Raising Tech

Amber Bardon: [00:00:00] Welcome to Raising Tech podcast. I’m your host, Amber Bardon and today my guest is Maggie Seybold. She is the Vice President of Customer Insights at WelcomeHome. Welcome to the show, Maggie.

Maggie Seybold:

Thank you, Amber. I’m excited to be here.

Amber Bardon

So I’m sure all of our audience has heard of WelcomeHome before.

WelcomeHome is a little bit of a newer company. When they came on the market, I think they made a really big splash. I heard a rumor, I don’t know if it’s true, but I heard a rumor that Align Consolidated Enquire and Sherpa just to take on WelcomeHome because you’ve been such a big disruptor in the industry.

So for those of you who have not heard WelcomeHome, can you tell us a little bit about who you are?

Maggie Seybold: Sure. WelcomeHome is a senior living sales and marketing focused CRM solution. We’ve been around since 2019 when our co founders started bubbling around the idea of putting a new user friendly data backed CRM out into the space.

Since [00:01:00] then we have grown from a team of two to a team of almost 50 now, and starting out with our one or two early thought partner operator partners. We’re now well over 2000 communities on the platform. It’s been a really exciting journey. I think in terms of how WelcomeHome differentiates itself.

It’s a customer focused company. John, our co founder and Ryan from the start were focused on providing a solution to customers that was built by customers for customers. And spent almost a year and a half on the initial MVP of the product to get it right with some of our initial partners. And, since that time, They’ve looked for more new and innovative opportunities to serve customers.

Customer Insights is one of them. So I came on the team in 2022 as the data and analytics function for WelcomeHome. Our team has grown, but we’re here mostly to take all that data that sits beneath the CRM and find ways to serve it back to customers in ways to help them improve [00:02:00] their results, serve it to the industry to, put information and performance data out there.

It’s been a great journey, love this company, love the senior living space. It’s been a wild ride.

Amber Bardon: That’s fantastic. So give me a little more insight into what specific problems was WelcomeHome coming in to solve or what opportunities to WelcomeHome see in this space that they didn’t think was available already.

 Anyone who spends time in senior living sales and marketing will be familiar with the experience that sales director and the sales leadership goes through every day. The reality is senior living is a really tough job when you’re regardless of whether you’re thinking of the sales director doing that tactical work showing prospects around helping move them in or you’re thinking about the sales leadership.

Maggie Seybold: This is not residential buildings that have a relatively straightforward process. This sales process is unique and that it’s vulnerable. The time period varies enormously. There’s a ton of work that goes into each individual [00:03:00] relationship between a sales director and a prospect.

And frankly, it’s hard to keep track on all of that data. So hard that, the job was just made more difficult for a sales director on top of the additional emotional difficulty of selling senior living. So John and Ryan really went into this with the goal of taking all of that technical burden, taking all that redundant work and making it as easy as it can be for the sales director.

And then layering on top of that tools that make it easy for the leadership team to know what’s going on, identify opportunities and act on those opportunities in a way that is data backed and informed. They multi pronged issue to attack. But the journey to get there has been great.

And we’re very focused on. Even as we grow today, keeping our customers in the loop, even engaging with prospects on where do we need to improve what gaps exist in the product that we should be filling. And as like AI is an incredibly interesting space right now. We’re having active conversations about innovation in that space [00:04:00] too.

So it’s been an ongoing process and very customer informed.

Amber Bardon: Maggie, let’s pivot a little bit and talk about what’s going on in the industry, what’s going on in the space, what’s happening with sales today and senior living.

Can you tell me a little bit about what are some of the major trends that you’re seeing in the industry today, and maybe some of your biggest takeaways from the first quarter of this year?

Maggie Seybold: Sure. What I love about customer insights at WelcomeHome is we have an enormous amount of data to sift through and then work through trends and insights with our customers, as we all know, in the industry, COVID was an extremely challenging time.

