How Partnerships Help Ingleside, Sunshine Retirement Keep Up With Tech Investments

Senior living tech investments are not cheap, and operators can grapple with not only installation but maintenance costs. That’s where partnerships come in.

According to NIC data, nearly half of all senior living buildings are 25 years or older. In order to keep these buildings running, operators must focus on more than amenity renovations but also increasing their technology capabilities, primarily through expensive retrofits.

Rockville, Maryland-based senior living nonprofit Ingleside is staying current with tech infrastructure needs y through partnerships with internet and cell phone providers T-Mobile and Verizon. The organization updates its three communities roughly every 10 years to better meet resident tech needs, according to Dusanka Delovska-Trajkova, chief information and digital officer at Ingleside.

“I’d like to think about digital transformation all the time, because you cannot really transform your business to use technology unless you have made these investments,” Delovska-Trajkova told Senior Housing News.

Bend, Oregon-based Sunshine Retirement Living’s asset management team coordinates with internet service providers, typically those that work with surrounding hotels and apartment buildings, to get reliable wifi coverage throughout a community. Most of the operator’s buildings are 30 or more years old, with the oldest being 46, according to Vice President Stephen Eatman.

The process of rewiring and running cable throughout these communities isn’t cheap, however.

“For the most part, we saw this coming and we started this investment a few years back,” Eatman said. “Now, it’s a question of maintaining and making sure we have what we need as we move on.”

Keeping ahead of obsolescence

Ingleside takes an approach of “not patching what is broken,” according to Delovska-Trajkova. To accomplish this, Ingleside bundles capital expenditure projects with IT projects, such as when remodeling its oldest communities adding in smart home technology like electronic locks, Amazon Alexas and other smart technologies offered through partnerships. The goal is to future proof the process as much as possible.

“We come in and talk with building management and property management about what their needs are and how we can run with their plans,” Delovska-Trajkova said. “We’re trying to build and give them suggestions on how we can add additional cabling.”

For example, while renovating the kitchen of a unit originally built in 2009, the organization’s IT team added cabling and smart-home connections to modernize the unit, including smart thermometers in the refrigerator.

Modernizing units in that way has helped the organization keep up with the technological changes of other departments, according to Delovska-Trajkova. 

Sunshine invests in three core technology improvements: increasing the efficiency of a community’s dining offerings through upgrading a point of sale system, robotics and investing in support systems for both the individual communities and the corporate office.

However, the company is in a holding pattern on adding new robotic processes until it can prove their worth in operations. To do so, the company is testing commercial vacuum robots in four of the five communities it manages for owner Sabra Health Care REIT (NYSE: SBRA).

Because of its partnerships, Sunshine didn’t have to invest in additional infrastructure for its new tech, according to Eatman. Instead, its partners support and provide maintenance for the devices.

While it is incorporating more technology solutions, like the Amazon Alexas it is bringing to its communities, Sunshine also has to source partners and systems to integrate it, leading to a “domino effect” of technology expenses, Eatman said.

Operators have to keep more than core upgrades in mind too. With the rate of software upgrades occurring, keeping those maintained prevents security threats from cybersecurity risks, Delovska-Trajkova said. Even changing the systems for a community’s HVAC or lighting could cause problems if they are not considered.

“Starting from the security, compliance and risk assessment point of view has worked for us,” she said. “The threat is real.”

Preventative maintenance is the key for operators to keep ahead of the problems caused by technology’s constant acceleration, according to Delovska-Trajkova. Putting money in an annual capital projects budget helps keep it from being deferred to something else.

“We were able to work through deferred maintenance projects when we had established a life cycle technology planning of a five- to 10-year roadmap rather than replacing reactively,” Delovska-Trajkova said. “We’ve had instances where things simply died because nobody paid attention.”

Sourcing and addressing solutions

Operators don’t have to go it alone when determining upgrades and tech-based renovations in communities. In some instances, partnerships can help cover the majority of the cost and take the responsibility for the replacement.

One instance of this occurring for Ingleside was Verizon replacing its copper lines, which are no longer supported, for fiber optic cables at no cost to the organization. The move occurred in Ingleside’s favor due to delays from resident requests because of the disruptions it would cause within their living space, Delovska-Trajkova said.

The operator also worked to partner with T-Mobile and AT&T to build out and enhance wifi infrastructure within one of its buildings. Without that partnership, Delovska-Trajkova said it would have cost the nonprofit around $1 per square foot in a 1 million square foot community to build distributed antenna systems to create the cell phone and internet service networks that residents want.

Sunshine is always willing to at least investigate and take meetings with potential partnerships on a regular basis in order to maintain the level of technology it needs in its buildings.

“I’ll have a member of our team learn about it and sell it back to me so I can talk with the owners and see if any of them are interested in participating with it,” Eatman said.

With a continued lack of development occurring in senior living due to the price of land, materials and capital, Eatman said it’s an exciting time and challenge for the industry.

“We think about the fact that a lot of senior living buildings were initially built off of having a cruise ship feel,” he said. “But cruise ships have changed quite a bit. And just like those have had to be updated, we’re in the middle of looking at and figuring out how we can do that with our buildings.”

The post How Partnerships Help Ingleside, Sunshine Retirement Keep Up With Tech Investments appeared first on Senior Housing News.