What Providers Can Learn From Arrow Senior Living’s Operational ‘secret Weapon’ 

Arrow Senior Living has an operational “secret weapon,” according to CEO Stephanie Harris, and it’s something that other operators could learn from.

The senior living operator based just outside St. Louis has partnered with Arizona State University to work with students of Professor Jeffrey Baum’s data science program to sift through company data and help build business intelligence platforms.

“We continue to have interns from his program. We’ve hired students from his grad program. We’ve helped introduce him to other senior housing operators in the industry that have also now hired from his program,” Harris told Senior Housing News. “It’s been nice to be challenged by somebody with a different perspective, purely from looking at data.”

These kinds of partnerships offer research and marketing benefits for senior living operators, according to Bryan Ziebart, president of Insight Living. The operator works with Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and Stanford to track and study more than 100,000 data points relating to resident health, including gait, to offer suggestions and improve their overall quality of life. Residents who are well stay in their units and communities longer.

Insight markets partnerships like the one it has with Cedars-Sinai to entice newcomers, Ziebart said.

“We’re able to really impress on the fact that we are constantly working with groups and with universities to find ways to innovate for the benefit of our seniors, and so that’s a recurring theme and trend in our sales process,” Ziebart said. “That is definitely the benefit for us in the operation side, even if we don’t see the dollars and cents.”

Partnerships ‘translate into business value’

Baum and his students work with Arrow Senior Living to focus on data analytics and business intelligence strategies while fielding future employees into the industry. The two organizations are now four years into their partnerships.  

Students in the program help build business intelligence systems platforms for senior living operators which are in need of more granular data with which to make decisions.

“There’s so much you can do for operational efficiencies, for business model innovation, creating new revenue streams and for getting better wellness outcomes for the residents, which is a nice social good but it also translates into business value, too, because the better wellness outcomes, the longer length of stay and less vacancies,” Baum said.

Arrow has hired one graduate student from the partnership with Arizona State University and employed three interns, all of which have been hired by other operators or vendors providing technology solutions for operators. The operators has worked with these students to build data models in its communities with “physical plant complexity” and lower delivery care efficiency to find improvements.

In one instance, the data revealed a physician group working with Arrow Senior Living had heavily prescribed medications, which slowed down its distribution to residents. Another student, who now works for a senior living vendor, did a “prospect data mine” to better identify prospects that are more likely to engage with the community, resulted in more efficient community call centers to find better targeted leads in the database compared to cold calling.

“Had we not worked through his thesis, which was very different than probably where we would have started in tackling the problem, we wouldn’t have gotten to a better outcome,” Harris said. “[Baum] elevated our team’s ability to distill the data and make it usable with more complex streams of information versus single source access data mining like we’ve done in the past.”

Looking ahead, Baum is hoping to eventually see courses for students to receive certificates specifically targeted toward the senior living industry as another way to benefit young professionals looking to get into an industry that could use the workforce.

Harris continues to bounce ideas off Baum about Arrow’s technology stack to modify or overcome some of the data integrity challenges that exist in senior living.

“We still struggle as an industry of documentation by exception. It makes it very difficult to adopt technology with consistency,” Harris said. “We’ve had to work through some problems to continue to enrich our information, and it’s been nice to have somebody to bounce those ideas off of.”

Researching better outcomes

Insight works with Stanford University and Cedars-Sinai to research and develop technology designed to intervene in preventative health issues and keep residents well, according to Ziebart.

Researchers track how residents sleep and their medication and food intake to create profiles for residents. The profiles help Insight improve care and thusly notch higher resident and family satisfaction scores.

“It goes back to a mentality and a mindset of how we operate from the bottom to the top,” Ziebart said. “All of the data that goes into our systems has to be accurate because it’s used in the backend, so there’s a higher level of expectation around compliance.”

The partnerships also act as effective marketing tools to prospects.

“There’s a lot of brand affiliation and reinforcement for families that the operator ideologically cares about these things,” Ziebart said. “To be able to say you are partnered with the university is very high bar … they protect their brand name very closely.”

Ziebart describes Insight’s university and research-based integrations as being a long path he wouldn’t recommend to most other operators, but utilizing university connections can be a “huge differentiator.”

“Frankly, every operator should be thinking about how to. Integrate with universities where possible, because it’s just clearly such a benefit for everyone,” he said. “Not just for the P&L, but the residents and families.”

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