In this episode of The Roots Podcast by 12 Oaks, host Greg Puklicz, President of 12 Oaks, is joined by Chief Executive Officer Richard K. Blaylock for a deep dive into the future of value-based care in senior living. Together, they explore how 12 Oaks is laying the groundwork for smarter care delivery—through integrated health records, data warehousing, and emerging technologies like motion and fall detection.
From pilot programs to strategic partnerships with platforms like August Health and Inspiron, this episode unpacks how the 2025 thematic goal of value-based care is becoming a reality. With a strong emphasis on data-driven decision-making, Greg and Richard discuss how these initiatives are designed to improve wellness outcomes, enhance family satisfaction, extend length of stay, and drive long-term RevPAR growth.
Produced by Solinity Marketing.
Intro 00:00
You’re listening to The Roots Podcast by 12 Oaks, where we’ll be joined by industry leaders to discuss and highlight the character, competency and care that is required to successfully manage senior living portfolios.
Greg 00:13
So the second initiative that we had on the board was value based care. And value based care is a very buzzy word you hear these days. Everybody talks about value based care. And, we see the industry moving from the social model to the medical model. What positive impacts can the implementation of value based care have at a community?
Dick 00:41
Well it’s interesting. I am not our Chief Compliance Officer and do not pretend to know as much about compliance. But it’s important to us. And as this initiative, as value based care has been brought out into the open to the forefront in the industry, this idea of wellness and health outcomes and reducing the need for care by better wellness plans, it fits right in with what we do in senior living. It lines up with our goals. It lines up with our wanting our seniors to thrive in community. So, implementing it is an important step. And that’s why it’s one of our major initiatives for 2025, is to look at those ways to pilot some programs, to look for opportunities that we can build on that and add that to the services that families and residents know that they’ll get at a 12 Oaks Senior Living managed community.
Greg 01:43
And when we look at some of the projects under that initiative that we’ve already undertaken in 2024, we were able to consolidate and standardize our electronic health records, all under the August Health system. So that’s an example of partnering with a trusted partner, August Health, and being able to roll out a standard system of health records across our portfolio. So that helps us in terms of management, that we can obtain data from the same systems across our portfolio.
Now, that was foundational. That was kind of step one. We knew we had to have the basic system in place that could provide us with the ability to efficiently manage the health and wellness of our residents, their care plans and that type of thing. So from there, and you mentioned pilots, we have just signed a contract with Inspiren to pilot their system in two of our communities. So we are going to see how that works. We’re really excited about the possibility of bringing these motion detection, fall detection, care monitoring type of technology into the community so that we can better assess resident needs, make sure they’re receiving the, care they need, making sure that they’re at the appropriate level of care and also protecting their wellness through early detection, potential fall risk, right, elopement and other things like that. So, 12 Oaks is really starting to pick up some steam in terms of this entree into value based care.
Dick 03:45
Looking at these systems, these processes that integrate so that we are not only creating efficiencies, but that we’re getting the information and we’re able to put it together.
Greg 03:56
The last couple of conferences I have gone to, I’m often told that AI is going to save the world. And I don’t know that I’m fully convinced of that. I think there’s going to be a little more human effort than people expect. But yes, the integration of these systems is key and paramount to ensuring that the data is available in a format that’s usable, meaningful and actionable. So that is exceptionally important.
And the ultimate outcomes we’re looking for with regard to value based care are better wellness outcomes for our residents, better resident satisfaction, resulting in better family satisfaction, which will manifest itself in greater length of stay and also increase RevPAR as we go into the next phase of value based care. And we are going to be looking at pharmacy partnerships. We’re going to be looking at primary care physician partnerships, the ability to do lab work, administer, IVs, right. Perhaps mobile X-rays so that we don’t have to have residents put out to emergency rooms where we can do some treatment in community, right. And that will result in better outcomes for our residents.
Let’s move on to the next and final initiative, major initiative that we have for 2025, and that’s data warehousing. And that’s kind of a big term: data warehousing, executive planning tools. Your thoughts on data warehousing, AI and what the future holds for senior housing?
Dick 05:44
Well, I wish that I was competent to speak on all of these, but I do know how important it is for us to have quality data warehouse. We even talked about a little bit earlier when we were talking about value based care, what we need to do in systems and how they integrate. So we need to know that the data, the KPIs, the benchmarking, everything that we’re looking to try to do is in one place, it’s all integrated, it’s available that we program, ourselves, ways that our teams, because each one of them is going to use different data differently to determine what’s going on at a property? We want to help our RVP, who are our Regional Vice Presidents that are out in the field managing their 4 or 5 or 6 properties. We want to make sure that they have accurate and up to date and current information that helps them, with the executive directors, make good decisions day in and day out with respect to the performance of the community. And so it starts with the data warehouse and the ability to put the information in there that is the right information that we then can put into a presentation, if you will, or a tool that we can use in the field.
Greg 06:59
Yeah. And that presentation, that tool has been the topic of much discussion here at 12 Oaks lately as you’re certainly aware, right. How can we do that in a concise, easy to read, usable manner that is going to integrate all these systems? We have a payroll system and an EHR system and a life enrichment system, and we’ve got INSPIRE gathering data for us, right. We’ve got our Yardi base accounting platform, right. How do we pull all these things together? And that’s what we’re looking to do this year, and exploring opportunities to utilize AI where appropriate, right, to build out, user friendly dashboards that can get pushed out to users, alerts, notifications, and having a predictive capability where we know we’re going to be coming into a variance situation so we can be proactive and fix it before it happens instead of being reactive on 30 day old data. And that’s the real revolution in senior housing as we can now be proactive instead of reactive as we move forward. And that’s hopefully what data warehousing is going to do for us.
Dick 08:19
Also think and just go into what you spoke to earlier, the idea of AI and how AI partners with us, we don’t want AI leading what we’re doing. We don’t want AI making decisions for us. What we want is AI to partner with us, to help us pull this information together in a concise way that it can be utilized, and then it can be a support.
We’re in the people industry. Our business is about care, our business is about helping seniors to thrive in community. And we’ll always be in the people business. But these kind of tools like this: AI, data warehousing, those things are going to help us be better. They’re not necessarily going to take a lead in any way.
Greg 09:00
You couldn’t have said it better. We are in the people business. We are in the business of helping seniors thrive in community. And I think that’s a great way to end this conversation. Thank you very much for once again being on The Roots Podcast. And thank you to our listeners. Tune in next time to 12 Oaks Senior Living.
Outro
We hope you enjoyed this episode of The Roots podcast by 12 Oaks. Get connected with us on social media and at 12oaks.com.