And while COVID was meeting our shores in 2020 and 2021, there were some trends going on underneath the surface that we are still working on solving today. So things that come to mind. 1st, digital adoption as a sales outreach method for prospects exploded. We saw the outreach through digital leads expand massively and digital leads account for more than 80 percent of inbound today.

[00:05:00] That’s a very different sales process than working with referral partners like doctors or family and friends program. So there are many operators today that are still wrapping their heads around the appropriate strategy for dealing with different types of digital leads. An online website lead looks different than an aggregator lead and how do you, Manage those 2 different prospects.

That’s 1 huge impact that we’re still working through today. Another from coven. Is that we were stuck inside, so referral outreach took a backseat for 2 years and now we are as an industry relearning that muscle a bit and trying to. Be a little bit more efficient about it. Understand. Where should I be spending my time if I’m trying to decide between getting in touch with the 15 new online leads that have hit my inbox in the last half an hour or putting aside a four hour block to go get lunch with a couple different referral partners who may or may not have been productive in the past.

So really finding that balance on lead management is another huge [00:06:00] focus that we see in industry as well.

Amber Bardon: I’m curious with all these changes with COVID and some of the takeaways you just mentioned, how do you see the sales process changing and what are some opportunities for improvement? Sure. So

Maggie Seybold: in terms of how the sales process is changing, And I might be biased because I’m on the data side, but we are now seeing a much higher burden of proof on how sales directors make decisions on how they spend their time because that lead volume kicked back so aggressively after COVID

we were having such an influx of leads that it became more of a challenge to decide how to allocate your time to maximize the number of move ins that you’re getting in your specific community so that burden to make well informed choices, data backed choices has been a significant change in the sales process.

Not only is it focused on the lead management side of things, so really understanding how does an aggregator lead behave? How quickly do I need to get in touch with that [00:07:00] person? How many touches do I need to complete so they’re comfortable coming in for a tour, and I have the appropriate discovery to give them a successful experience.

Lead management is one thing. Activities and how we approach that nurturing process is another untapped area. We all know, I think, anecdotally, calls are better than emails, but how does text fit into all of this? Especially as baby boomers age in, not only are baby boomers more digitally capable, but their sons and daughters are. IPhone users, they have inboxes that probably have 17, 000 emails in them.

 It’s a new way and a new person that we’re trying to interact with. So those two changes have also had a meaningful impact on the sales process.

Amber Bardon: I think this emphasis on data and using data for driving decisions is a big upcoming trend in the industry. And I think it’s really long overdue.

And we’ve done a couple of podcast episodes on data analytics tools. Can we just talk a little bit more about how can you incorporate that in your day to day? How can that data that you’re gathering through WelcomeHome integrate with other [00:08:00] aspects of the business?

And how do you see this just changing the way sales is done in the future?

Maggie Seybold: lots of different audiences and lots of different use cases for data and senior living. Starting at the sales director use case, WelcomeHome has tools to almost automatically log many of the activities that are happening as you go through the sales process.

Having those data points that are stored and able to be used as a reference is critical for continuing to refine your sales process. If you’re seeing, for Mary, who inquired two weeks ago, I did two calls. She toured. We did an ED follow up, had another call, and then she moved in three months later.

Collecting that journey data helps us figure out how to respond to each additional journey. That’s only one example. Even looking at things like lead source historical performance, we see in our data that aggregator leads typically take More work to earn a move in make sense is they’re super competitive.

They’re evaluating a ton of [00:09:00] options. It takes more days, more time, more deliberate effort. And then on the back end, their length of stay is half of the stay of a friends and family referral, which again, makes sense that person has an emotional, a personal tie to the community, whereas an aggregator has evaluated seven options.

And if they’re not immediately satisfied, they can just go check out the neighboring community, right? So having that information at your fingertips plays a huge role in how you do your day to day, especially at the sales director side. Similarly, as we like think up the chain. Regionals, for example, looking over five to 10 communities, really hard to identify what sales director actions are productive and coach across the team without that data visibility.

