Story 1
Just after being seated at a local restaurant, your server brings you an entire meal – soup, appetizer, salad, entree, dessert…everything. Some of the food appeals to you and some of it doesn’t. It was brought to you without the server either asking or knowing anything about your preferences. You wonder: “How could the server possibly know what I wanted without ever having asked?”
Story 2
You go to a local clothing store to purchase some items for a special occasion. As soon as you walk in, the clerk brings you several outfits and then escorts you to the cashier. You were never asked your preferences or measured for your size, but you are expected to take the clothes and pay for them. Some of the clothes don’t even appeal to you, and you have no idea whether any of them fit you. You wonder: “How can I be expected to take these clothes without having been asked my preferences or size?”
Story 3
You’re touring an Assisted Living Community with your mom, because she needs help managing her health and can no longer live independently. The Director immediately takes you to the dining room for lunch. Granted, it’s a nice dining room, and the food is good. But that’s not why you’re there. You stress that you’re there because your mom needs help managing her health, and you want to learn more.
Your mom has 6 different chronic health conditions – a heart condition, high blood pressure, arthritis, and some others. And she takes at least 1 prescribed medicine for every one of them. It’s complicated for your mom to balance all these health conditions, keep track of all the medicines, and arrange all the doctor visits. You want to know this AL’s experience and expertise managing their residents’ health, because THIS is the reason for your tour. And yet when you ask the Director to show you this information, you’re told the information is not available because they don’t measure the health of their residents. You wonder, “How can an AL manage resident health if they don’t measure resident health?”
Now…which story is true? You decide…
Analytics – “you can’t successfully manage what you don’t measure.”
As a physician, I can’t speak about the restaurant or clothing store. But I can address the AL, because I’ve had the same question too. When AL marketers have paraded through my office over the years, why did I only hear about good food and nice people and NEVER about what mattered most to me and my patients: the ability of an AL to manage my patients’ health?
The reason is clear and not the fault of the AL: there simply wasn’t a practical way of doing it…of defining the metrics and using powerful analytics to measure resident health. ALs previously had no choice but to operate under these limitations. Until now, ALs have not been offered an analytics service that is easy, cost effective, flexible, and capable of measuring resident health with insights that can be used to enhance health management and improve marketing.
But analytics are now available for the assisted living industry. And to meet expectations of the baby boomers, to remain profitable, and to reduce resident turnover, analytics will very quickly become a welcome essential for the demands all ALs are facing: rising resident health acuity, inclusion in emerging health referral networks, resourcing and educating staff.
Analytics uniquely allows ALs to VISUALIZE resident health and use the insights to implement customized health management strategies, assign resident risk levels, and facilitate risk adjusted staffing.
For ALs, the choice is simple: analytics now, or analytics later. Whether you lead or whether you follow, everyone is still in the same parade.
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