The hole that can no longer be ignored.

Any discussion about senior housing that does not include senior healthcare has a huge hole in it.

Not a tiny hole that you can step over, tiptoe around, avoid, pretend it doesn’t exist. A HUGE gaping hole that will ultimately consume you, because prospective residents and their families and especially health referral sources increasingly demand to know how you manage the health of their loved ones, as this is the very reason that compels them to your doors. Residents who are deciding why they should choose YOU rather than a competitor in the same town.

Research shows that assisted living seniors each have an average of 8 chronic health conditions and take about 7 different prescribed medicines (many of them taken more than once a day). For a 100 bed assisted living community, that means its aides and its nurse are helping manage 800 chronic health conditions and dispensing more than 700 medicines every single day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year!

How could you NOT talk about this?! And yet, so few do!

What an opportunity to promote your experience and expertise about a topic so precious and intimate to your residents – their health, which they have handed over to you with whole-hearted trust.

How could you NOT openly discuss this? Why do you not discuss the training of your staff, your experience in managing not only these health conditions but also the medicines that support them, the customized and personalized care approaches you have designed for specific health conditions, and more?

If you’re an owner of senior housing, surely you must realize that housing for seniors is totally different than housing for younger folks. Sure…younger folks have health issues. But they have fewer of them, and they are healthy enough to easily manage them on their own. So the reason why younger folks are attracted to your properties has nothing to do with health.

In senior housing, however, especially assisted living, it’s the exact opposite. The ONLY reason why residents come to you is because of their health and because they can no longer manage their own health and now depend on YOU for assistance.

With this realization, and with the understanding that profitable senior housing investments depend on maximizing occupancy at the most efficient cost, isn’t it logical that you would insist that your operators put resident health as a prominent and visible priority?

And yet the following statistics demonstrate more focus is urgently required. Over the past 10 years for assisted living,

Length of stay has plummeted from 36 months to 22 months.
Annual resident turnover, pressured by acuity creep, has skyrocketed from 41% to 54%!
The leading reason for resident turnover is declining resident health, and this has risen sharply from 72% of those residents who leave to 92% currently!

Although occupancy nationally in assisted living averages about 88% (according to the 4Q15 figures from NIC), what if, by implementing a focus on resident health, you could maintain that occupancy with a lower turnover rate and therefore with lower cost? What if you could reduce turnover by 10% or 20% or more? At a conservatively estimated cost of $4000/turnover, that would result in significant cost savings. Improved profitability would be achieved by stabilized resident health. Everybody wins!

Every senior in your community has a host of chronic health issues – every single one of them. When your discussions do not include general information about resident health and the services you have designed to support these health issues, you prevent your customers from learning about your strengths and expertise in this crucial area, and you hide your most promising market differentiator.

Every owner and operator of senior housing, especially assisted living, would benefit from informative discussions about the health issues managed in their communities. What an opportunity to display your commitment to quality, personalized, resident-centered care!

For ideas about how to ‘close the hole’ in senior housing discussions, please e-mail me:

st**********@il*******************.com

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Dr. Steven Fuller

Dr. Steven Fuller is a triple board certified physician/entrepreneur who develops programs in support of an Integrated Care model of senior housing. This model includes 3 equal, interactive, and mutually supportive team members: real estate, hospitality, and healthcare.