We try and make that easy for regionals by servicing that data for them so they don’t have to dig 10 hours in the CRM just to find, this process works. This is what increases conversions. Similarly, for admins, senior living is in a state today where [00:10:00] admins have a complicated job.

They have to report up, they have to report across, they have to communicate down. And how do we communicate the decisions that we’re making? We do it with data. So once again. Being able to support our admins with having the data presentation ready to go. So they don’t have to pull raw CSVs down from the CRM. Come up with

a chart in Google slides, that was incredibly annoying to make and spend a valuable 5 hours of their day doing that when they could be thinking strategically about the direction of their company, all different examples of how we try and support our customers across levels, but data is pivotal in every single one of them.

Amber Bardon: We’re talking a lot about data from the perspective of the providers. How do you think these changes in data will impact the customers? The residents and family members that are looking for options out there, potential living situations.

How do you see that evolving and changing? And especially when it comes to things like more virtual interactions versus that in person that [00:11:00] we’re typically seeing right now?

Maggie Seybold: It’s an awesome question. And ultimately, At the end of the day, everyone in this industry is trying to create a positive experience for the prospect and for the resident.

And again, to your point, data here is an enormous asset, particularly as we think about the initial journey that prospect goes through, I’ve tried to replicate it. It’s not fun doing the Googling, trying to sift through all the options available, signing up for a place for mom, getting 16 texts and five calls a day.

That’s an incredibly challenging thing to navigate. Even if you put aside the vulnerable component of my loved one needs care and the emotional complexity that exists in just that interaction where data helps the most is it allows the sales directors and this prospect to know each other better. If a prospect is trying to get education on what kind of care they need, or what kind of care mom and dad needs.

It’s important for the sales director to know that the prospect or the [00:12:00] influencer is in that stage of their journey. So ultimately we can support them with what they need. If someone doesn’t understand their budget, for example, and whether or not, their option set matches what they’re able to afford.

Again, another way that we can support prospects through their journey and reduce, or at least mitigate a little bit, some of that pain around trying to understand. What do I need? How quickly do I need it? Ultimately, a sales director is creating a relationship with a prospect or an influencer.

So the more data we have about each other, the better we can communicate and form a relationship that will lead to productive outcomes for both. Ultimately, we want the sales director to be able to drive an efficient move in. Do it, in a very caring and thoughtful way. And for the prospect, we want them to get the care they need quickly.

And so being able to know more about each other helps quite a bit with that.

Amber Bardon: It’s going to be a whole new world in the next couple of years.

Maggie Seybold: Yeah, especially with the pace. Technology today is evolving so rapidly. There’s so [00:13:00] much opportunity, especially with AI coming in and changing as quickly as it is things like even, on the CRM side, we’re always saying it doesn’t exist in the CRM.

It doesn’t exist at all. But at the end of the day, if we’re all honest with ourselves. Sales directors don’t want to fill out 15 to 25 fields about every prospect. So the more that we can take those calls, we can take those texts, we can auto populate the information that we need, and then provide suggestions on what to do and when making that job easier for a sales director is going to become a much more significant reality in the next few years.

A couple of months to a few years from now.

Amber Bardon: Yeah. And I think this really applies to all the enterprise applications that communities are using. So I think there’s a lot of opportunity just to optimize and be more efficient across the board. And a lot of software companies are not yet thinking that way.

So I think it’s really, refreshing to hear that WelcomeHome has built that into your tools.

Maggie Seybold: Particularly talking about AI and just [00:14:00] technology innovation in general, it can be really scary for senior living. And I think as you mentioned earlier, Amber, it has felt as if we’re behind for a long time.

