, they’re getting care from outside our 4 walls, what happened without the nurse having to go look through all those different charts and summarize it for themselves. So how are we bringing this into their own workflow? Another thing we’re seeing is scheduling. if you’re scheduling the labor for who is working with what resident for the week. It’s also another thing a copilot can help with.
Amber Bardon: So just going back to your previous example on the admissions or just sorting through the data of what’s going on with the resident. I’m just imagining that what SkyPoint would do and correct me if I’m wrong, is they would have the ability to go to this AI tool and say to it, “Give me a history on Mrs Smith and give me the history of what led to admission” and then it would pull the data from all these different sources and essentially give you that little paragraph of summary of data.
And then the same thing would be, if they want to look back, maybe all our clients do care meetings, every morning or shift change meetings, they could say give me a summary of everything that’s gone on in the past 24 hours without having to go pull the clinical notes and look at the chart and pull the assessment.
Gregory Petrossian: That’s exactly what I’m describing. And I think in addition to that, think about the communication that needs to happen with the family and how can you more easily put that plan or what’s been happening and then communicate to the family more easily.
” Hey, help me write an email to the resident’s family”, or “Hey, a resident’s family asking about a policy or procedure, or what’s gone on. Can the copilot just write that quick response for me?” And so let’s increase that touch that we can have and that communication across all aspects of the care.
Amber Bardon: That’s pretty amazing. We’re all used to doing that on our phone right now. My kids ask me a question, I go to Google and ask Google the question and it comes up a generative AI and gives me the answer. So how does this work? Is it voice activated? Is it an app that sits on their phone or computer?
How does that piece work? And then my second part of that question is, how do you build this on the backend for a client? What does a client need to have in place to be able to take advantage of this technology?
Gregory Petrossian: Great question. So the way that end consumer interacts with the experience can be the choice of the operator, whether it’s working with chatGPT or what’s now Microsoft is releasing called M365 Copilot.
We can also build what’s called a custom copilot with Microsoft’s low code technology called Copilot Studio. And then finally, we have built our own product called our private copilot, where we can actually white label and deploy a web application with a custom URL for the operator, like copilotoperator.com, and it looks like one of their own applications in their environment.
You have different options for that experience, and there’s different licensing models that everybody has, so we just help bring the right experience and model to the operator.
Amber Bardon: So to go to the 2nd, part of the question, tell me what this looks like from an infrastructure perspective. Let’s say a client has PCC and Sage Intacct and OnShift and Paycom and Sherpa and eChoice Menu.
How is this all working together? Do you have to have agreements with each vendor individually? Just walk me through with this. Like, how do you build this?
Gregory Petrossian: Yeah, so what we provide and what our platform truly is all the back end infrastructure where data can be brought in and unified and if a customer has these relationships with all their vendors, they need to ask them for data access, and some vendors are easier, and some vendors are more difficult to get that data access, and sometimes you have to pay them money for that data access, and every vendor provides data in a little different way.
And sometimes they have different options for getting to that data. And that’s where we help as the advocate of the customer. We say, we walk through and talk with all their vendors and ask these questions. Typically, our customers or operators don’t have the technical depth to even know what to ask for.
So we help them in that regard. And we’re building integrations with Many of the data systems that they’re familiar with currently and have worked with . As soon as you get that access, whether it’s through an API, some SFTP or you’re getting just CSV files in some way. We work to automate that data ingestion, bringing that data into that unified back end and what we have is a pre built architecture that plugs into that copilot experience all the different ones I was mentioning as well as we’re building and massaging that data that could be used for a copilot, or it could be used for reporting the way I like to explain it is you want to build your data warehouse or your data lake house these data structures in a way that can be used in different modalities.
whether it’s for generative AI or whether it’s for reporting. Build it once and use it across the different ways, whether you’re trying to explore data with reports or whether you need a specific answer, like you were saying with your Google search, or you need help with a specific workflow. So we bring all that and put it in a box and with clicks of a button as a customer purchases it.
We deployed that infrastructure specifically into their four walls. That’s what makes us different is we are an enabler for data, and we help accelerate the path to doing that because a lot of my background and experience has been building these things from scratch. There’s a lot of work you have to do to be able
to even get to the point of being able to bring data in the door and when we had all these different customers on one off builds, it was hard for us to manage and maintain that. So a lot of the value we provide is consistency in how it’s built and that infrastructure. So we can more cheaply provide support
and maintenance and break fix. We have a fractional team that can support the end to end data process that gets that data to the large language model or to the report. And that’s what we’re making cheaper and easier for operators to be able to compete with the larger operators that have the money to build these things from scratch or have data teams, we want to be the easy button for them to be able to get going on these type of efforts.
Amber Bardon: How many senior living communities are you currently working with
Gregory Petrossian: Communities? Don’t know the number, but right now we’ve got four or five operators we have been working with for the past year and a half, and we’ve got another five to ten operators that are on our pipeline. So I would say it’s still early days for us and I think it’s still very early days for generative AI, and we’re really working with the operators that are pioneering and leaning in. And I think that’s the difference is, sometimes I’m talking to operators, they’re like, Hey, give us to the T, the use cases and the things that this works really well for.
This has only been out for, 12 to 18 months. And so we’re working with you on tackling the use cases you are seeing and the pain points you have. And so those operators that are wanting to be more on the bleeding edge are the customers we’re seeing.
Amber Bardon: Do you ever see. Potential in the future use case for the residents themselves to have access to this
type of tool.
Gregory Petrossian: Absolutely. And I think, and typically what I’m telling operators is you want to solve this first internally on your internal data and with your internal teams before you start deploying and putting it out there in the public. An example I like to pick on is, I was seeing these memes of things like some Chevrolet dealership that had taken their customer service chat bot on their public website and was callingsome open AI API and people were using that chat bot as just like a free chat, GPT pro subscription and asking it things well beyond, “Hey what is the price of this model or what is the price of this car” or “hey, when can I buy it?” They’re telling you to do its homework, right? Because they didn’t put the right guardrails and the right context for it to be specific to what it needed for that dealership.
And so that’s what we’re doing first is there’s a lot of training and reconciliation and fine tuning we have to do to make sure that the AI copilot is reliably responding and what we have done with our product is effectively turn off hallucinations. And so you’ll get more. “Hey, I don’t have that answer” then you would with chat.
That’s going to make up an answer. And we go through a testing phase, very… I would say an iterative sprints or iterative cycles where we want to take a small piece of their data and use case, solve that first and then start building on that rather than boiling the whole ocean all at once.
And so it is an iterative process to get to the endpoint, and you’re never really done with your data. And I think that’s one thing that customers have to really grok whether you’re doing data warehousing analytics, business intelligence, AI, you’re always building something and iterating on it, and it’s never really done because your business is always pivoting and changing.
Your data systems are always changing. And so how can you take off? How can you bite off enough? Chunks that you can actually chew and get through and see value on the other end because if you never see business value on the other end is what really kills these projects. So we’re very meticulous and what we’re going to take on with our customers and operators because we need to see true business wins.
