What are the biggest areas of opportunity in ancillary services in seniors housing?
Dining presents opportunities
By Andrew Agins
Partner
Evolve Senior Living
An interesting opportunity for ancillary revenue is to curate an elevated dining experience for our residents. We will always offer the traditional menu that is included in the base rent. However, for an additional fee, we can design a special dinner for a smaller subset of residents. For example, our chef can prepare a progressive tasting menu or a steakhouse night. If residents opt in, they can experience a fun dinner with friends and family.
Integrate hospice, home health
By Dan Williams
CEO
ONELIFE Senior Living
The biggest area of opportunity lies in developing a robust healthcare delivery model that plays out in our communities. If we integrate services like hospice and home health, we create a higher path of wellness.
Creating in-house service is challenging but achievable. The key to success for these ancillary businesses is developing outside clientele versus depending solely on in-house residents. Make it a standalone business.
Dissect your levels of care
By Joe Jedlowski
CEO
Distinctive Healthcare
Our biggest area of opportunity is having a truly comprehensive clinical management system that enables our team to accurately capture and execute on level of care. This is an area that we have dissected as an organization, and we have moved our communities to 10 levels of care.
Overall, as an organization, we have been able to drive our ancillary revenue by an increase of over 24 percent in the past 14 months.
Accurately track services
By Stephanie Harris
CEO
Arrow Senior Living
Balancing what is included versus extra services can be tricky for staff to navigate. Our best growth has been the result of benchmarking and fostering competition among communities to accurately record services.
Our plant operations team has excelled in driving ancillary charges, particularly in IT services, handyman services, extra transportation and laundry. In addition to optimizing existing streams, we are exploring new avenues such as maximizing leased space agreements and collecting fees from Medicare providers for accessing our technology.
Customize services
By Gale Morgan
SVP, Sales
Mather
Boomers bring many opportunities as they are adamant about personalization and choice, and are reluctant to pay for packaged services. They’d prefer to only pay for what they use.
This generation is about wellness, longevity, purpose and personal improvement, so they will use a variety of services. Look to provide wellness coaching, wellness retreats and enhanced wellness tools.
The next generation of residents will only use ancillary wellness services when they perceive value.