Senior living technology can have flashy features, but the best solution will always be the one people actually use. Tech adoption is at the heart of success and the stakes are high, impacting everything from resident well-being to workplace culture to a community’s bottom line. Few understand that better than Esmerelda Lee, senior vice president of operations at Discovery Senior Living, the nation’s second-largest senior living company.
With more than 20 years of senior living experience spanning from skilled nursing to executive leadership, Esmerelda has seen firsthand what drives (and derails) tech adoption. At AgeTech’s Senior Living and Post-Acute Care Innovation Summit, she joined Sage’s Lindsey Daugherty on stage to discuss how operators can choose the right tech partners—to ensure that their teams have buy-in and actually embrace the tools their companies invest in.
Discovery Senior Living chose to take a best-in-breed strategy versus conforming to one platform to meet an agile company's needs. Our corporate office supports our regional companies in their local tertiary markets, and we support our national management companies who have communities all over the United States, so we’re not a one-size-fits-all kind of company. That is something we keep top of mind as we continue to partner with our vendors.
Our project management team led the proposal and the entire project of choosing and deploying our EMR, EHR, and resident incident tracking systems. However, our team of clinicians collaborated with our community directors of health and wellness, executive directors, regional nurses, and key stakeholders to take part in choosing the system. Our IT team then worked with Gartner in contract reviews to ensure we were making the right decision in terms of market research. It can be a long yet collaborative process, but that's what ensures and strengthens adoption through deployment. We always keep our end users in mind—and when they love using a product, it's a win.
At the heart of everything we are trying to do, we want to make it easier for our team. When a product is user friendly and allows team members more time with their residents and prospects, that product is helping strengthen the culture of our company. All companies would prefer that the technology they leverage is data driven and gives us the analytics so their teams can do better. But choosing a technology that strengthens the culture of the organization is a critical component for senior living operators who face labor challenges every day.
One of the things I love about resident engagement platforms is that they allow residents to have the autonomy to sign up for doctor’s appointments, sign up for transportation, or choose what they're going to eat in the dining room. With our CRM, we’re also able to use OneDay videos. Those are very powerful with our residents, especially if they are graduating from rehab and coming back to our communities. So, for example, we can share our OneDay stories with family members so they can share in the joy of their loved one’s rehab graduation.
With my former company, we had a product with the potential to fail. We loved the product and our teams were excited to deploy the product, yet the residents were hesitant because it involved voice activated technology which was new to them. So the adoption rate from residents was about 20%. It took one community executive director investing time with each resident to show them the benefits, getting a resident ambassador to do the same process two weeks later, and then we saw adoption rates skyrocket.
Getting buy-in is huge. You can have the best technology and the best sales pitch, but those people on the ground are the key stakeholders. Getting resident adoption and buy-in from EDs, resident ambassadors, and caregivers is more important than what I or a CEO thinks. The people who actually use the product determine the outcome of that technology in their community.
We've engaged in virtual training sessions because we really can't assess all our team members in person but, recently, we have been working with some amazing vendors who are willing to fly to every main live training venue and host a party and a training session with our teams. That’s really helped our adoption and allowed our teams to get buy-in around the product.
Sage does this very well. Some companies are hiring operators and caregivers to be a part of their company. Those companies benefit from talent who have heart and empathy for seniors, but also are forward-thinking and want to see change in the industry. Partnering with senior living subject matter experts who are innovative and creative is key for tech vendors. Even though tech has really boomed in senior living, it’s nowhere near where it could be. I do believe that with more money coming into the senior living space, we are going to get there.
(This interview has been edited for clarity and length.)
