PointClickCare or Yardi? Fundamentally different.

Senior living operators need a core business system to run their clinical care and financial operations. These are the two most important business areas to address. These are also interrelated, as care services drive billing and revenue directly, so an integrated system allows the seamless flow from care to billing, speeding revenue recognition.

Selecting a system for this purpose often comes down to a choice between PointClickCare’s Senior Living Platform and Yardi’s Senior Living Suite. But which is the better choice?

Besides a comparison of features, it is important for operators to understand the fundamental difference between the two systems: their origin. The origin of each of these systems points to their areas of focus, and ultimately what each system excels at. This is perhaps as important for operators to consider as the features - operators need to align to the system (and company) that most closely fits their objectives and corporate personality. Longterm, It is all about the fit.

Let’s find out about each company’s origins, starting with Yardi.

Anant Yardi, after whom the company is named, founded Yardi in 1984 and continues to be President of this family owned enterprise. At heart, Yardi is a real estate software company. Anant Yardi founded it to address the lack of accounting and property management software available to the residential real estate market. Since then, he has diversified his markets to include commercial real estate, affordable housing, airports, and senior living. Plus many more. It makes sense, since most of the functionality needed in these markets is similar: accounting, property management, leasing, payment processing, CRM, document management, construction management, and business intelligence. Senior living additionally has some very specific requirements related to clinical care, such as an EHR (electronic health record).

According to Enlyft, Yardi seems to have a dominant 15%-20% share of market in property management software, mainly in the US and mainly in Real Estate. By extension, this means that the majority of the company and its 4,000+ employees are focused on Real Estate. For senior living operators, the implication is that although Yardi offers a senior living suite, only a small(ish) fraction of the company is working on the functionality and features related to senior living, such as evolving the EHR and clinical care elements.

Compare that to PointClickCare, which was founded in 1995 expressly to address the lack of clinical care software available in the long term post-acute care market. Founders Mike and Dave Wessinger were working in the nursing home and long term care space where they witnessed manual, paper-based clinical care management processes that they thought would be better solved with software. Despite much initial push back from the sector, PointClickCare expanded within Canada and into the US in the mid 2000’s. Today, PointClickCare’s solution is used in over 21,000 skilled nursing, senior living, and home health agencies, with over 75% share of market.

For senior living operators this means that the majority of the effort of the 1,500 employees at PointClickCare is focused on the core clinical care management platform, extending it deeper into senior living from its LTC roots, and adding/enhancing financial, CRM, non-clinical operations, nutrition, and employee engagement.

Fundamentally, the origins of Yardi and PointClickCare are different, as are their areas of focus and expertise. Yardi excels at property management and accounting. PointClickCare excels at clinical care management. Each has expanded beyond their core areas, competently. However, Yardi will never excel at clinical care management, just as PointClickCare will never excel at property management and accounting.

So, for senior living operators trying to choose between Yardi and PointClickCare, when considering fit, consider the company’s culture, objectives, and personality.

Yardi may be a better fit for development-centric, property management oriented operators, who may have a light care component, but are not structurally centred around it.

And PointClickCare may be best suited for operators with more acute care management needs, or where care management plays a bigger overall role in the operations.

Once operators have identified which of these is a better fit for them, then they need to consider each vendors’ features and functionality, and ecosystem.

In either case, operators will still need to select complimentary software systems to complete their technology stack (see prior post) and to fully digitalize their senior living operations.