The Corporate view: A high-level technology architecture for Senior Living operators.

Operators of senior living communities live at the intersection of hospitality and healthcare. This requires that their technology architecture reflect both non-clinical and clinical elements, respectively. This was described in the Resident perspective architecture, which needs to be expanded further to achieve a complete Corporate perspective. Additional elements that are needed for the business include finance, human resources, investment, construction & development, sales & marketing, and analytics. Not all operators will require each of these elements, or may need them in varying proportions reflective of their business reality. Most operators will have some of these elements in place already, though they may be due for a refresh or rethink. Much of what I’ve seen are on-premise systems that haven’t been maintained, updated, properly secured, nor are serving the business well anymore. Given the sensitive healthcare data that operators are stewards of, this is an area of enterprise risk exposure.

Working outward from the Corporate persona(s), to Service, Systems and Infrastructure, yields a substantive number of elements to plan for, as shown below. (Note this is not intended to be an exhaustive view, but rather a good typical starting point for consideration. Also, some areas can be expanded further, such as “sales”. Clinical services are mainly viewed from the administrative perspective.)

Operators can use this template as a guide for prioritization and development of a roadmap. What is important however, is that operators keep the end state in mind, meaning how all the elements work together in the end, as a system. They should focus on creating an integrated whole, rather than an assembly of individual and isolated solutions, as this will dramatically simplify operations as well as reduce costs.

Operators of every size need to consider which parts they want to maintain themselves, and which they would prefer to outsource as managed services. The basis for such decisions should be strategic, in the sense that what is managed in-house should provide differentiated business value, while commodity items should be outsourced. In-house resources should be doing the most valuable and strategic work, as that is where the return on investment for the business is.

As an example, managing infrastructure such as WiFi, internet, telephony, and similar systems is a commodity for which there are a multitude of highly capable and qualified service vendors. The important distinction here is that while it is critical to keep those systems healthy and resilient, maintaining them operationally is more efficient and effective if outsourced to a good partner.

In contrast to this, operators would not want to outsource their investment planning, and whatever underlying algorithms they use to prioritize and plan where to build new communities. This is a highly strategic activity underpinned by proprietary processes and calculations that can be extremely important differentiators in degrees of business success. That said, operators should outsource the operationalization of the underlying database (e.g. to a cloud database vendor such as AWS, Snowflake, etc), rather than building and maintaining that on premises.

Key to building an integrated assembly of systems is selecting the right vendors, whom operators should consider partners, in that the relationship is about a mutual fit and support, rather than simply being transactional in nature. The right curation of ecosystem partners and solutions yields more resilient, agile, and cost efficient architectures. For this, operators should look to API-led, cloud based solutions with pre-built integrations to their most critical systems.

While the permutations of such an undertaking can seem overwhelming, like a 1000+ piece puzzle of the same colour tone, operators can be confident that it is possible to bring together the right solutions for the business, for now and for tomorrow. Sometimes though, it helps to have a trained guide.