By Susan Saldibar

So, you’ve bought a cluster of buildings to transform into senior living communities. Anyone who has done it knows there are a ton of things that have to happen. And in short order. So there are plenty of opportunities to make mistakes. 

Here’s a big one: Putting IT on the back burner. Or piecemealing it.

Either way the results are always the same. The operator gets hammered. 

No one knows this better than Ephraim Ebstein, founder of FIT Solutions (a Foresight partner). 

Ephraim sat down for a chat with Steve Moran in a recent Tech Tuesday broadcast. He knows IT inside and out, having grown his San Diego-based start-up almost overnight after his first client decided to go national. He said, “We can do that.” And they never looked back.

Ephraim and Steve talked a lot about the many IT holes found in senior living. There’s a fascinating anatomy of a cyberattack that’s too long to share here. So watch the video and get the nuts and bolts. 

In the meantime, here’s my set of takeaways:

  1. There are no “small potatoes” when it comes to cyber criminals. If you think because you’re smaller, you’re safer, think again. You’re easy pickin’s for cyber criminals. FIT stays on top of all the latest cyber action by monitoring cyber behavior 24/7, identifying login and password anomalies, and creating thousands of alerts that they keep track of. Ask them how they stopped a massive New Year’s Eve cyberattack in minutes. Pretty impressive.  
  2. “AI employees” should be replacing your chatbots. These “employees” will text your prospects in ways that make it impossible to tell that they’re not real people. They can reach out to a prospect and ask “How’s your mom doing?” and engage in real “back-and-forth” texting. The AI learning layer lets you train them to get better and better. Your real employees can spend their time following up. 
  3. There’s a ton of money you could be saving. It’s hiding in your old contracts and uncancelled services. IT professionals know exactly where to find it. 
  4. Know when it’s time to partner with a professional. You’re going to need a company like FIT when you start having lots of movement — buying up buildings that probably have different firewalls, EHRs, email systems, datasets, etc.  That’s when you need to set some foundational rules. How do you standardize? How can you get economies of scale? Those are the questions that FIT answers and helps you as economically as possible. 

And, yes, there’s a number 5, which is really a warning. As someone who worked for years with a technology provider, I’ve heard (and said) it over and over again: 

Don’t “think you know” what you’re doing with your IT. It will come back to bite you. 

Because, if you’re looking to grow your organization to more than a handful of properties, you’re going to get hammered if you don’t get strategic about IT. A lot is happening out there that you don’t know about. And you’ll probably make a ton of bad decisions if you try to unpack it all yourself or kludgy it together using those who “think they know” instead of experts. 

Senior living can be saving money and taking advantage of all the groundbreaking stuff out there. Maybe your competitors already know more about it. As someone who has worked for years in technology, I wouldn’t wait around to find out. 

Watch the video. Then, you owe it to yourself to check out the folks at FIT.