This article is sponsored by Sentrics. In this Voices interview, Senior Housing News is joined again by Sentrics CEO Darin LeGrange to learn about integrated entertainment and engagement platforms, and how they are improving quality of life for seniors across the country. He also explains how this technology can drive growth, independence and relationship building to positively impact behavioral health.
In 2020, Sentrics launched the Sentrics360 suite. How did the first year match up to your expectations?
Darin LeGrange: 2020 was a challenging year for everyone in our industry, but in many ways, we were able to achieve our objectives. We shifted our focus to help clients serve their residents, both through the early stages and the height of the pandemic toward the end of 2020. First and foremost, we wanted to adapt and figure out how to help. We used our entertainment and communication capabilities to help meet unique needs. This included movies on demand, technology-based entertainment solutions and automated communication systems that helped communities share updates with families more easily.
We also launched Ensure360, Entertain360 and Engage360, which are all part of the Sentrics platform. The RTLS capability within Ensure360 helped us pivot this life safety technology into new areas, including contact tracing, to help communities automate exposure tracking and reporting.
Our Enrich360 application — which is our machine learning-based platform — provided a case management capability to help operators manage the processes and protocols for COVID, or any infectious disease for that matter.
We delivered the first truly integrated entertainment and engagement platform on the one device that all seniors know how to use: the TV. Then we saw a nearly 40% increase in our ability to bundle these capabilities with TV, internet and voice to offer lower cost, higher quality services. We believe it sets them up for the future as we start to roll out enhanced entertainment and engagement solutions. It was a good year, and we achieved what we set out to do.
With all that said, how did the COVID-19 pandemic change your product plans?
LeGrange: Our products were purpose-built when we started down this path two and a half years ago with our focus on the convergence of health care and senior living. We saw what was coming. COVID accelerated that, and I think everyone would agree that it accelerated the recognition of senior living communities in the health care business. It was no longer okay to only label us as hospitality businesses. We are both.
In addition to the contact tracing and case management applications, we accelerated our usage of voice control. Allowing a resident to control their environment can go a long way, and we were able to optimize their ability to control technology through voice. Technology can keep residents engaged when they have to spend more time in their room than we want them to, but it has to be simple to use.
Unlike other voice applications that are always listening, or require another third-party device, ours is integrated into our EHub and activated with a remote. Our voice control has been trained to accept a button click to “turn it on” providing more security and feelings of independence for our residents.
We’ve all seen the Saturday Night Live skit where Alexa responds to anything that is said in the room. We wanted to make sure that our voice application would make it easy for our residents to engage and utilize the technology through a robust platform that is plugged into the community, the families, the health care ecosystem and anything else they might need.
2021 could be called “The Year of Disruption” for engagement platforms. What is Sentrics doing in this area?
LeGrange: We spend a lot of time talking about our engagement and entertainment integration. 2021 holds many opportunities for technology providers to not just disrupt, but to solve real problems in the market. We’re painfully aware of the feelings of isolation and loneliness that the pandemic brought on. It helped us recognize that loneliness is not just a COVID thing, and that many of our residents are lonely for many parts of the day. Engagement is about helping residents find their passions and purpose and connecting them to other people.
The last year helped the industry see the holes in today’s engagement platforms, which largely just automate existing operational functions. We partnered with Sara Kyle at LE3 Solutions, and Bob Kramer at Nexus Insights, who’s on our advisory council, to reimagine engagement in our communities. We just announced that we are adding a new foundation to our Engage360 platform this fall.
We call it Resident Journey, which provides a systematic and curated approach to keeping a pulse on and helping every resident activate their best day possible every day. It leverages the Vitality Activation Approach and its three vitality indicators — growth, independence and relationships — to assess a resident’s emotional health, gauge her transition in and through the community, and nudge and support her move from passive to activated vitality.
Built into Engage360, our Resident Journey application includes three critical components — a survey engine, a recommendation engine and an analytics engine — to capture critical information about a resident’s ongoing interests, provide insights about a resident’s unspoken needs and enable both the resident and the people who surround that resident to help them with valuable tools to stay active and vital to the community, family and friends.
You just mentioned the partnership with LE3 to create Vitality Activation Approach. Why is this important for operators?
LeGrange: We partnered with LE3 to create the Vitality Activation Approach, which is the cornerstone of our Resident Journey application. It is a process for understanding, defining and driving a resident’s experience by continually assessing a resident’s progress against three critical indicators: growth, independence and relationships.
To quote Bob Kramer, “No one wants longevity without vitality.” We want to create better years, not just more years. By asking a resident a series of simple questions related to growth, independence and relationships, right through the TV, and then feeding them recommendations related to those questions — again, right on the TV — we can measure and guide the resident experience. While the resident believes the community is responding to his or her unique needs, wants and continuous aspirations, the community receives critical information and insights about the resident’s experience and state of mind.
