By Steve Moran

Senior Living 100 2025 is in the books. It consisted of great content, great conversations, connecting with old friends and making new ones and long walks on the beach.

Attending this conference and consuming this content will help leaders lead better. The content was so rich that at time it felt like trying to drink from a fire hose, but I came away with three big take-aways.

Massive amounts of actionable information. I came away with three big impressions/Ideas:

  1. We are on the verge of really being able to use all the data we have in unimaginable ways. – While the conference was not super AI heavy, several operators talked about using AI and data to understand their operations better and make better decisions. The single biggest obstacle has been taking all the data that operators are generating and creating a unified “data lake” that can be accessed in many ways. While most operators are not there yet, enough are that this should no longer be seen as an insurmountable problem …

    The remaining challenge is figuring out what’s important and what’s not.

  2. Senior living is solving big healthcare problems. – Value-based care is one of those things that everyone is talking about. And some people sort of think they know what it is, but then again, no one really knows what it is. Yep, kind of that nonsensical and confusing …

    Ultimately, though, the concept is simple. Senior living knows its residents better than the rest of the healthcare system. Not only do they know them better, but they are in a position to prevent falls, prevent emergency room visits, and prevent and/or shorten hospital stays.

    This all adds up to millions of dollars of savings to the healthcare system in this country for nearly every single senior living community.

    Value-based care is all about doing a better job of what we are already doing, measuring it, documenting it, and economically participating in those massive savings.

    The beauty of value-based care is that it gives residents and their families better lives.

  3. We are getting better every day. – I came away from Senior Living 100 feeling very optimistic about senior living and the role it plays in making the world a better place to live; the role it plays in allowing older people to have amazing lives. There are challenges and plenty of things we still get wrong. There are operators and capital providers who don’t really care about their customers.

At the same time, though, there are leaders who eat, breathe, and sleep the big question of how to make the lives of older people, the lives of team members, better.

The job is never done and will never be done. But we are better today than we were five years ago, and we will be better 5 years from now. If you attended SL 100, you came away a better leader. If you were not there I would recommend it for next year.