New Healthcare-senior Living Partnerships, Models Show An Evolving Industry 

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Senior living is not hospitality or health care, it’s a mixture of both.

That is not a new sentiment in the senior living industry, but it is a notion that is gaining more steam this year as operators bolster their ability to keep residents well for longer.

One such company is The Springs Living, which in September partnered with SCAN Health Plan, a company that oversees one of the largest nonprofit Medicare Advantage plans in the country, to connect older adults with more supportive healthcare services that enable them to live in their preferred home for longer. The two partners are with the move serving 1,900 residents around Oregon.

With similar goals, leaders with Lifespark earlier this year unveiled the company’s “complete” senior living model which aims to unify senior living property management, activities and wellness programming to connect residents with the care and services they need to age well. Lifespark just named former Generations CEO Kathy LeVee to oversee senior living operations as leaders expand the Complete model to 60 of the operator’s communities in Minnesota and Wisconsin. 

Both models include payment options that help residents access and pay for services, like ACOs or Medicare Advantage plans. Senior living operators are launching these new models as their resident base arrives with more needs than in the past. A 2022 NORC at the University of Chicago study showed that the average assisted living resident manages more than 14 chronic conditions such as asthma, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes. Nearly half of older adults overall have two or more chronic conditions at the same time, according to a 2025 study published in the National Library of Medicine.

Zooming out the lens, it’s clear the senior living industry is evolving and adapting to the fact that today’s older adults desire not just good lodging but also care that keeps them living well for longer. Both Lifespark and The Springs Living, along with other companies, are making resident healthspan a big focus in their margin-boosting efforts, and that’s why I believe this trend will only grow in the months and years ahead.

In this members-only SHN+ update, I analyze these and other conversations and announcements from operators and other sources to bring you the following takeaways:

• Why more operators say they are embracing healthcare and connected services

• Inside the vision of a more connected senior living community

Pivot to healthcare is personal

The senior living hospitality-health care debate is over. In 2026, it’s clear that senior living operators must offer both a place residents want to live in addition to the services that keep them living there for as long as possible. The Springs Living’s new partnership with SCAN is meant to do just that through co-branded healthcare offerings for older adults that deepen the company’s integration with value-based care.

With its new partnership, The Springs Living is not reinventing the wheel, but it is seeking to improve it. The partnership has goals such as eliminating unnecessary emergency room visits, expanding access to preventative care and equipping staff with other tools they can use to keep older adults well.

“In our communities, the person who notices Dad didn’t come to breakfast or simply isn’t himself should already know the healthcare professional who can act on it. That knowledge shouldn’t sit outside the healthcare system,” Stubblefield wrote last month on LinkedIn. “Put those people together, in the place Dad calls home, and we have an opportunity to catch things earlier, prevent some crises and keep more older adults healthy and independent.”

For Stubblefield, doing so is personal. His father, Fancho, lives in in Sherwood, Oregon, in one of the company’s memory care communities.

“His caregivers know things about him no chart ever will. I’ve also gotten the call, before he moved to The Springs, and met him in the ER to spend three hours just to find out he was dehydrated,” Stubblefield wrote. “We can prevent that trauma and cost. I know how hard this system can be even when you have people around you who know how to navigate it. I want something better for my dad. And I believe every family deserves the same.”

Indeed, Stubblefield said that senior living residents and older adults often face a “broken healthcare system” with long wait times and poor outcomes. He compared the current model for caring for older adults as akin to ancient and often brutal forms of medicine that “were worse than the cure.”

“In the future, we will be saying the same thing about how we treat our elders today,” Stubblefield wrote earlier this week. “These experiences to often lead to a cycle that your parent– the once relevant contributor to society, the kind teacher, the brilliant scientist, and one day you — never recovers from.”

Not every senior living operator has such a close personal connection pushing them forward, but many do share The Springs Living’s goals.

The aim of Lifespark’s Complete model is similar. Lifespark has in the past offered many different services within its communities and managed an ever-complicated array of data. But what the company lacked until the launch of Complete was a way to tie these services together in alignment of the same goal.

Prior to the launch of Complete, Lifespark’s didn’t always find ways to share information among its multiple service lines. Now, Complete is opening the data stream so it can more freely flow among them.

“We really wanted to bring a complete solution that was about building a trust-based relationship and understanding our customers, not just by trying to throw things at them, but by delivering our value proposition for the rest of their life,” Lifespark CEO Joel Theisen told Senior Housing News in January.

In a nutshell, both services aim to improve the holistic senior living experience from beginning to end. Instead of moving into a community and getting lost in a disparate slate of services and providers, operators like The Springs Living and Lifespark are actively holding residents’ hands through that process.

Healthspan is good for business – and for society

Noble as they are, senior living operators aren’t just pivoting to these plans out of the kindness of their hearts alone. Leaders of multiple organizations have said there are compelling business reasons to keep residents well for longer, including better length of stay and occupancy, higher satisfaction and more efficient staffing practices. Lifespark’s average occupancy was already trending to about 96% prior to the launch, but occupancy is no longer the only mark of success in senior living.

“All the normal things that people think of as assisted living, you have to be good at,” Thiessen said in January. “Not only do you have to have a great customer experience and a great employee experience, but you have a good economic model that drives NOI.”

The operators behind these plans are deploying them without requiring a significant investment. In fact, operators can even bolster revenue if they can deliver care lower than the reimbursement rate.

Still, to me, the larger prize – or the “holy grail,” as Stubblefield called it – is to keep people from moving to higher levels of care due to health events. By doing so, operators won’t just hold onto their residents longer or potentially expand their margins, they also will help fix what Stubblefield and others see as a big societal problem.

We all die, but how we die matters as much as how we live,” Stubblefield wrote on LinkedIn this week. “This is a measure of our society. Let’s fix this, together.”

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