Back in June, newly formed Senior Living Transformation Company (SLTC), in a joint venture with Omega Healthcare Investors, purchased a 114-unit senior living community in Brentwood, Tennessee for about $11 million, or $96,500 per unit. They consider that to be a distressed price for the roughly 25-year-old building, and they plan to invest a few million dollars into the property over the next several years. SLTC is led by Arnie Whitman, Chip Gabriel, Corey Bennett and Joelle Poe. But the acquisition is not the real story.
The community, to be called Senior Living Transformation Center, will be an incubator of sorts to try to create an environment that will be the future of seniors housing. There will, however, be several moving parts to get there. Whitman is very familiar with incubators, as well as technology for seniors housing, as he has been extremely involved with Aging 2.0 over the years and was an investor in its GENerator Ventures, where entrepreneurs were trying to come up with new ideas to help the senior care industry meet the future.
Whitman believes the past structure in seniors housing investments was your traditional OpCo and PropCo, and that it will be outdated. He is adding a third one to create a three-legged stool: HealthCo. He believes technology should be used as a tool to create efficiencies in operations and revenue generation, and he and his team want to prove that it will work and show what the return on investment will be to investors and payers. In addition, they want to integrate care services with the local population, something that is not new but something that has probably not been done well, or convincingly.
It will all be about people, process and data, and they believe that currently there is a lack of data to make the right decisions. In addition, if the staff buys in, a significant shift in culture will improve operations. Never an easy task, but as we all know, a good culture has been lacking at many companies and communities. They will start with what they call “basic cable,” and then roll out more ideas and technology.
Their initial implementations will include a new EHR, eMAR and CRM. They selected Medtelligent’s ALIS solution for their combined offering and data integration capabilities. They are also replacing an outdated and unreliable plug-cord and PERs system for nurse call with a Sage digital nurse call solution. Sage has data integration capabilities and they are able to capture highly relevant and actionable data for SLTC’s model, not just in the moment of need, but one that will also allow them to detect early changes in condition and higher care needs.
This will not be just for SLTC, even though they do plan to roll their concept out into other communities they buy. They would like to have other providers come in, take a look and see what they can bring home. Everyone talks about bringing change to seniors housing; These guys want to do it and spread the word. Let’s just say that after the pandemic, the industry needs it.