Amber Bardon: I think you’re absolutely right that this is definitely very new and, it’s really exciting to think about this being the future. Essentially that we’re taking the technology that we’re all just getting now on our phones and applying this to the industry at whole and it’s been such a huge gap.
A data analytics, data analysis has been such a huge gap in the industry for years and years. And there, there hasn’t really been a great solution. And I almost feel like this is leapfrogging some of the other things like just BI tools, power BI and things like that.
This has been such an interesting conversation. I’ve definitely learned a lot. I might have some follow up questions for you off this podcast, but I do want to ask you if something I ask everybody on the podcast before we wrap up. This is all very new and it is the future, but what do you see beyond this even?
So after this becomes more commonplace and we start to see more and more operators adopting this, what do you think is next?
Gregory Petrossian: What I think is the future of AI and AI copilots is we’re going to see organizations having these AI copilots to be specialized within their business. You’re going to have a copilot that really knows your H. R. data and your H. R. processes. It knows your sales and marketing department really well, and it’s helping them. And so you’ll see business domains having these specialized copilots helping in their day to day, their analysis, their forecasting and that’ll become way more commonplace as reporting business intelligence has been already.
What we’re going to see as well as the next stage in what copilots can do is automated agents actually doing these tasks, having a level of autonomy of, ” can you work with this resident’s family on any of their questions” and it can go and scan. Oh, I see this email that came in and I’m going to respond based on the resident’s information, the context I have, and it’s going to be able to do that more automatically.
And so I think, again, that’s what’s really scaring people is that it can do more and more task oriented things on its own. But I think we’re pretty far away from that. And it’s the tasks. That’s really the grunt work that we don’t really want to do or should be doing. And we really want to lean more on the human touch and the human relationship in senior living, actually caring for the resident. Rather than the administrative back end back office test that we are grown to do.
Amber Bardon: Gregory, is there anything we didn’t talk about that you think our listeners should know? I think all of this is going to be really new to them. And I think a lot of people will be excited about this, but I just want to give you a chance to say anything else that you want to mention before we wrap up.
Gregory Petrossian: I think it’s an exciting time for operators to lean in to their data. I think it’s an exciting time just for health care in general, where we can finally realize what we’ve been saying for so long of being able to provide better care for cheaper price and to really be, value based in how we operate.
So, excited to see what the next 5 to 10 years holds for senior living at large.
Amber Bardon: Me too. It’s an exciting time for sure. We’re seeing a big shift in the industry and a lot of new technology and I think it’s a great time for senior living tech.
Gregory Petrossian: Yeah. And thank you again for hosting me. So appreciate it.
Amber Bardon: Yeah, so glad you were able to join us. And where can our listeners learn more?
Gregory Petrossian: Please visit our website, skypoint.ai. We’ve got blog posts. You can typically find my blog posts or my teams. We have a YouTube where we have tons of content as well, where we teach about AI, other Microsoft technologies, we love being thought leaders and mentors in this space.
We do a lot of free trainings as well. You mentioned power. B. I. we do a lot of free power. B. I. and what’s called fabric training and Copilot training. So check it out and hope to see you at one of our trainings or webinars.
Amber Bardon: Thank you so much for sharing that. And thanks for coming on the podcast today.And listeners, if you would like to give us feedback on this episode or find more of our episodes or give us any ideas or topics for future episodes, you can find us at raisingtechpodcast.com and you can find us on all the social media at Raising Tech Podcast. Thank you for listening.
Join our Founder & CEO, Amber Bardon, on an exciting episode of Raising Tech, where she has a thought-inspiring conversation with Gregory Petrossian, Director of Sales at SkyPoint. SkyPoint is an AI-platform for Senior Living operators, which offers them the chance to chat with their data.
Since SkyPoint‘s secure and unified platform helps communities establish a central space where they can gather, consolidate, and prepare data, SkyPoint’s solution can boost Senior Living communities’ organizational productivity. Tune in to explore the meaning of AI and what it means to chat with your data using SkyPoint, unlocking its potential to revolutionize Senior Living communities just like yours!
You can find Skypoint here: Website or LinkedIn
Raising Tech is powered by Parasol Alliance, The Strategic Planning & Full-Service IT Partner exclusively serving Senior Living Communities.
Amber Bardon: Welcome to Raising Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Amber Bardon. Our guest today is Dylan Conley. Dylan is the Chief Technology Officer for LifeLoop. LifeLoop is a technology platform for senior living providers that provides engagement and operations functionality for the day to day.
Welcome to the show, Dylan.
Dylan Conley: Thank you. Thanks for having me, Amber.
Amber Bardon: Dylan, would you start us off by telling our listeners about who you are, what's your background, what brought you to LifeLoop?
Dylan Conley: Absolutely. I've been in technology for decades, but really just entered senior living. So my background is more enterprise SaaS applications, spent years and years with large technology companies building software solutions.
So this was a big move for me just a few years ago. What really drew me to LifeLoop was the mission. The mission and the outcomes to be able to innovate and provide technology to an industry that affects the lives of so many people has been really just the greatest privilege of my career.
Amber Bardon: I'm always curious to ask people who are new to this industry, because I've been working in this industry for almost 17 years. So how do you find it? What do you see are some of the differences from your previous past experiences?
Dylan Conley: It's interesting. I think that organizations that we work with, no 2 are alike.
The needs of the seniors, the needs of the staff, they're always different. And so 1 might come to a technology company or setting and expect we're going to build a solution that is so robust and simple that it meets everybody's needs, and that is absolutely not true in this industry. Customization, flexibility, ensuring that every individual, regardless of the level of care, has their needs met is a fun challenge.
Amber Bardon: So let's talk a little bit more about LifeLoop. Tell me about the history of LifeLoop. How long has it been around? What's the founding story? Anything you can share there?
Dylan Conley: Believe it or not, our story started 25 years ago, our founders were the first to break computers into senior living and they found very quickly that it had a huge impact.
It was immediately clear. There was an opportunity and this was needed in senior living. So they founded IN2L aimed at helping seniors engage with specialized content covering all the dimensions of wellness. Over the past 25 years. We've continued to curate, collect, refine that content set so that our engagement solution has more than 6,000 different content items covering the needs of seniors in every care setting and handling scenarios that you would run into in just about any context.
About a decade ago, LifeLoop was formed or founded with the goal of helping families stay connected with their loved ones, helping families stay connected with staff. So it was really a communication centric platform, but through the years it's evolved into a full operational platform with solutions for every department and senior living. Everything from activity and calendar management and maintenance, transportation and photo sharing. We've really built a solution that covers the needs of everybody. The 2 companies came together, LifeLoop and IN2L, a little over a year ago, and we were able to very quickly integrate both the products and the teams thanks to our shared DNA which is the mission.
Amber Bardon: Actually, I was going to ask you about that because I know that everybody is aware of the merger between IN2L or It's Never Too Late and LifeLoop. And I've had clients asking me "What does this mean? What are the changes? What does this mean for us as a potential client or an actual client?"
So can you just talk a little bit about how that partnership works and any changes or integrations down the road?
