Smart Ways Data Can Help Your Senior Living Community Cut Costs

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly half of all senior living communities were operating at a loss. While margins and occupancy rates have started on an upward trend over the past few years, the challenges facing senior living operators have not declined. Staffing shortages, high turnover, revenue leakage, and inflation are obstacles that often seem insurmountable. All senior housing communities want to increase operational efficiency and save money without compromising resident care services, but the question is: how?

The answer? Data analytics. Here, we’ll take a deep dive into how tracking critical metrics and aligning them with your KPIs can deliver actionable insights and empower you to make informed decisions for your community.

How Data Saves Senior Living Communities Money

To cut costs while maintaining your quality of care, you need to begin by simplifying your data. Data is flowing into your assisted living, independent living, or memory care communities every day. Once you know how to harness it, you’ll begin to see the difference it can make.

Decision-Making with Actionable Insights

Data-driven decisions are smart decisions. Rather than making choices that impact your community based on a feeling or a whim, you’re basing decisions on factual information. 

For instance, tracking activity signups and participation can help you determine which programs are in high demand, and which are failing to recoup your budget. Having this knowledge will help you make programming adjustments that will save you money and increase resident satisfaction.

Optimizing Staffing Levels

Staffing by acuity is critical in senior living communities, especially in skilled nursing settings. By analyzing your staffing data and comparing it with resident care plans, you can make sure that you are adequately staffed at all times. This can help considerably in times of employee shortages or when occupancy and staff coverage are imbalanced. It also protects employees from being spread too thin, increasing their satisfaction and improving retention.

Reducing Unplanned Expenses

Use predictive analytics to anticipate what your needs may be in the near future, so you can plan accordingly. Tracking analytics will help you benchmark where you are right now, so you can make better decisions and improve your budgeting to be ready for the unexpected. 

Maximizing Occupancy and Retention

Your analytics can also help you with occupancy rate optimization by empowering your sales and marketing teams to find gaps in your process and better fill your pipeline. Tracking resident experience metrics will also allow you to see shifts in opinion and sentiment and address any issues before they impact retention. 

Streamlining Billing and Revenue Opportunities

With the right analytics tools, you’ll be able to identify revenue leakages and make swift corrections quickly. You can also spot billing errors and adjust your processes to improve accuracy. Evidence-based data helps with revenue capture and ensures you’re never leaving money on the table. 

Reducing Operational Waste

Operational efficiency is key to your success as a senior living community, but waste can run rampant without robust data tracking. Data analytics will help you identify trends and offer valuable insights into how to cut wasteful spending. 

For example, data analytics will help you manage inventory to ensure you’re not over-ordering supplies, or conversely, that you’re never left without what you need.

Enhancing Efficiency Across Departments

To create greater operational efficiency, you can rely on data to create optimizations at the facility level and at the resident care level. Use data to allocate resources better and improve internal processes like streamlining your workflow and inventory management. You can also use it to create more personalized senior care that improves resident experience, well-being, and safety.

Why Senior Living Teams Struggle Without the Right Data Tools

• Time lost in clunky manual data tracking processes
• Increase in errors and inconsistencies due to manual collection

• Lack of a unified view of your data due to siloed or separate tracking systems
• Delay in decision-making caused by inability to track data in real-time
• Ongoing revenue leakage and billing errors
• Missed opportunities to optimize savings and cut costs
• Growing risk of operational inefficiency, increased turnover in staff and residents, and declining occupancy

ElderSmarts: A Money-Saving Solution for Senior Living Communities

Avoid the challenges teams often face by investing in an analytics solution that is proven to increase operational efficiency and save senior living communities like yours money. That solution is ElderSmarts, a proprietary analytics-as-a-service software from Eldermark that will empower your team with actionable insights that lead to data-driven decisions. 

The Key Features That Can Help

When you want big picture, real-time data from your community, ElderSmarts delivers. Our centralized operational dashboards are powerful and highly customizable, so you get the data you need, exactly when you need it. Here are some of the features you’ll find within ElderSmarts:

Predictive Tracking to Optimize Staffing

Use ElderSmarts to track community trends and optimize your workflow so you’re never under- or over-staffed. Identifying staffing trends and gaps will help you improve resident safety as well as increase employee satisfaction.

Predictive Risk Management to Reduce Unplanned Costs

ElderSmarts utilizes AI to predict certain risks within your community, like resident falls. With these predictive analytics, you can work proactively to assess and mitigate risk factors that will ultimately keep residents safer while keeping your operational costs lower.

Tailored Insights to Streamline Decision-Making

Whatever team or department you want to look at, you can use ElderSmarts dashboards to track data and pull out valuable insights. Keep tabs on your sales and marketing performance, for instance, and make faster and more effective decisions to correct issues and improve efficiency.

Intelligent Billing Insights to Maximize Revenue

Stop revenue loss and capture more profits by pinpointing gaps in your billing and revenue cycles. Maximize reimbursements and ensure accurate tracking and billing of services provided to residents.

AI to Reduce Inventory and Resource Waste

Stop overspending and provide appropriate resource and budget allocation with ElderSmarts. Our analytics tool uses AI to track inventory and resources so you can find leaks and stop them before they turn into major headaches. You’ll also be able to see trends and patterns in inventory ordering and usage, so you can always have what you need, without the waste.

Benchmarking Tools to Measure Performance

Want to know how you stack up with your competitors? Use ElderSmarts’ benchmarking tools to generate reports that show how your performance and efficiency measure up to other senior living communities.

Success Stories

We like to say that ElderSmarts comes “batteries included” — meaning this tool is ready to use right out of the box. That was exceedingly clear for Monarch Healthcare Management, once they activated the software and immediately identified $270,000 in uncaptured revenue. In fact, ElderSmarts users have added $60 million in revenue collectively since adopting our service, and reported a 40% increase in service revenue.

But more than saving dollars, ElderSmarts also saves time (and we know that time is money). One senior living operator told us that they saved hours of administrative time every month by using ElderSmarts instead of their old method of manual data tracking. 

Best of all, ElderSmarts is an intuitive platform that doesn’t require hours of training or employee compensation. It goes to work right away on increasing operational efficiency, and the savings are noticeable from the get-go.

Quick Tips for Making the Most of Your Data

• Start small: Overhauling your internal processes and ramping up efficiency doesn’t happen overnight, but ElderSmarts will give you immediate insights. Start by making informed decisions to change what can be easily managed, and work your way up to more complex challenges from there.
• Benchmark your performance: Utilize ElderSmarts’ data from thousands of subscribed communities to get a baseline on your efficiency. Understand what performance trends are happening across the industry and make data-driven decisions to set and achieve your goals.
• Ask for feedback: Engage with your team to understand their concerns or questions regarding data analytics. Communicate with them clearly and help them understand that data tracking will help them save time they can spend on more important tasks. 
• Try before you buy: Making a decision on which analytics solution to use can be tough. Make sure any prospective AaaS provider offers a free demo to walk you and your team through the ways you can use the software to take decisive and effective actions.

Find Out How ElderSmarts Can Help Your Organization

You’ve already got the data — now you need the smarts. ElderSmarts is an analytics solution that is proven to save senior living providers time and money while empowering them with relevant data to make informed decisions. Your staff, and the older adults in your care, deserve a community that prioritizes their best interests and works to cut waste and improve efficiency without cutting corners. 

Getting started with ElderSmarts is simpler than you might think. Gather up your team of decision-makers and contact us for a free custom demo today!