And with this new wave of technology, there really shouldn’t be a fear that technology is going to replace a sales director or replace the role of a regional. In fact, it’ll be the regional that uses technology tools and data. The regional that uses AI is going to outperform peers that don’t.

As we, we develop these tools, it’s critical to the WelcomeHome team that we’re rolling out things that are going to be easily adopted. That we’re doing the upscale. So our users understand these tools and feel confident in their usage. And we build things that make sense that aren’t just shiny from a marketing standpoint.

We want to build things that actually work and create value. And so much of what we hear about in the technology space today is marketing. So being really thoughtful about partnering with our customers as we develop. The innovation at [00:15:00] WelcomeHome has been an enormous focus as well.

Amber Bardon: Maggie, are there any really specific tips, tricks, trends that you can share for people in the sales roles or for providers that you have come across using your system or using your data?

Maggie Seybold: There are plenty of very tactical tips and tricks and we should honestly get time and then another time and invite our customer, our VP of customer success, Emily, to come chat about this as well.

But there are so many tactical tools in WelcomeHome that make. An enormous difference in results, but when we think about things that apply to everybody, we’ve seen two major focus areas for our operators in terms of how they’re shifting their strategy on the sales director side for the past six or so months.

The 1st is on management of aggregator leads. So being more proactive about that partnership with aggregator partners. They send a lot of leads, not all of them convert. It makes all the sense in the world, but if we can better partner with our aggregator [00:16:00] touch points, we can work with them to say, these are the criteria that each prospect needs to meet.

They need to financially qualify. They need to be in this radius. Also only send me five a month. And then we’re going to do a retro on all five and how they performed to boost the conversions with those types of leads and have a better working relationship. It’s also worth noting as well, that not all communities Need all lead sources.

So taking a look at what lead sources make sense for my community context. I in a urban, highly competitive area where every aggregator lead that’s coming to me is evaluating 15 other options. That’s important context to keep in mind when you think about your inbound pipeline. Whereas if you’re the only memory care facility in 50 miles.

It’s good to get your name out there. So having more coming from an aggregator lead source starts to make a little bit more sense in that case. Lead management is 1 side. The other side is proactive strategy around activities and scoring prospects. When we [00:17:00] see those prospects come in, we know that every prospect has a different journey.

Every prospect has a different level of readiness to participate in the sales cycle. WelcomeHome has worked really hard over the past six months to update our scoring mechanisms and the product to base scoring, not only on what we know about a prospect, but how that prospect is working and engaging dynamically throughout the sales prospect process.

If you think about a typical independent living lead. That person could move in 30 days. That person could move in two years and their degree of involvement with us as a sales team will vary enormously. If you put yourself in the sales seat in that scenario, it’s really hard to know, should I call Mary or is she’s at home learning?

Is she communicating with her core influencers, we’ve updated scoring to make that process easier and make that allocation of time decision easier. So adoption of scoring is another huge tip and trick that we’ve been rolling out with our customers. And then, in terms of activities [00:18:00] planning again, anecdotally, we all know calls are.

Better than texts or emails, but it’s not just about the channel. It’s about the channel. It’s about the speed and it’s about the quality. So when we think about how particularly that 1st touch with the prospects, we want to have the most. Relationship centric conversation and outreach that we can. So getting the call done, getting the calls done within 20 minutes, making sure you’re prepped to talk about the right topics, given what you know about that prospect and what you can port in from your mark marketing automation, having that productive conversation, and then using that discovery to plan the tour in a way that is tailored to that specific prospect.

We have a planning activity and WelcomeHome. And in the data, we see that those that log planning time before a tour for more than half of their prospects. Average occupancy is at those communities is 93 percent versus the average, which is in the [00:19:00] eighties. Putting structures around how you approach the sales process is the future. It’s not random anymore.

Amber Bardon: I have definitely learned a lot on this podcast. Is there anything we haven’t talked about yet

you want to make sure our listeners know?