Dylan Conley: Yeah so we've already integrated the products to the degree that you can get everything that each company provided but now you can get them together. It means that our robust content library that was through IN2L only available in pre packaged hardware solutions is now available through the App Store Play Store in the LifeLoop app. It also means that we can bring the content, bring the engagement to different areas of the daily senior living workflow in new and innovative, creative ways that wouldn't be possible without the two solutions all part of the same platform.
Nobody has lost anything. Nobody's going to lose anything. This has allowed us to bring just a tremendous amount of value to our customers in addition to what we were already providing.
Amber Bardon: Thanks for sharing that. Can you talk a little bit more about what does LifeLoop do specifically? Can you tell me about what are some of the key differences between LifeLoop and some of the other platforms on the marketplace today?
Dylan Conley: Sure. So specifically LifeLoop provides daily senior living workflow platform that assists in all of the day to day activities. Our content, our engagement system is really our biggest differentiator in that we have been perfecting this over the last 25 years. And we still to this day have a large team dedicated to curating
and highlighting content so that every month there's fresh new activities for residents to take part in. Never a dull moment. Never an experience of "Okay, I've done it all. What more can I do with this platform?" It never happens because there's always something new. On the operation side, staff operations, our platform handles messaging communication, whether it be between families and staff, families and residents inter staff communication.
Mass emails, notifications to the community and into families. Our messaging platform is really the core of the platform. And then the heartbeat is the calendars and activity management. We have built a robust activity management framework into the product so that you can facilitate and automate the day to day.
Everybody's on the same page. Every resident and family knows at a glance what's planned activity, attendance tracking registration. And everything you could imagine that would go with activity management. In addition to this, we have transportation capabilities, maintenance capabilities, so that a resident can request help in their apartment. Photo sharing, digital displays, and so we tie it all together with the ability to showcase important information in strategic places within the community, whether it be what's on the menu near the dining hall, what's the agenda today in a recreation room?
All of that information available from within our platform. You can display in digital displays throughout your community. Now that's just some of our key features. We do a dozen or more different things with our platform.
Amber Bardon: I want to just reiterate what you said because that is an important distinction between LifeLoop and some of the other products out there is that not only are you a resident engagement platform, but you also do the staffing side, which is really unique. I don't think any of your competitors also have the ability for staff to use the tool and use the system.
Dylan Conley: It is the content, the engagement that is our key differentiator and not just that you can do the 2 with 1 platform, which does bring a tremendous amount of value to just 1 less system that you need to worry about learning and maintaining, but it allows to integrate and weave the content and the senior engagement into the day to day and in creative ways that others just wouldn't be able to do.
Amber Bardon: So walk me through that a little bit. Let's say I am a staff member at a community that has LifeLoop implemented and all the different modules and aspects you talked about. What does that look like for my day to day workflow?
Dylan Conley: One example is we have the ability to bring our music content into the displays. And so what's typically a static digital display that's presenting information in a slideshow format. Now you have accompanying music, and so you can fill the room. You can essentially provide overhead music from our content offering, which is specifically curated to the needs and the tastes of folks in senior living directly within your display.
Amber Bardon: So let's talk a little bit about the industry specifically. So what are you seeing from LifeLoop's perspective?
What are some of the key challenges that the industry is facing as well, specific to communities? And how is LifeLoop helping to solve those challenges?
Dylan Conley: I think there are a few big challenges that we hear from our customers over and over. Just ubiquitous problems in the industry and hearing that feedback has driven the direction of our product.
We take a customer led approach to product design and and strategy, but to answer your question directly, the 1st problem I would call out is staff turnover. I don't know that I've met a single operator that isn't focused on improving staff retention. It's a tremendous problem in the industry today . So our products are built to save staff time and to empower them to do their best work. These are some of the most talented, hardworking professionals I've ever met, really a demanding job. And so to save them time is a meaningful thing. We've long held the belief that the key to improving staff retention is reducing burnout. Studies have shown in the vast majority of cases, burnout is cited as a key reason for leaving a community.
These staff members just don't have enough time to provide the residents with the experience that they wish to provide. And it's unfortunate. It's that they can't meet their own quality standards, which leads to burnout. Some of our most innovative customers approached us saying we're observing something.
We think that we're seeing longer staff retention, the longer duration of employment on average. We've seen that since rolling out your system. Can you validate that? Do you see in your data that's true? So we dug in. We looked at the data. We found that on average. Length of employment or length of activity within LifeLoop is 31 percent longer than the average length of employment in senior living.
So this is a pretty big difference, but the data is very clear. That when staff members have access to LifeLoop, they stay employed at least 31 percent longer. And when you consider the costs of onboarding new staff and potentially using temp workers, it's really a significant cost savings.
Amber Bardon: That's really fascinating. How did you guys get that data? Did you do surveys? Did you ask the HR teams to provide that information?
Dylan Conley: In product data, we looked at when did the staff user first become active?
When did they start using the system, all the way through to when did they stop, when did they become inactive. On average for each staff user of our application was 31 percent longer than industry average.
Amber Bardon: Congratulations. That's an accomplishment.
Dylan Conley: Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. We're very excited about that.
Amber Bardon: Let's talk a little bit about the technology market in senior living. I always say that I think senior living technology is the most exciting technology field because it's such a huge area that's really been ignored for a really long period of time.
So there's so much innovation happening. So many new vendors coming into the space. What's your assessment of that?
Dylan Conley: Yeah, so there's really 1 thing that I've been hearing a lot over the last 18 months or so. it is that there are a lot of technology providers in this space. There are more than 300 providers that I'm aware of, that the team has analyzed, we've looked at capabilities.
Just understanding the technology landscape and the vast majority of those 300 providers have just one capability in their product or said another way, their point players. I see the technology landscape and senior living has fragmented, made up of hundreds of point players. And as a result, a lot of our customers come to us frustrated.
They try investing in technology, but now they're stuck with numerous systems that don't talk to each other. This exacerbates an already overwhelmed staff who now has to maintain all these different systems, each with their own idiosyncrasies, each with their own learning curves. And making the staff retention and burnout problem worse and so essentially undoing the positive intended effect.
A very small minority of providers in the space have 5 or more capabilities where your typical senior living community wants to automate or digitize dozens of different workflows. A very small minority who do more than a dozen capabilities like LifeLoop. I think in summary, my thought is that I don't see having a landscape
so fragmented is scalable in the long term. I see point players only really thriving. With investments and integration or with M&A with mergers with other point players or expansion of the tool set.
Amber Bardon: Yeah, I completely agree with you. I think definitely the vendors that can figure out how to integrate are the ones that have the best long term solution, because we really moved to a place where best in breed is what everyone's looking for.
We're moved away from the old days of one system doing everything. And, we definitely hear that a lot from our clients that having 10 different passwords to things and systems not talking to each other is such a huge challenge. So I'm really agree with you on all
of those comments.
Dylan Conley: Yes, that's right. And it's more and more of our customers are asking for integrations and that's why a big focus for us over this past year has been building APIs to support open synchronization with any system as well as SSO. So then instead of having to maintain passwords and usernames across all of your different systems, you have one set of credentials and it flows through.
And we've been getting really good response from those capabilities.
