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<\/p>\nWelcome to the fourth segment of the Changemakers, a Senior Housing News (SHN) series of interviews that spotlight leaders who are shaping the future of senior living through innovation. Yardi is sponsoring the series, and for this installment, we are excited to share that the featured company is a longtime Yardi client.<\/p>\n
Meet David Eskenazy, president of Merrill Gardens based out of Seattle. Merrill Gardens has over 30 communities across the U.S., and they\u2019ve even begun expanding into China \u2013 a move that Eskenazy helped lead and that few other providers have yet taken. Eskenazy joined Merrill Gardens back in 2015, and since then has pushed the organization forward with a focus on efficiency, technology and the data insights it brings.<\/p>\n
During his interview with SHN, Eskenazy spoke at length about his passion for pulling, analyzing and leveraging data. \u201cI\u2019m kind of a data nut,\u201d he shared. Eskenazy believes that clear reporting \u2013 and an understanding of what the numbers really mean \u2013 are essential, not just for himself but for the managers in Merrill Gardens\u2019 communities.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd so we built,\u201d Eskenazy said. \u201cTo the point where I believe now we probably have the most sophisticated business analytics tools in the industry.\u201d The results are impressive. He and his team can quickly dial in on sales, marketing or care and see what\u2019s working and what\u2019s not throughout the organization.<\/p>\n
But what did Eskenazy change at Merrill Gardens for his team to attain that level of instant insight? You don\u2019t need to wonder. He explains more in this excerpt from the SHN interview:<\/p>\n
How did you get the tools you needed to achieve this [business analytics function]?<\/strong><\/p>\n Fundamentally, you have to see where your information is.<\/p>\n For example, when I went to Aegis, we had eight different systems, one for the receivables cycle, one for the general ledger, one for the payroll hours \u2026 all this stuff was everywhere. One of the things that we had to do was consolidate.<\/p>\n At Merrill, we did a similar thing, but we didn\u2019t have quite as many different systems. We were basically able to get down to two basic data sources, Kronos and Yardi. We also bolted on Yardi EHR, which is an electronic health record module that takes all the [resident] assessments, and we dial those assessments down to points. Those points are now inside Yardi. That\u2019s a measure of the acuity of the residents. Now we have the acuity of the residents, all the financial information, the hours, and the payroll dollars, direct and indirect, in pretty much two places in the cloud.<\/p>\n But, we had to build a system that could draw from both of those two. Every single night we have a download that goes into a central depository \u2014 that\u2019s our data bank \u2014 that we then hook into for our business analytics, so it gives us pretty close to real time.<\/p>\n