By Steve Moran

This is something that has been rattling around as disconnected thinking in my head for months. I had the sense there was something here but was at a complete loss.

While at LTC100 in Scottsdale a while back, like magic, the dots connected. Two observations I couldn’t reconcile suddenly became one big idea.

The two observations:

  1. When expenses start creeping up, it is a widely accepted practice to take a hard look at all expenditures, looking for even small ways to reduce costs. When you shave pennies in enough places, it creates meaningful, measurable improvements to the bottom line.
  2. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of technology vendors that promise higher efficiencies and staff savings. Mostly, the claims get dismissed because unless a technology can allow you to reduce headcount or scheduled hours, the rightful reaction is, “So what?”

A New Way To Think About It

Here is the problem that no one ever talks about: tasks always win. Team members are hired to do a job, and that job is ultimately a series of tasks. Meaningful connection with residents is also expected, but when time is tight, connection is what gets crowded out every single time. 

As I was listening to some interesting AI technology pitches that included the usual claims of staff savings, it hit me hard that they were onto something big that no one is talking about.

It’s Huge

If organizations started looking for penny-sized savings in team workflows, those pennies would add up to meaningful extra minutes, maybe even extra hours, that could be used to create better experiences for residents.

Imagine your team members recouping 30 minutes a day. Or an hour.

Where the Minutes Could Come From

The savings are hiding in the friction nobody talks about. A few examples:

  • A care aide spends 12 minutes per shift tracking down a supervisor to ask a documentation question that an AI assistant could answer in 30 seconds.
  • A nurse dictates incident notes by voice instead of typing them out. That’s 8 minutes back per report.
  • Scheduling software eliminates three phone calls to fill an open shift. That’s another 15 minutes.
  • Automated family updates, a brief text or email triggered by a care event, replace the manually written message the charge nurse was composing at the end of a long shift.
  • The resident wears a patch or spends one minute in front of a technology-based mirror that captures vitals, loads them into the resident record, and flags possible changes in condition.

None of them is dramatic or even noticeable by themselves. But across the team and across a week or month, those moments become additional meaningful encounters between residents and team members.

What You Do With Those Minutes

This is where it gets good:

  • A caregiver sits down next to a resident who has been quiet all morning, not to complete a task, just to be present.
  • A dining team member notices a resident’s birthday is tomorrow and spends five minutes personalizing their place setting.
  • A nurse calls a family member not because something went wrong, but to share something the resident said that made the whole hall laugh.
  • A med tech finishes a pass early and takes a resident outside for ten minutes of fresh air because the weather is nice and the resident mentioned yesterday that she missed her garden.

None of those things cost money. Every single one of them is the difference between a community that delivers care and a community that delivers an experience.

The Real Opportunity

The senior living industry has been asking technology to solve a staffing problem. That is the wrong question.

The right question is, “What would your team do with their time if the friction got out of the way?”