Amber Bardon: We have run into some challenges with the SSL with the Microsoft MFA credentials, but that's probably a different topic. But let's talk a little bit about the future. So what do you see are some trends that are going to be happening in the industry?
And I'm specifically curious. How do you think AI is going to fit into that? That's a question that I get a lot. So I'm interested to hear your take.
Dylan Conley: Yeah, so AI is here to stay and generative AI in particular, I think will have a major impact in the next year or 2. It's happening now. The interest is there now, and it's happening quickly.
I think there are a lot of really time consuming tasks that. are going to be automated as technology providers master the APIs provided by vendors like open AI, the makers of chat GPT, just as one example, where these sophisticated systems can create what one of us could with nearly the same quality, but in a fraction of the time.
What's even more exciting about this is they can be trained to meet very specific criteria. Whether it be corporate objectives or industry level best practices. And so highly tunable, accurate automation systems, I think, is going to do a lot to reduce the dependence on the few highly tenured staff who are most in demand in the community who have been there longest and understand what's the daily operations and the residents better than anybody's will take burden off of them, which will in turn improve retention of the folks that are most crucial to the success of the operation.
Amber Bardon: Is there anything that LifeLoop is working on that you can tell us about that's going to be coming out in the future.
Dylan Conley: Yes, and now I'll just say that we are working on some big things that make use of artificial intelligence, generative AI in particular, to meaningfully reduce time in a very measurable way.
I can't say much beyond that. Unfortunately, but I will talk about something that is coming very soon here, just in the next month. And we already have this in some of our more innovative customers hands as they pilot it. We're preparing to launch a product that we call LifeLoop Insights. With this product we are empowering and arming operators with all the operational data so they can understand at a glance how their communities are performing operationally and how their residents are engaging.
So we provide KPIs that serve as leading indicators. So operators know where risk is emerging within their system, where to invest their time and attention. We also provide actionable insight. So it's clear what steps to take with each community to improve performance. Front and center, plain English.
Here are the recommendations of steps that you can take to make your communities more efficient and help your residents engage better and more holistically. And we've seen that when done right, there are very real, very measurable wellness outcomes, wellness improvements. We use data, not just from within the system but across the industry and broad.
So we have thousands and thousands of communities that use our products today. And so we see the data we've analyzed what does best in class look like in the industry and where are there opportunities for improvement? And with LifeLoop Insights, you have the ability to compare your community's performance, not just to other communities within your system, but across the industry and broad.
Amber Bardon: Sounds really exciting. looking forward to learning more about that in the future. Dylan, thank you so much for joining me today. Is there anything that we have not covered, or any words of wisdom or advice that you would like to share with our listeners?
Dylan Conley: I really appreciate your time.
Thank you. Great questions. I think the only other thing I'd say is this is an exciting time. We're seeing evolution and technology unfold in front of us. It's not too different from the birth of the Internet, the birth of the cloud. You might call this the birth of generative AI, but I prefer to say we're entering the age of intelligence.
And just like all other evolutionary events in technology, the systems and operational practices that took us here from where we were yesterday, they're not going to take us into the future. So my advice, words of encouragement is to embrace this change. It's the innovators that will differentiate their products by being the first to harness this new technology.
Amber Bardon: I love that. The age of intelligence. You should coin that.
Dylan Conley: Thank you. Maybe I'll, maybe we'll go for a trademark.
Amber Bardon: Dylan, where can our listeners find out more about LifeLoop if they'd like to
learn more?
Dylan Conley: Yes. We are LifeLoop.com. If you go to LifeLoop.com right on the homepage, you can fill in your contact information.
Our phone number is there as well. We'd love to hear from you and we'd love to see if we can help bring value to your communities.
Amber Bardon: Thank you so much for joining me today, Dylan. It's been great having you.
Dylan Conley: Thank you, Amber.
Amber Bardon: Listeners, if you'd like to find more Raising Tech podcasts, or you'd like to share any feedback with us, or you have an idea for a future episode, you can find us online at RaisingTechPodcast. com and on social media at all of the same handles. As always, thank you for listening.
Join our host, Amber Bardon, on the latest episode of Raising Tech as she speaks with Dylan Conley, the Chief Technology Officer of LifeLoop. Discover how LifeLoop's platform is equipped with innovative tools that can improve community operations and enhance staff satisfaction. With LifeLoop technology, residents, families, staff, operators, and owners can all stay connected, resulting in optimized communications and a better overall resident experience.
With over 30% of their team members having worked in Senior Living communities before, LifeLoop understands what it takes to create exceptional senior care. Discover how their smarter communication capabilities keep families, their loved ones, and staff connected by listening to the episode.
You can find more about LifeLoop on their website and LinkedIn.
Amber Bardon: Welcome to Raising Tech podcast. I'm your host, Amber Barden and today my guest is Joel Cormier, who is the Director of Product Development at Viconic Health.
Viconic health is the maker of Viconic Fall Defense technology. Welcome to the show, Joel.
Joel Cormier: Thanks for having me, Amber. I appreciate being on and hello to your listeners.
Amber Bardon: So Joel, this is my first time learning about Viconic Health. So why don't you give me a little bit of background and introduction about the company?
And then let's talk specifically about the fall defense program.
Joel Cormier: Sure. Fall defense is a patented impact protection technology. It's a new intervention in senior living using proven technology that was originally developed in automotive and military and sports for passive impact protection systems.
And the simplest way to really describe it is it's fall protection under your feet. As we know in long term care, we're well aware that falls happen despite everyone's best efforts to prevent them and detect them fall defense is really a new intervention that we've developed for all senior living environments and specifically what it is it's the flooring underlay is the best way to describe it. So it lies between a flexible floor covering and a rigid sub floor. reduces the risk of injury when someone falls on it. So it's not like an airbag, which would be an active system. It's a passive system, like a pad that reduces the risk and severity of fall related injuries.
The other cool thing about it, it's a hundred percent made in the United States and engineered and produced right here in Metro Detroit.
Amber Bardon: So I know there's a lot of different types of fall technology out there. This is definitely a growing field. A lot of those technologies are categorized as preventative or monitoring or after the fact. So how would you categorize this type of technology? Does it help prevent falls in any way? Or is it really after the fall occurs that the benefit comes in?
Joel Cormier: Actually, it's neither. It's really a system that is there because falls do happen, so it doesn't prevent the fall, it doesn't detect the fall, but what it does is reduces the risk of impact injury when you do fall.
Amber Bardon: Can you just explain that to me a little bit more.
Joel Cormier: Levels of impact protection are required in certain areas like automotive and military. They're actually mandated, for instance, by the Federal Highway Traffic Administration for reducing risk of critical injuries and crashes.
Any hard point in a vehicle , has some padding or protection in the event you impact it. It really is like a helmet pad or an absorber that's in between you and whatever the hard surfaces that presents that risk of injury.
Amber Bardon: What are the requirements? Does it raise the floor level? How does it work with a wheelchair or a walker or something like that?