I always say we’re using the TV, which is a passive device, to gather information that gets residents out of their room and away from the TV. We’re using a tool they use today to drive engagement and create vital, thriving seniors in our communities.
You like to talk about the “Resident Journey.” What are the operational benefits of thinking about what residents go through in this framework?
LeGrange: The overriding value of Resident Journey is to help identify and guide the wellbeing of a resident through an entire community stay. At the same time, Resident Journey provides community leaders with consistent processes, measurable progress and actionable insights to drive a personalized journey for every resident.
Many communities today still rely on pen and paper to capture information about a resident. Often that information sits in a file drawer with the person who captured it. High employee turnover makes it even harder to capture and share information that can help staff have a meaningful impact on the emotional wellbeing of a resident. Plus, complicated annual surveys may take months to calculate and have results.
Resident Journey is ultimately about capturing consistent information today that can provide insights and actions today. Our data does not sit in file cabinets waiting to be read — it will be captured, correlated and analyzed to provide valuable insights and recommendations as soon as it is captured. It gives community leaders a way to measure and affect progress because it provides a systematic way to capture, access and trend consistent information across a neighborhood, community, region or corporate entity. It even gives communities a way to compare themselves against industry averages.
Last year, you talked about the convergence of health care and senior living. How is Sentrics enabling that convergence?
LeGrange: For the last two and a half years, as we put Sentrics together, our work has been based on the foundation that health care and senior living are converging rapidly. It started with new Medicare reimbursement programs and the proliferation and growth of Medicare Advantage. With the pandemic, we saw more communities move into the management of care. Now we’re starting to see a proliferation of community-led risk management of residents.
As operators take on more financial and premium risk with the integration of Medicare Advantage programs, we continue to add more capabilities to our Sentrics360 suite to meet the full spectrum of resident needs. Whether it’s physical, mental, social or behavioral information, this 360-degree view helps us predict and prevent adverse events.
If we learned anything through the pandemic, it’s that for the lonely resident who is isolated from the watchful eye of family, technology can be harnessed to help everyone understand more about a resident’s care, well-being and social engagement. The easier it is to adopt that technology, the more likely a resident can benefit from it.
Sentrics has built a unique set-top box to drive all of its solutions. Tell me about your EHub and what you’re calling “The Power of One.”
LeGrange: The Sentrics EHub can traditionally be viewed as a set-top box, but our EHub is really an internet of things, or an IoT, device that makes it easier for a resident to use. TV, internet and voice typically come with their own set of devices, and if you want a DVR capability, for example, you need to add another device to the setup.
We knew we needed to make all of this easier, and our EHub is the culmination of that. It is a single IoT device that controls the TV, the internet connection and the voice service. It provides DVR services, and it can also control third-party streaming. If you have a Roku device or Apple Play device, it can help control that. It also integrates with our Engage360 platform, so you can control all entertainment and engagement technology from the same platform.
The community itself has one device to maintain. It is less expensive to the community and to the resident. Even family members find this beneficial because there are fewer tech support calls going into the community, asking for something to be fixed in Mom’s room. We’ve simplified not just the maintenance, but also the usage for everyone involved through this “Power of One” technology.
Coming into this year, no one knew fully what to expect in the senior living industry. What was the biggest surprise to you in the first half of the year, and what impact will it have for the remainder of the year?
LeGrange: We’ve talked at length about senior living and health care convergence, and we’ve obviously seen a rapid acceleration of that over the last year. Anne Tomlinson, who’s also on our advisory council, pointed out how rapidly specialty plans are growing within Medicare, and how communities are partnering with or creating their own Medicare Advantage plans at an accelerated pace.
While we knew that was coming, the surprise was the rate at which it picked up. We also discovered that while senior living residents are becoming less technology-averse, simplicity is still key.
Technology for technology’s sake won’t get used. The technology that operators will adopt are the tools that can unlock the potential to elevate the quality of life for the residents, ensure their physical safety, keep them medically well, enhance their social engagement and improve their behavioral health.
If it is simple, technology will be utilized to accomplish all four of those goals, and that’s the purpose of Sentrics360. We believe health care convergence and technology adoption will continue to move ahead rapidly in the coming years.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Sentrics delivers a comprehensive suite of data-driven solutions that provide a 360-degree view of residents to help senior living communities transform their operations from reactive to proactive care. To find out how, visit Sentrics.net.
The Voices Series is a sponsored content program featuring leading executives discussing trends and topics shaping their industry in a question-and-answer format. For more information on Voices, please contact [email protected].