Why A Growing Number Of Senior Living Operators Are Going Big On Data

Senior living providers are getting more tactical in using data and analytics to fuel operating performance and achieve better clinical and lifestyle outcomes for residents in 2026 to keep up with increased demand.

In the last few years, multiple companies have added new data science capabilities and even dedicated teams to track anything from real estate to identifying patterns in staff and resident activities to better help customize the senior living customer experience.

A growing number of operators now believe that data and business intelligence are the “cornerstones” of senior living operations today, and they are wielding more analytical and predictive power than in the past to improve revenue, staffing efficiency and positively impact resident clinical care coordination.

By developing these data science teams, senior living providers can identify strengths, weaknesses and trends, taking the data and creating actionable information for leadership to guide future growth or lead internal stabilization efforts.

LCS is among the companies that has greatly increased its data and analytical capabilities in recent years. In 2026, other operators must adapt to this new operating reality as LCS has done, according to LCS Vice President of Data and Analytics Joel Rosenberg.

Starting in 2022, LCS established a data science team to help identify trends, make strategic growth decisions and better predict operating performance. The team is made up of three staff including a director of data governance and a data scientist, with plans to add future roles, including a position focused on AI use.

Early success for LCS communities include leveraging data to make better and more informed sales and marketing decisions, improved tracking of resident care coordination, while also tackling the impact of labor retention, according to Rosenberg.

“Our data scientists are most impactful when they’re surrounded by experts from our communities,” Rosenberg said.

Other senior living operators including Sonida Senior Living (NYSE: SNDA), Trustwell Living, EverTrue and Ascent Living Communities have all launched data science and analytics initiatives to further evolve the senior living operating playbook.

First victories using data: improving sales, marketing

The LCS data and analytics team works closely with regional and site leaders to better inform the team of useful data to track that can span sales and marketing all the way to tracking clinical care outcomes. By connecting data leaders with community operations experts, LCS is able to find a “recipe for success” blending community-level experience with enterprise-level data reporting.

The LCS data team also visits communities managed by the Des Monies, Iowa-based senior living provider to “cut through the noise” and identify potential blind spots in data analysis to understand just which metrics are worth tracking to improve operations, Rosenberg said.

“It gives us expertise at the community level and we put it together with our ability to translate the data and identify trends to ultimately deliver an impactful solution,” Rosenberg said.

Those impactful solutions include providing LCS sales and marketing teams with tools to understand market effectiveness, and how to improve conversion rates based on buying trends across the portfolio. In 2026, Rosenberg said LCS is putting data together capable of providing more insights to improve clinical decisions.

Trustwell Living, which launched a business intelligence and data analytics effort last year, relies on its financial planning and analysis team to create data dashboards and benchmarking for operations teams through an intranet known as Trust Point for internal communication, according to incoming Trustwell CEO Lori Colwell Jones.

In an interview last month, Colwell Jones said the New York City-based provider is reviewing various systems to modernize them, including nurse call systems, mobile device management, cybersecurity and its software vendor partners.

“We’re looking at dining, entertainment and engagement solutions,” Colwell Jones said.

Sonida Senior Living also had success using data insights to improve sales and marketing, including how and where to deploy finite marketing dollars in competitive markets to be more effective. Sonida used analytics to deploy frontline sales leaders to get better results, representing the first major win for the operator’s data science team, according to Sonida Senior Director of Operational Finance Joseph Young.

While referral partners are an “important part” of the senior living business model, Young said Sonida tracked outcomes with its vendor partners to determine when to spend more on direct marketing efforts or outsource those efforts.

“It helped us determine where those partnerships were thriving and where they weren’t,” Young said.

Greenwood Village, Colorado-based Ascent Living Communities built a new data ecosystem to have better control of the flow of data from communities, needing access to pull out data from vendor platforms to create dashboards capable of providing high-level insights for guiding future growth, according to Co-Founder Tom Finley.

For example, Ascent Living’s data science team pulled move-in and move-out data, along with lead activity from disparate systems into one place to get a more accurate picture of the company’s operating performance, Finley said, rather than rely on trailing data from previous months.

“We have this in one place to get a real picture of what we are looking at rather than sorting through data that is old and less relevant,” Finley said.