Joel Cormier: The interesting thing is that there are no requirements for floors in long term care or senior living environment. Whereas there are federal standards in automotive, sports and military that require that those surfaces be padded or compliant to reduce the risk of injury. 'Were developed technology that's on over 65 percent of cars and trucks and 75 percent of ground combat vehicles, along with sports helmet liner systems.
Really the way it works is that it lies in wait and is there 24/7 to reduce the risk of injury when you do fall. With our experience in automotive and military and sports impact protection, we were keenly aware that rigid surfaces represent a risk of impact related injuries wherever we live, wherever we play, wherever we age. In 2015 we became a finalist under the Head Health Challenges 2, which was actually sponsored by the NFL, GE, and Under Armour, was actually on the 2016 Super Bowl because we were working to build a lab and develop a superior turf underlayment system.
To reduce the risk of concussion and injuries in sports. So that's really how we started developing our underlay system. But we really identified an unmet need in senior living because the concrete and rigid sub floors are so rigid and long term care and even in aging in place and residential environments with just the floor covering that they pose a substantial injury risk.
And so during that development work. Carpet and synthetic turf manufacturers that we started interfacing with are the same ones that produce floor coverings. And I want to really be clear in this, that the floor coverings are not the problem relative to reducing the risk of fall related injuries.
They're actually an essential part of the solution because floor coverings. To get back to your original question they're just doing what they are engineered to do. They provide essential traction, cleanability among other, vital functions and the flooring manufacturers, they really do an incredible job of developing functional quality and aesthetically pleasing goods to cover these rigid sub floors.
Through our collaborations, I've developed many friends in the flooring industry and their support was really essential for us understanding how floors work. And, floors also need to support mobility. Some efforts in the past were made by others in an attempt to develop underlayment systems to reduce the risk of injury, but they were either so squishy that they actually created mobility issues.
Or they were so hard and inefficient that they really didn't substantially reduce the risk of injury, if that makes sense. Rigid rubber products they may have a little comfort, but they don't really substantially reduce the risk of injury. Whereas soft foams may be able to absorb injury reduce injury risk, but they create mobility issues and they're squishy.
So we really applied our expertise from our work in other industries, automotive, military, sports to develop a low profile system that supports the mobility and healthy aging. So you really don't know it's there it's firm and stable yet when you fall on it, it's capable of deforming and reducing the risk of injury.
And and we patented it and now we're bringing it to market.
Amber Bardon: Is your ideal scenario to install this flooring in the entire community, or is it generally specific to just the resident room, or how does that work?
Joel Cormier: Our initial installs have been initial individual resident rooms to date but we have had more and more interest moving into 2024 and entire communities or memory care wings or AL wings or skilled nursing facilities.
Those are the 3 levels of long term care that seem to have the most interest. Certainly there's a preventative benefit and independent living as well too. And those type of long term care settings, AL, memory care, skilled nursing so that's where we primarily have seen it in our initial installs have been an individual rooms, but falls can happen every anywhere.
And based on the research falls primarily occur in the bedroom or in the bathroom or somewhere in between. But, trip hazards and other things can create a fall just about anywhere within a facility, or building or home. So it just makes sense to be conscious of where your falls are occurring and, protect those areas specifically and other areas if you're able
Amber Bardon: Are you focusing on senior living communities or are you also able to install this in someone's home if they live independently? And if you have installed in some senior living communities, how has it gone so far? Can you give us any case study results?
Joel Cormier: Yeah, that's great.
Our first applications have all been long term care facilities, AL, memory care, skilled nursing, and really, since we've brought it and made it available to the market the warm welcome we've received from providers, caregivers, gerontologists, researchers, designers, architects, and installers has really been amazing.
We have a 26 page white paper available on our website with the details and the science between how Viconic works, how it supports mobility, ambulation, walking, wheelchairs, motorized wheelchairs, yet it's capable of deforming to reduce the risk of the fall related injury on our website.
So I encourage anyone if they want to geek out there's 26 pages of science there. And it also includes the data from our beta sites, and some of our pilot partners on the actual fall data from the rooms with and without the iconic system so iconic was installed and select rooms. They put their highest fall risk patients in those rooms and then we compare it to the rest of the facility that may or may not have, high risk patients and thus far the providers have been very pleased with the the outcome.
Amber Bardon: Joel, is there anything that you are working on that will be released in the future that you are able to share with our listeners?
Joel Cormier: falls happen at home as well. And so we've begun our effort to launch Viconic At Home.
The vast majority of seniors currently are aging in place and prefer to age in place as long as possible before making a decision or having to move into a long term care facility. For seniors aging in place, incorporating Viconic into a remodel or even a new build just may make more sense for them.
And 1 of the things that our product can do in addition to reducing the risk of injury is reduce things like trip hazards, that can cause a fall like rugs. Because our product does provide some comfort underfoot and it does have an R value, so it does provide, some thermal insulation.
And so some of those things that you might have, a sink side mat or a bedside rug that could promote a fall can be eliminated when you put the Viconic in there. So we've just really started to develop a network of preferred certified aging in place. Professionals that are focused on assessing homes and their conditions and ways that they can be modified and improve so people can age and live their best life at home.
And also along with that, working to develop a network of preferred remodelers and installers and, potentially new builds as well too. We also love the greenhouse model, the small home model. Where you have multiple residents occupying a residential home and an assisted living or memory care type application.
Amber Bardon: So I know you mentioned earlier that there are not any requirements to installing this, but I imagine there's some type of cost to bring up the floor and put this underneath. So what would a community need to know that they would need to change or do from an infrastructure or investment perspective for an install?
Joel Cormier: One of the things that we engineered the product for was ease of installation. So it is a floating system, so it can go over just about any rigid surface that needs to be protected with very little surface preparation. Basically, these panels are modular, they stick together you cut them with a box cutter or a zip tool to the periphery of the room, and then you conventionally install a flexible floor covering over the top of it.
Because the product is a little bit under a half of an inch in height, we had to engineer a transition for it, which we also supply, so [00:12:00] it's a sloped surface that integrates with Viconic, so you can get up onto it from a surface that does not have Viconic. So that was one of the developments that we have.
With that increase in height, you have to consider door jams and other things within the space. But it's all things that are considered in, any remodel or new build. Most providers have been looking at it in the scope of when their current flooring needs to be replaced or they have a room turn.
That's when they're considering installing Viconic, and it can be installed very quickly and efficiently within that time period. Certainly we're looking at more new builds and more construction in long term care. But, that's going to be a little bit farther down the road for us, given the current environment, which has been a difficult environment to launch a new product and to say the least.
Amber Bardon: Yeah, that's what I was thinking as you were speaking that this would really be ideal in a renovation or new construction scenario. So you can get it. I imagine that the install is much easier to do and more cost [00:13:00] effective in that scenario.
Joel Cormier: Yeah, it's actually the easiest in a new build when you don't have to tear up an existing floor covering you've got nice clean surfaces to work with, and you can finish it and you don't have the reinvestment of a new floor covering but thus far the feedback from the installations have been very positive, people really don't know it's there which is one of the great things about it is It's just invisibly supporting healthy aging and in person center care.
Amber Bardon: I know that your company has a grant program. Can you tell our listeners a little bit more about that?