Maggie Seybold: I think now having been in this industry and working with customers for almost two years now, I think every time I work with a sales team or a sales leader on adopting data as part of their process, they’re surprised at how seamless it really is.

And so I would just say, as we go on this journey together, Lean on your vendors. We’re here to support you. We will get on the phone. We will walk through these tools. We will show you how to use them. And ultimately it is our product that you’re using and it’s our responsibility to make sure it’s well adopted and working for you.

So that would be my call to action. I know the data feels intimidating, but in today’s environment, adopting data is what separates the top performers from the bottom.

Amber Bardon: Data is definitely the future as we mentioned earlier. It’s just something we’re going to keep seeing more and more of.

 Our clients really [00:20:00] ask for this. So I think you’re in the right place for it.

Maggie Seybold: Thanks so much, Amber. This has been a great conversation.

Amber Bardon: Yeah. Maggie, can you tell us where

Maggie Seybold: can listeners find out more about WelcomeHome? Sure. So you can find us online, welcomehomesoftware.

com. We also do have a pretty active marketing team on LinkedIn as well. We’re consistently putting out data centric blog posts, interviews with our team members and customers, all actually really informative stuff and a fair amount of data backed benchmarks as well.

Amber Bardon: Thank you so much for joining me today.

Maggie Seybold: Thanks.

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.

Amanda Knapp: Today. We have a very special episode for you. I'm Amanda Knapp and I am the marketing coordinator at Parasol Alliance. If you didn't already know, we offer many different educational materials, white papers, blogs, case studies. We also have a thought leadership webinar series where we spend an hour with four industry experts who share technology solutions for the senior living industry.

Recently, we published a white paper on how to solve staffing issues with technology. And we have Kati Jones today, our Director of Client Relationships,here to tell l us more about it. Thanks for being on the show today, Kati. 

Kati, what is the main purpose of this white paper? And what are the essential points to remember? 

Kati Jones: Staffing challenges have been an ongoing issue in the senior living industry. While staffing has improved post pandemic, staffing still remains a big challenge for most [00:01:00] aging services communities. For the staffing challenges white paper, we surveyed over 5, 600 end users from the senior living communities.

We have the pleasure of serving to better understand the staffing challenges They're experiencing and the unique methods they're using to tackle their own staffing obstacles by sharing this data and its technology solutions featured in the white paper. We hope to help senior living communities reduce or even eliminate staffing challenges at their communities. 

Amanda Knapp: What positions did you find were the most difficult to hire for and what were the recruiting challenges that the communities were facing?

Kati Jones: Of the communities we serve and surveyed, 44 percent reported they have the most difficulty hiring CNAs for their communities. And then trailing close behind that, 31 percent of the communities reported nurses were the most challenging hire for them. Over half of [00:02:00] these aging services providers stated recruiting as the biggest staffing challenge they have at their senior living community.

 47% of these communities stated finding qualified candidates was the biggest recruiting challenge for them and also not having enough people available to fill those positions was the second most common recruiting challenge reported.

Amanda Knapp: Wow, that's some interesting data. What recruiting methods were the communities using? 

Kati Jones: So indeed was used by more than half of the communities with job fairs and applicant tracking systems being used by less than a quarter of the communities.

 Direct hiring was the preferred method use when it came to filling these positions. But some communities did use other supplemental hiring methods. Staffing agencies were used in a third of the communities and only 6 [00:03:00] percent of these communities stated they used employee referrals as a method for hiring, which is interesting because there are many communities who.

have referral based programs that they can use to hire. Of the communities using employee referrals as a hiring method, more than half were offering a referral bonus.

31 percent offered sign on bonuses and 13 percent offered loyalty bonuses. 

Amanda Knapp: Yeah, I was also shocked when I heard the only 6 percent of the communities stated that they were using employee referrals because I always felt like that was such a huge resource.

Can you dive more into the community's turnover rates and if they were using any sort of retention and engagement strategy? 

