The Company
Specializing in independent living, assisted living and memory care, Vitality Living offers residents a premier experience based on their wants and needs. Headquartered in Brentwood, Tennessee, their mission is to create vibrant communities where residents, families and team members can be themselves, live purposefully and experience a profound sense of belonging.
The Challenge
Siloed Data
Vitality’s data used to be scattered across siloed solutions, requiring leaders to pull information and generate reports manually. Not only were these processes time-consuming, but they also prevented Vitality from unlocking insights regarding occupancy, falls and more — since data lacked the organization and presentation needed to reveal important trends. Not to mention, Vitality’s data wasn’t being updated in real time. Leaders sought a business intelligence solution that would present up-to-date, business-wide data in a visual format — all in one place.
The Solution
Yardi Senior IQ
Yardi Senior IQ is a business intelligence solution that surfaces real-time data in attractive, sharable dashboards. Designed for senior living providers and drawing portfolio-wide data from Yardi Voyager Senior Housing, Senior IQ provides the insights needed to act confidently and make smarter, faster decisions.
The Story
Visualizing Insights
Before Senior IQ, Vitality didn’t have a seamless method for capturing and gathering important data. “Prior to us coming to Yardi, with the system that we used before, we couldn’t pull any of that data,” shared Syndell Lawhon, vice president of wellness at Vitality. “We had to do things manually.”
Manually pulling metrics and organizing insights, they were limited to sharing only numbers with staff, owners and investors. Now with Senior IQ, Vitality has a visual representation of the same information — via custom graphs and tables — housed in one secure location. “Nurses are very visual people,” explained Lawhon. “When they can see the numbers in a graph pulled right up in Senior IQ, it clicks so much faster. Numbers on a piece of paper are not as powerful.”
“Senior IQ makes the numbers real to people,” continued Lawhon. Not only is Vitality’s data now presented in a visual format, allowing teams to interpret insights with ease, but that data is also readily updated and centrally stored — ensuring accuracy and equipping leaders to get fast answers to specific questions. “I push a button and then I have the graph I need,” shared Lawhon.
With intuitive dashboards, graphs and tables revealing trends that Vitality wasn’t previously capturing, leaders are gaining insights that move the needle like never before. “A trend is telling you something,” shared Lawhon. “There’s so much information in Senior IQ that you can dig into. There’s always something we’re finding on a daily basis — something else we know we could use.”
Driving Informed Decisions
With the ability to access real-time data in Senior IQ, Vitality can make informed decisions regarding occupancy, care, staffing and revenue. “I’m in Senior IQ almost every day,” explained Lawhon. “If we have a community that seems to be trending up in move-outs, I can get in there faster and say, ‘Is it because we didn’t do a good job at move-in?’ We turn that around before it becomes a long-term trend that really hurts our occupancy.”
Touching on the power of good data in relation to care, Lawhon shared, “The data helps us reassess what the community is doing, and see if our assessments are really accurate. If a resident was not assessed correctly, then the care we’re telling our staff they need is not correct. It all rolls right back down to the resident, every time.”
With staffing, Senior IQ helps Vitality pinpoint when issues are occurring and make scheduling adjustments accordingly. “Looking at trends, if most of our falls occur on second shift, we can ask, ‘Do we have the right level of staffing at bedtime, and do we have the care spread out correctly among the staff members?’” said Lawhon. “When you see those trends going up and down, that leads you to look at other things to fix that.”
Vitality also captures revenue specifics with Senior IQ, equipping leaders to reallocate resources as needed. “If you’re capturing revenue, it allows you to add that extra staff member if you need to — you can justify it,” said Lawhon. “Then the care for every resident in that community just gets better.” In another example related to revenue-driven decisions, Lawhon explained, “If the data shows we’ve had a lot of higher-acuity residents move out, then we go back to our sales team and say we have the ability to bring in some higher-acuity residents. That way our revenue stays neutral.”
Empowering Staff
By giving care staff the tools to visualize important trends for falls, infections and more — Senior IQ helps Vitality empower those individuals, which boosts retention as a result. “Senior IQ helps us with nurse retention,” said Lawhon. “When you start getting data and looking at the bigger picture — how you can make things better for the whole community — not only does it make you feel empowered, it also elevates your skill set.”
With staff seeing the specifics of how their community is operating, and with the knowledge of how to make improvements, Vitality’s residents reap the benefits. “Not only have we effected the residents’ direct care, we’ve also effected the resident by increasing longevity with our staff,” shared Lawhon.
Streamlining Workflows
Vitality left data digging in the past when they implemented Senior IQ. Instead of searching through siloed solutions and manually compiling insights to send to owners and investors, Vitality now unlocks actionable information at the click of a button. “I can go in Senior IQ and in two seconds, I’m able to pop information right out for that community and send it right along,” shared Lawhon.
When it comes to sharing data with community teams, Senior IQ helps staff members avoid digging for what they need, too. Staff can now find data instantaneously — then spend their time applying that knowledge to deliver better care. “I want my regional nurses to spend their time analyzing the data and making a difference, not working on getting the data,” explained Lawhon.
Best of all, the expedited workflows don’t compromise quality. The easily-accessible, detailed data captured in Senior IQ is reliable every time — and it includes visuals. “I can go in Senior IQ, filter for what I want and there it comes on the screen,” said Lawhon. “Before, I’d be using a calculator to manually do things, and I would still just be sending numbers.”
“It’s so wonderful — things that used to take me forever, I can do so fast now,” continued Lawhon. “It saves a tremendous amount of time, we can find things quicker than we did before.”