Joel Cormier: Yeah, so our ownership is very passionate about what we're doing to benefit the lives of seniors, both in the United States and globally. We really expected to be farther along than we are, but we're in this for the long haul.
And this has been a challenging environment for us in the midst of a global pandemic and staffing shortages and cost increases and cost of goods and services. But we're prepared to, continue to invest and 1 of the ways that we're helping make this product available is through the grant program that we've developed. And after two years of positive feedback from our pilot sites, we rolled out this program so providers could experience Viconic within their walls, starting mid last year. And under the grant program, we provide Viconic Fall Defense at no charge for two to three rooms.
And we work with the facility to support the installation. We work with the provider's team, their preferred flexible floor coverings, and installers, and whoever their floor covering providers are. We train them up on the install and support the initial installation on site. And part of the collaboration with the providers is that following installation, we share
and compare the fall data from the Viconic and non Viconic rooms and evaluate outcomes. And by the end of this month, we'll have awarded at least seven providers a grant. And be sharing that information and data with them and working to improve outcomes. Going into 2024, we're likely to continue the grant program.
It is on a tab on our website. So if you're interested, you can apply at www.viconichealth.com. We ask for some information and it's easy to apply.
Amber Bardon: So can you walk me through what does the product look like? Do you have different design colors, different choices, other different looks, patterns, things like that?
Joel Cormier: That's a good question. It's an underlay, so you never see it. But it's about 11 millimeters, which is 7/16ths of an inch in thickness. And it has an energy absorbing Cone layer and those cones buckle and collapse and are the energy absorbing layer that lies below a rigid load leveling layer, which is the layer that the floor covering the flexible floor covering attaches to that's the [00:16:00] surface that a pressure sensitive.
Flooring adhesive is applied to that is used to attach the floor covering the iconic and it's really that simple. The facilities can use the flexible floor coverings that they're currently comfortable with and simply put by Viconic, beneath those floor coverings. And it provides, a level of protection that the floor covering itself is just not capable of doing.
So those panels, it comes in individual panels. There's a overlap of one seam to another that attaches to one another with a pressure sensitive adhesive. There's a release liner you peel away, and the panels are about five feet by about two and a half feet, so it does go down very fast on the installation side.
Then once the Viconic is down it's very, it's a conventional floor covering install over the top of it. Your average flooring installer, if they can install the floor covering and have installed an underlayment in the past, should be able to install Viconic. So it's fairly simple from an installation and execution standpoint.
But it's really one system. We can tune the stiffness of our energy absorber up and down. We feel we have it optimized right now for most senior applications to reduce the risk of injury, across the entire aging population.
Amber Bardon: Is there any opportunity to put any additional technology into the flooring that could help detect a fall so that you would be able to have, both functions at once with this fall program.
Joel Cormier: We think so. We look forward to collaborating more with current suppliers of fall technology. Our product is a bit translucent. We do anticipate being able to maybe do some way finding from beneath the floor around the perimeter as well to help guide, people with cognitive impairments That might help them find the bathroom at night, or if they have vision impairments those are things that we've anticipated and we'll be working on and, we're here, we've collaborated thus far with, leading gerontologists, researchers, flooring manufacturers, and we want to work more with providers directly understand what their needs are and provide systems that that make the most sense for the residents and for their caregivers as well, too.
Amber Bardon: Joel, I've really learned a lot on this episode and speaking to you. Is there any words of advice or wisdom or anything that you haven't shared yet that you would like our listeners to know about?
Joel Cormier: Yeah, I just want to say, that there's been so much great work that's been done on fall prevention and detection, but unfortunately, falls happen.
And we're really working to fill this unmet need in this space. And we really appreciate the support. We look forward to collaborating with providers and, from a personal standpoint, my mom fell and broke her pelvis and her inner humorous a couple of years ago. And fortunately she was able to come back, but a lot of people don't, if you're over 65 and you break a hip.
There's a 25 percent chance you're dead within a year of that from complications of that hip fracture and traumatic brain injury is almost as bad. Stay as healthy and as active as you can. Use your muscles. Your muscles are your best padding and protection against the fall. That's often times why we don't break when we're younger and we're frail and have more breaks when we're older, in addition to things like osteoporosis.
In your environment, remove trip hazards that could cause a fall. And lastly, we just ask people to look at the data that we've published and the science behind it. A lot of people in healthcare aren't really aware of what is being done in other industries and the standards that are out there that are protecting a lot of us in our day to day drives to and from picking up our kids or, just playing sports or
playing on a playground, for instance. Just look at the science and, if someone you care for is at risk of falling, we, we hope to have a Viconic available in markets and ask that people, consider it going forward. But stay healthy, be well. And try not to fall.
Amber Bardon: Yeah, this is definitely a huge area where we're seeing a lot of technology come to play. So I'm excited to see all these new vendors coming into the space. Old vendors getting into the space because this definitely is a prevalent issue and can cause a lot of major problems for people.
So thank you so much for joining me today, Joel, and I really enjoyed getting to learn more about your product. Where can our listeners find you if they'd like to learn more?
Joel Cormier: To learn more, you can reach us at www. ViconicHealth. com at the link that'll be shared in this podcast.
Amber Bardon: Thank you so much, Joel.
Joel Cormier: Thank you. Have a great day.
Amber Bardon: And listeners, if you'd like to find more episodes, or if you have feedback on this episode, or if you have an idea you'd like to hear about in a future episode, you can find us at RaisingTechPodcast.com and Raising Tech Podcasts on all social media platforms. As always, thank you for listening.
In this episode, Joel Cormier, Director of Product Development at Viconic Health, sits down with Parasol Alliance's Founder & CEO, Amber Bardon to talk about Viconic Health's revolutionary and unique flooring solution that can minimize fall-related injuries for Senior Living community residents. Viconic Fall Defense is designed to work as a layer of protection underneath the flooring, supporting fall protection strategies while providing comfort for staff.
Find out how Viconic Fall Defense can enhance mobility, while reducing fall-related injuries in all senior care settings, including Skilled Nursing, Assisted Living, Memory Care and Independent Living by tuning in for the full episode!
You can learn more about Viconic on their website and also on LinkedIn.
Discover more about how Viconic Health's unique solution can diminish fall-related injuries by reading their data-driven white paper here.
Raising Tech is powered by Parasol Alliance, The Strategic Planning & Full-Service IT Partner exclusively serving Senior Living Communities.
Welcome to Raising Tech podcast. I'm your host, Amber Barden, and today my guest is the founder and CEO of Cubigo. I'm going to let him introduce himself. He is from Belgium and his name is a little bit difficult for me to say. Welcome to the show.
Geert Houden:Hi Amber. My name is Geert Houden, founder & CEO of Cubigo.
Amber Bardon:So nice to meet you. I've known about Cubigo for a really long time and I've talked to a lot of people at your organization, but this is the first time that we've met, so really appreciate you taking time to come on the show today.
Geert Houden:Yeah , thanks for having me. It's great to meet it Virtual <inaudible> . So yeah, thanks for having me.