Kati Jones: Almost half of the community stated that they had a turnover rate between 60 and 70 percent, while almost 25 percent said that they have a turnover rate of more than [00:04:00] 81 percent.

So, As you can see, turnover is very high in these communities and some communities, um, do perform exit interviews when their staff members leave and they found that compensation was the number one reason for more than half of the staff leaving. Almost a 3rd of the communities reported using spirit days as a unique employee retention and engagement strategy.

But a majority of these communities did not have any sort of employee retention or engagement strategy. As far as the employee engagement tools they were using, almost all of the communities were using surveys to gain feedback from their staff. And only 12 percent of the communities are currently using a workforce management system.

Amanda Knapp: When you were conducting the surveys, did you find any unique [00:05:00] approaches that people were using to overcome the staffing obstacles? 

Kati Jones: The communities that had a retention rate of over 70 percent had a lot of similarities.

They all offered recruiting incentives, more than half offered sign on bonuses. All communities increased their wages by more than 2 percent across the board, 2 3rds of the communities were using an engagement tool and many were using an employee engagement app that was designed specifically for senior living. 

Amanda Knapp: Wow, that's really interesting. We recently featured an employee engagement app on another Raising Tech podcast episode, and they mentioned that senior living communities using their app actually increase their retention by 31%. Can you talk specifically about how technology is helping with the recruiting and staffing solutions?

Kati Jones: Currently there is a recruiting app available that will automatically post on job boards and social [00:06:00] media when positions become available, it will also send automatic updates and reminders to keep the applicants engaged and even perform automatic background checks

for potential candidates. There is also an app available that offers behavioral assessments for potential candidates and a private database for employees to save the applicants information for future job openings. Another app available that's mentioned in the white paper is like an Uber for senior living communities.

In that, pre qualified candidates can pick up open shifts on a as needed basis. This comes in handy for call ins and reducing the amount of overtime for staff to help avoid staff burnout. 

Amanda Knapp: Are there any other ways that technology is helping with staff burnout?

Because I know that is huge in the industry right now. 

Kati Jones: Yeah, absolutely. There is a wellness monitoring [00:07:00] technology that uses biosensors to actually track a resident's daily health. These solutions include wearables and innovative, if you can believe it or not, toilet technology that detects irregularities and it alerts the senior living communities medical team when these changes and residents health have happened. So this actually catches infections before the resident.

Gets worse, and it saves time for the resident when it comes to recovery. A big one that we're hearing from every angle in senior living is robots.

So dining robots have been known to give staff more one on one time with residents. That actually improves employee engagement and helps with staff burnout because those robots are able to do the menial tasks. That way the staff can spend more time communicating with the residents and bonding with them.

And we know that [00:08:00] greater experiences with those residents have a better outlook for the entire senior living community. We also found that dining robots have allowed some senior living communities to cut about two full time positions. This is significant in helping reduce the strain that is caused by employed staff when You either can't fill open positions in the dining area or say you have someone that's out sick.

We also found research that cleaning robots like vacuum and floor scrubbing robots actually clean the baseboards can save up to 10 hours per day in housekeeping. And the good thing about that is you don't have to worry about robots calling in sick. 

Amanda Knapp: Wow. I wish I had a robot to clean my baseboards in my house.

Is there anything else we haven't discussed that you would like to add today? 

Kati Jones: Yeah. So many communities are faced with high turnover rates [00:09:00] and burnout staff and technology can really help alleviate These issues in every way, leaving the residents and staff happier and all together a better community. 

Amanda Knapp: I couldn't agree more.

Thanks for joining us today. 

Kati Jones: Thank you. Amanda. 

Amanda Knapp: You can check out our white paper for more information and learn about the different solutions that we mentioned today. To hear more top technology trends in senior living, 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 enjoyed Raising Tech, please leave us a review and share with a friend. As always, thank you for listening.

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.

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.

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.

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.

​