These efforts have resulted in an average daily census increase of 6% compared to 2025, with occupancy at approximately 90%, Finley noted.

Tackling staffing challenges with data

It’s no secret the senior living industry has faced myriad staffing challenges in recent years, but data science efforts can help cut through those headwinds to reduce turnover.

Sonida has reduced staff turnover 20% over the last 12 months through more accurately tracking staff patterns, while also identifying where and why turnover was plaguing certain communities, Young said.

“What we’re trying to do is be a little bit more sophisticated and handle some of the nuance at the community level,” Young said.

LCS has recently started a pilot program to track workforce data, studying retention and turnover to identify common trends and factors that equip human resource directors and executive directors with tools to help them improve local workforce challenges, Rosenberg said.

The growing data platform built by Ascent Living helps prevent employee burnout and tracks overtime and agency use, Finley said, with success in using data for expense management being the “top outcome” for the company. In the last 18 months, Finley credits the company’s 33% reduction in employee turnover to identifying workforce trends more quickly within Ascent Living communities.

Before staff are hired by Ascent Living communities, leadership also have access to data showing hiring speed, while also identifying challenging positions to fill, Finely added.

“We’re tracking things in real time and making corrections so that we stay within our budget,” Finley said.

Data to improve clinical care

The next wave of advancements for senior living providers in their use of data tools will be the ability to create predictive analytics capable of providing actionable data for an organization’s future.

Sonida tracks fall incidents, call-light activity and identifies “cluster events” like multiple falls at one community in a short period of time, Young said. This helps teams adjust care plans as necessary rather than on a retroactive basis. Tracking call-light use of residents is monitored to determine rising acuity and changes in resident wellbeing, Young said.

Closely tracking resident clinical changes during their time at a community can have direct financial impact, and Ascent reported a 100-day increase to the company’s length of stay in assisted living and memory care from 2023 to 2025, Finely said.

Monitoring ongoing resident acuity, through metrics including body weight changes, Ascent Living clinical teams can “stay alert” and an “early sign” of a resident’s change in acuity, Finley noted.

By tracking resident acuity data, LCS is able to create a “holistic, anonymized view” of resident data rather than “snapshots,” Rosenberg said. Using data from clinical teams has helped identify correlations between engagement, health indicators and length of stay. Over time, Rosenberg sees this type of data analysis as a critical way to improve length of stay.

For clinical outcomes, Rosenberg said LCS is now piloting data analysis efforts on falls, elopements, hospitalizations and “insurance-related incidents,” Rosenberg added.

St. Louis-based senior living nonprofit provider EverTrue created a dashboard that uses natural language processing and AI to analyze feedback from residents and their families to assess satisfaction and loyalty, CEO Adam Marles. In less than a year, the EverTrue data team created a unified reporting system tracking clinical, operational and financial data into one platform. That’s helped EverTrue staff have information that is more “timely and valuable” in serving older adults living in EverTrue communities.

“This allows us to identify emerging themes, understand what’s driving satisfaction, and give leaders clear, actionable guidance on where to focus improvements to provide the best experience for our residents and their family,” Marles said.

EverTrue also overhauled its medical recordkeeping system, creating “a single, unified source of truth” for EHR information that has helped EverTrue clinical teams improve care coordination, Marles said.

“This foundation for resident care and safety reduces ambiguity, improves accuracy, and enables far more reliable reporting and analytics going forward,” Marles said.

In 2026 and beyond, Rosenberg envisions senior living’s use of data and analytics continuing to evolve as AI continues to evolve.

“AI can do a lot of good, but the question is: can you embed it into operational workflows so it feels natural? It shouldn’t be another screen or another tool—it should meet staff where they’re already working,” Rosenberg said. “There are some really big opportunities there. That’s the next frontier.”

Young sees the senior living industry as being in the “optimization phase” of taking data and then creating plans based on that data, and the evolution will occur in the rise of predictive analytics, like improving operating performance through predictive data analysis.

“Forecasting the business is the most important thing that I do,” Young said.

Starting in a data science effort to improve operations is not easy, but Finley said the challenges and risk are worth the reward.

“I would encourage my operating colleagues out there to just take that first step,” Finely said.

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