Amber Bardon:Tell me about the history of Cubigo. How did you come to found the company? This is the first time that I knew that you were from Europe, so how did you come to the US and get into that market?
Geert Houden:So I started the company in 2011, personal story with my grandmother, like a lot of founders in this space. We started out in Europe more from a home care angle and trying to keep people in their own environments for as long as possible with the help of technology. When we first visited the US in 2015, we saw a big opportunity in residential care and senior living in general. First when we came here in 2016 and we first lived for one year in a Brookdale community just to understand the market and the ins and outs of the needs of the people within senior living. All that information experience that we gathered, we used to build a new product, the current Cubigo version, which was launched in the US in 2018 and that is still being used and now in different countries as well. We brought it back to Europe.
Amber Bardon:What is your market segmentation or do you have a lot of clients in the United States and in Europe? And I'm just curious, is the senior living industry very similar there or is it different?
Geert Houden:It is different. First of all, Europe, the home care market is a bit more developed so people stay at home as long as possible and when they're not able to do that anymore, they go into more skilled nursing. So the retirement living segment is not as present as it is in North America. We do have 70% of our business coming from North America, so that's the US and Canada. The rest is coming from UK, Europe, and South Africa. So basically we still see both markets, very interesting development, but the North American market is the biggest for us this moment.
Amber Bardon:When you say home care is more developed, does that mean that people are using Cubigo in their homes?
Geert Houden:They do, but it's always initiated by the operator. So it's that beyond the wall principle where you leverage the services that an operator already has organized in a building or a campus and use that to bring to people outside in a 10 miles radius or something like that. Cubigo is built with that in mind and that is definitely also something we see going to happen in North America, but it's a bit more about already in Europe.
Amber Bardon:I definitely have a lot of our clients looking into that type of technology. It hasn't really taken off so far, but I agree with you that I think that that's coming and I think there's going to be a big push for people to remain in their homes much longer just due to the costs of some of the communities.
Geert Houden:The cost is definitely an important point. The other one is the expectation of the end user consumer and the baby boom generation looks a bit different at senior living and we know that some of these people just never want to live there and that could also be a solution for them to just stay at home.
Amber Bardon:From your perspective, what do you see are the major challenges that are facing senior living in the next few years?
Geert Houden:Well, I think one we already talked about that's the expectation level of the baby boomers. We also see more and more people walking in with technology and they expect from the operator that they can interact with their tools with the organization. On the other side, there is the labor challenge. So there is a lot of pressure from that perspective, and we believe that the expectation level plus the labor challenge can be supported, at least solved for a part with technology. The biggest challenge we see on that front is that a lot of our clients and prospects, they have a lot of point solutions because every department purchased their own application, their own digital tool, and now when everybody is working in a digital way, we end up with 10, 15 different point solutions. And so there is not enough integration, not from a user experience where you have to use all these different applications, but also from a data perspective for all the data is now in 10 different silos. We believe that in the digital transformation of senior living, going from point solutions to integration is a very, very important step.
Amber Bardon:So I know that the resident engagement market has gotten a little bit crowded in the last few years. There have been some companies that have been out there for a while , CareMerge, which is now Icon, TouchTown. I know Cubigo has been around for a few years. How do you see yourself as a differentiator against the other products in the marketplace?
Geert Houden:We cannot just be bold resident engagement because we have extended the platform with other modules that tap into for us overall nonclinical environment instead of just being in a silo of resident engagement. So one of the big developments we have done the last couple of years is the hospitality suite point of sale payment layer that is available for all departments to capture ancillary revenues, not only in the dining room but also billable activities, maintenance, housekeeping, transportation, and bring that all together for invoicing , with EHR , the financial , systems in the backend. And we have added the visitor management module, we have added different services like transportation, housekeeping, maintenance, so it's more than just resident engagement and we try to integrate everything on the nonclinical side and integrate with the clinical side of the EHR and go to more integration and integrated workflows than just being in another silo.
Amber Bardon:I think a big part of that, and it's related back to what you were saying with the data analytics is integrations with other systems in the marketplace. And I agree with you, I think there's a huge lack in the industry right now of centralized data and KPIs and it's something that really needs to get addressed. I feel like the entire industry is really far behind other industries with being able to just have key data at your fingertips. So how are you addressing integration and data analytics through your platform?
Geert Houden:So first of all, there is the integration with third party applications. We mainly focus there on the EHR billing and the property management solutions like PCC, Yardi, so forth. We do also integrate with the workshops , maintenance facility management platforms. Basically we integrate all that data with our set or own data through data lake. So we have a very solid data infrastructure in the platform that at least bring all that data together and to start not only provide that business dashboards and correlation between these data points, but that is also a starting point of smarter algorithms like AI that can see patterns in these data that we as human beings are not able to see anymore. Before you tap into that, I know AI is kind of a hype or a trend. Before you can do smart things with AI, you have to integrate and bring your data together otherwise impossible. And that is why we first want to go for integrated workflows and then put that layer of AI and all that .
Amber Bardon:Can you talk a little bit more about those integrated workflows? What does that mean for a community and their day-to-day?
Geert Houden:Since we have visitor management, resident engagement, point of sale, all running on the same platform, they share basically everything. Once you have integrated your EHR for a resident directory and all the residents are synced, this resident directory is available in all these different modules. When you have a visitor, a family member coming in through our visitor management kiosk and they sign in automatically, they are available in the point of sale when they go for a lunch in the community and we can keep the preferences of that family member as well. Once you are a family member using visitor management, you get an invite for the family app to keep in touch with the community. Once you sign up through resident engagement module for an activity and it's a craft beer tasting of $20, that charge automatically flows onto your invoice. So we integrate all these different elements that we can. You are a prospect coming in for a tour, it's integrated with our digital signage. So your prospect name can appear on the digital signage. Hey, welcome Ms. Jones . In our community, once you upload your menus in Cubigo, they're available on digital signage and the app on the POS you can print them. So you don't need to put all that data in all these different applications anymore.
Amber Bardon:Many communities already have a lot of these modular solutions in place for point of sale or visitor management, for example. So what is your ideal client? What is the best use case for Cubigo? Do you intend to try to replace systems if they exist or do you think a client that is maybe is lacking systems are still on paper, which they exist? I've been to several of those communities in the last year.
Geert Houden:The ideal client is one that is working on paper and is making a huge leap forward by going not burst through all these point solutions and then to an integrated platform, but just skip all that and go from paper to an integrated platform because then they have maximum value. It's true that most of the providers and operators today have point solutions in place and then it's either replacement or integration and both can work. We can also integrate with physical management solutions for example, but we do have our own module which is fully integrated. That gives you always more value than trying to integrate because integration is also a very interesting word. Everybody says they're integrating, everybody says they have APIs, but in reality when you look at what they actually can do, it's sometimes very disappointing or it costs a lot of money. And that's why we believe that integrated platforms have a higher chance of success and just try to integrate with everyone and everybody.
Amber Bardon:Definitely that's true. I always advise our clients when they hear the word integration to really ensure they understand what does that mean? What exactly are the data points and how do those data points translate back and forth and how does that actually happen? Is it automated? Because I've had some vendors say they have an integration and it turns out it's an actual CSV file that has to be manually uploaded.
