This article is sponsored by Glennis Solutions. In this Voices interview, Senior Housing News sits down with Brad Frasher, Executive Vice President of Glennis Solutions, a fully integrated senior housing platform built and utilized by Atria Senior Living for over a decade. Frasher explains the coming impact of bringing Glennis to the public market and how operators can use Glennis to drive efficiency in community operations and resident care and gain strategic insight for better decision-making.
Senior Housing News: Before leading Glennis, you spent more than 20 years working for Atria Senior Living. What career experiences do you most draw from in your role as EVP for Glennis?
Brad Frasher: When you work in the corporate office for an operator, you recognize that you’re a support function. Your sole job and your sole priority is to make the day-to-day life of the operators at the building level and regional level easier. The best way to do that is to build intuitive software that is easy to use and requires minimal training, but also has built-in controls that provide guardrails for the operators. Having one integrated software system that drives senior living management processes allows them to focus on operations and provides the insight they need for peak performance.
While Glennis software has been used at senior living communities for more than a decade, it’s been on the market for just over a year. What are your biggest takeaways as you introduce Glennis to the market?
Frasher: Every operator has different pain points, and we want to make sure that we’re solving those first and foremost and doing what we can to make their lives easier. We also work to acknowledge where they are in their technology life cycle. Atria is a very large, complicated entity with many functions, roles and responsibilities, and has gone through the cycle over the last 20 years, as we observed. Newer, smaller operators may be a little less sophisticated. We’ve been through that growth cycle already. We’ve made a lot of mistakes and we understand what doesn’t work, what does and what’s been really successful. We can help them speed up their growth and their technology life cycle.
Glennis is unique in that it is a complete solution that was designed for use within senior living. How does that perspective reveal itself in the software and how does that benefit your customer?
Frasher: Several of the other platforms were adopted from other industries, whether that’s multifamily or skilled nursing. Glennis was built by a senior living operator, so the platform takes into account the important nuances of running a senior living facility, from sales to resident care and everything in between.
We’ve spent a lot of time working on each one of our modules to be sure they make it easier for everyone to do their job and to help senior housing operators improve performance results, whether it’s occupancy, resident care or service quality.
Glennis was purpose-built for seniors by veterans of the industry who understand the complexities of managing senior living. How does Glennis help providers manage today’s myriad staffing challenges?
Frasher: Again, the idea behind Glennis was to simplify the day-to-day of managing a community. The sooner employees can begin using the system, the easier and more efficient their workday becomes. Because it was built by an operator, it’s intuitive and easy to use and thus requires less training. To supplement that, we have our Glennis Flight School, an e-learning platform that allows new hires to get up and running with minimal training required by actual humans.
Additionally, because Glennis was utilized by a large operator for many years, we’ve had the ability to enhance and improve the system over time. For example, there are a lot of features that were built specifically to make department heads and regional staff more informed and efficient. Glennis allows information to flow in real time to the corporate office and the regional staff so that they can stay informed and make better decisions.
Data is king. How does Glennis break data silos and to offer strategic insight for better decision-making?
Frasher: I’m excited you asked this. Our newer product Glennis Insights is our business intelligence tool. It’s both an analytics and reporting tool. I’m a data nerd, and over my time, it’s always been about the data and reporting, seeing trends, making decisions, and creating actionable dashboards.
Our insights tool allows you to pull data from all of the modules whether it’s sales data, billing data, apartment pricing or care management data. You can pull that all into Glennis Insights, and it allows you to consume that information in easy-to-read dashboards and create more predictive analytics to guide you to the answer. It’s really a game-changer for decision-makers to have all of that information and data at their fingertips.
What excites you most about the future of Glennis?
Frasher: It’s been said many times, but our space is immature from a tech standpoint. It’s growing up quickly. At Glennis, we’re excited to catch and even drive this technology wave. That’s something that excites us every day. We have a chance to make a difference and change how the industry operates.
Finish this sentence: “The senior housing industry in 2022 will be the year of…”?
Frasher: Growth and change. Operators are focused on growing occupancy and apartment selling rates back to pre-COVID levels. The industry is experiencing change both in c-suite level management at several operators and in senior housing transactions where buildings are changing hands. All of these are good for the tech sector. New management or new operators look for technology to help growth. It’s very exciting for us.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Glennis Solutions offers a fully integrated cloud-based software suite purpose-built by a senior living operator for senior living operations. To learn more about how Glennis can help you meet the unique needs of senior housing staff and residents, visit GlennisSolutions.com.
The Voices Series is a sponsored content program featuring leading executives discussing trends, topics and more shaping their industry in a question-and-answer format. For more information on Voices, please contact [email protected].