Senior Living Nonprofits See Staffing, Funding, Time Constraints As Top Barriers To Implementing Tech

Staff capacity, funding and time constraints are the three biggest barriers to implementing new technology initiatives in senior living.

That’s according to the inaugural Ziegler Link-Age LeadingAge CAST CTO Hotline survey. The new survey, from a partnered effort between Ziegler Link-age Funds and LeadingAge CAST, asked over 100 technology decision makers of not-for-profit senior living and care organizations how they are approaching technology strategy, adoption and innovation.

Just over half of the respondents, 53%, said staff capacity or expertise was the among the top three limiting factors for technology adoption. Another 51% said funding and 48% identified time constraints as the within implementing new tech. Just 9% and 11% of respondents cited regulatory or compliance challenges and leadership buy-in, respectively, are top challenges. 

The data suggests that senior living nonprofits are on board with new tech, but face challenges such as lack of industry data when implementing tech in their running communities, according to Jenny Poth, senior vice president of investments and fund management at Ziegler.

Respondents named operational efficiency (75%), improving quality of care (51%) and improving the residential experience (33%) as top three motivators for adopting new technology. Poth said surprised the survey’s authors “were surprised about a few barriers that were reported much less frequently.”

“For instance, only 20% of respondents selected ‘addressing staff shortages’ as a top-three motivator and a mere 5% selected ‘preparing for value-based care models,’” Poth said.

Poth said she and the researchers also were surprised to learn that although 80% of senior living nonprofits set key performance indicators for new tech, more than half of them don’t actually use that data to inform their operations.

“We will need to do additional research to better understand the causes for this lack of follow-up, but we know making decisions be very difficult without robust data can be serious,” Poth added.

A little more than three-quarters of respondents, 80%, said that their organization’s knowledge of AI is either “very limited or exists only within select teams.” Only half of the survey’s respondents said they felt “somewhat confident” to deploy AI, and no organizations said they have extensive AI competency among their staff.

Respondents ranked legal and regulatory issues as their top concern around AI, followed by organization/roles/governance, identification mobilization and scaling of priority use cases, developing/nurturing AI competencies and stakeholder impact.

The majority of respondents have either implemented or are in the process of implementing automation to their operations. The top three areas automation focuses revolve around include billing/revenue cycle management (RCM), payroll and human resources with the exception of scheduling and admissions/move-ins, with 66%, 62% and 54% of responses indicating them as a priority.

As in other Hotline-series surveys, the researchers asked respondents to weigh in regarding how they think consumer expectations are changing. Their top priorities are better connectivity with in-unit WiFi and smart home technology is becoming the norm, and their top concerns are residents expecting the community to set up tech at the time of move-in and senior solutions feeling “prehistoric,” based on a Ziegler analysis of their answers.

One respondent wrote that their organization is “bracing for the impending changes for the AI explosion and currently trying to come to terms with the financial impact of adopting and securing new technologies using our current operational and financial models.”

Another wrote that the “fear of emerging tech is holding us back.”

The respondents also noted the rise of complex resident preferences for connectivity and technology.

“Residents also have expectations about using connected data to inform health and wellness,” one respondent wrote.

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