Geert Houden:Yeah. Another example is a maintenance request, right? You do a maintenance request and then we integrate with the maintenance team and we do that by sending them an email. Well , that is not an integration for me . An integration is you as a resident created ticket in Cubigo, it flows automatically in TELS or Worxhub. It creates automatically a ticket in there. When a technician in Worxhub or TELS changes the state of the ticket or has another question or additional comments, automatically that flows back to the resident interface with a notification resident can answer that goes back again and so forth. That is a real integration, not just an email that is solution to a team member.
Amber Bardon:So Cubigo is offering solutions to several of the different types of systems that are needed for a community. What is your long range plan? Are you planning to eventually have more solutions that can meet all the needs, such as EMR someday. Can you share a little bit about what you see as in the future?
Geert Houden:No , that's a very good question because you can think about indeed broadening your product scope also in the clinical direction. That is a choice we made to not do so. We will not compete with the clinical and financial systems out there. We believe we are very complimentary and should integrate with them rather than replacing them. The strategy we will follow is twofold or we have two angles. The first is the technology innovation angle or product innovation, and that will all be around integration data and AI. We currently are working on a happy aging indicator , so it's not a word for a wellbeing score , which takes all the data points that we have. And that is a lot because we do integrate with a lot of departments. I've come up with a very objective core for that particular resident. Not only that, we will also give, or the AI will give three, four recommendations, what to do with that person to get the score up so they can focus your efforts and your resources instead of just doing everything for everyone. So we believe that there's the direction that we should go into from a product innovation perspective. The other angle is way more around business model and then we are back to the beginning of not only this conversation, but also the beginning of our company. We believe that there is a big group of people living outside the senior living community that also can be supported by services in that community. Not only services like coming in for a lunch or coming in for an activity, but also the social side and being part of a community, being part of a group of people while you still just live in your own box . And that beyond the walls a concept is so prevalent in the UK and Europe. Also the opportunity of being a global company, of course, that we can bring these best practices from one part of the world to the other one. And so the US, Canada is maybe not fully there yet, but I'm sure in the next five to 10 years that business model of beyond the wall memberships is coming up and if you have all the experience and the product build aren't around that, well, we can be a very interesting partner for companies that are looking for that type of new business models.
Amber Bardon:So when you think about the biggest challenges and threats facing the industry right now, do you believe that those are related to your long-term strategy?
Geert Houden:They are. Again, workforce challenge will not go away. There is the aging of the population and will have to do the work with less people. And the only way to do that is being more efficient and the only way to be more efficient is technology. So there is a very clear hat with digital transformation, AI, the use of data towards efficiency, that is clear. The other side of the changing expectations of the baby boomers that want way more personalization, totally different approach of our service offering a different product, more technology support and so forth. Well , that's the center of the platform. The resident is in the center. We have built everything from the perspective of the resident. The resident is not able to use the technology. There was always a team member or a family member that can do it for the resident, but we put the resident first. In the beginning 10 years ago, people said, you're crazy. Older people are not used to use technology and now we are 10 years later or further. You know better than I do that the adoption of technology with this target group of like 65, 70 plus people is exponentially growing. And so by putting that from the start in the center, we have a additive edge and we believe that the threat of the baby boomer will not in senior living anymore, can also be in a way solved by offering these services outside the community, beyond the walls supported by this technology.
Amber Bardon:What do you think a community should know if they're thinking about implementing a solution like Cubigo? What should they consider in terms of preparation and what would be the biggest successes to an implementation?
Geert Houden:At the same time, probably our biggest challenge today in selling Cubigo is that we are not selling to one department. We are selling to an organization. That means that you have to have your different nonclinical departments on the same page when you go from fragmented ecosystem of apps to an integrated platform because everybody has to has to tap into that platform with their department. So it's a challenge and an opportunity if you are successful in that as an organization. And that's typically driven by an operational leader, COO or VP of operations. If you're successful in that, you have a way more streamlined organization. But to get everybody on that same page, it takes time and it , and there is , uh, a bit of change management and leadership that is needed to to do that. I would say that that is the , the , the most successful clients are the ones that are having the leadership and change management capabilities to bring the, the departments on the same page and go , uh, for a more integrated platform than they had before.
Amber Bardon:I think those are definitely indicators of success on the community enterprise , uh, staff culture. How about from the resident perspective?
Geert Houden:And so that is a , by the way, a number that we see growing every month , uh, almost, but the current adoption of, of our technology in let's say an IL and independent living setting, which is still of course this sweet spot because you have , uh, a younger demographic that is a bit more used to technology is around 75%. So that's pretty high. That means that 75% of the residents are actively using this tool to help them in their daily lives. The success there is that first of all, you have to make , uh, your , uh, your platform, in this case cubicle. You have to make it part of the daily life of the resident. Also the training aspect, that means we don't do the training. We want the community to do that in a, let's say a weekly iPad class or a weekly cubicle cafe or something, which is baked in into the, the work that the community is doing anyway. The same with the onboarding. If you onboard a new resident, this platform should be part of that onboarding. This is how we do things here. If you do that successful in a year time, you reach these adoption levels of 75, 80% and that means a lot more efficiency. 'cause if 80% of your residents is doing their service requests through the platform all straight with the different departments, instead of going to the front desk calling people, walking up to people and talking to people, that's a lot more efficient. And then the people that have to deal with all these transactions can have more valuable time with residents instead of just sitting behind the PC and registering everything.
Amber Bardon:When you say 75 to 80% adoption, is that independent living or is that community wide and CCRC independent?
Geert Houden:That that's independent. Living in assisted living, we see that dropping to like 50%, something like that. Sometimes a bit less . It depends of course also on where the community's located, the , uh, average age and so forth. But on average, I would say 40, 50% in , uh, in ai .
Amber Bardon:Thank you so much for joining me today. Where can our listeners find out more about cubi Go
Geert Houden:Cubi go.com . We also have a very active LinkedIn page where you can find new customers, new people on the team, new product releases, all that kind of good stuff.
Amber Bardon:Thank you so much for joining me today.
Geert Houden:Thank you, Amber. Bye-Bye.
Amber Bardon:And listeners, if you'd like to provide feedback on this episode or if you have ideas for an episode you'd like to see, you can find us online@raisingtechpodcast.com. Thank you for listening.
In this episode of Raising Tech, our host, Amber Bardon, has a captivating conversation with Geert Houben, Founder & CEO of Cubigo, where he illustrates how Cubigo's cloud-based platform is connecting Senior Living prospects, staff, residents and families through a suite of services to enhance their quality of life. Cubigo's integrated management system offers Senior Living Communities activities, maintenance, housekeeping, dining and transportation and more!
Discover how Cubigo is increasing operational efficiency and improving resident experience through their innovative cloud-based platform for senior living by listening to the entire episode!
You can find more about Cubigo on their website and LinkedIn.
Raising Tech is powered by Parasol Alliance, The Strategic Planning & Full-Service IT Partner exclusively serving Senior Living Communities.
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