Understanding Each Senior Housing Market Operator and Community

July 5, 2023

How can growth-focused healthcare providers like you differentiate your services to residents in senior housing communities?

One strategy that will deliver meaningful results is to tailor your approach to building relationships with operators.

  • Your competitive position in the senior housing industry.
  • How to hone your offering to meet prospective partners’ priorities.
  • Specific goals and objectives of each senior housing operator for which your organization might be a good fit.

Building Healthcare Relationships in Senior Housing Communities

As senior housing operators consolidate and expand their portfolios, the best method for you to build and nurture strong relationships with them is changing.

Currently, in the senior housing market, many national and large regional operators prefer to manage healthcare relationships at the corporate level, putting providers in touch with a single contact who takes responsibility for a business line, a clinical operations division, or a specific geography. Rather than building personal relationships with leaders at the local level, you’ll need to shift to introducing your healthcare service to corporate leaders who want aligned care partners across a portfolio of communities, including locally owned and operated communities.

NIC MAP Vision Insight: Centralization of Provider Relationship Management

In our conversations with senior housing operators, we noted the emerging centralization of healthcare-provider relationship management:

  • Some national operators formalize the process, issuing requests for proposals (RFPs) for contracted services, particularly pharmacy services
  • Other large operators manage healthcare relationships through their regional or community leadership

Depending on the way an operator chooses to manage the provision of essential healthcare services, they may seek specific improvements in:

  • Resident health status
  • Resident living experience within a community
  • Extended resident occupancy

Since operators increasingly prefer to standardize the resident experience at a higher level of quality, we expect many to move toward clearer, more-centralized management of relationships with preferred providers.

3 Ways to Find Unique Value in Provider-Senior Housing Footprint Matchups

Typically, healthcare providers will encounter five different senior housing footprint matches in the field:

  • National-National
  • National-Regional
  • Regional-Regional
  • Regional-Local
  • Local-Local

Here’s how to use your service footprint to find unique value.

  1. Determine how your service footprint benefits their organization.

You may only fill a critical regional or local gap in service coverage for a national senior housing operator but you can still win that business and grow your relationship from there – don’t let less than 1:1 footprint coverage be a deterrent to making a strong proposal for your service area.

  1. Identify how your organizational strategy can support their future growth.

Senior housing operators want to know how your organization’s growth trajectory will be mutually beneficial over time. Be ready to describe how your future trajectory aligns with theirs.

  1. Detail how your structure supports high-quality care for their residents.

Consider your unique advantages for delivering excellent care, whether your local focus gives you a staffing advantage or your national footprint provides economies of scale that translate to more resources for care.

The Importance of Local Community Requirements and Preferences

Within the new relationship-forming equation, it’s essential to keep in mind that your impact is reflected the actual care is delivered to people in each community where they reside. For senior housing operators, “working on campus” means that you would provide care “in the home of” their residents, aligning with community norms and standards.

As a result, you must seek out clarity around an operator’s expectations for service and operational details at each community where you’ll be giving that care. Here are just a few common key performance indicators:

  • Access or delivery times and routes on-campus
  • Expectations for staff behavior like ID display and adherence to a non-smoking policy
  • Staff compliance with local infection control policies
  • Team participation in community clinical or operational meetings
  • Technology integration or charting to a shared record
  • Aligned communications through defined points of contact from the frontline to executive levels

NIC MAP Vision is helping bridge the gap between healthcare and senior housing. In this video, CEO Arick Morton shares how NIC MAP Vision is improving communication between these two sectors by providing transparency, valuable data, and connectivity to better provide resources for millions of seniors.

Get To Know Senior Housing Operators with NIC MAP Vision for Healthcare

NIC MAP Vision can provide the market intelligence you need to target the right senior housing operators with a unique, fully aligned value proposition that can yield a mutually beneficial outcome. Our comprehensive data and easy-to-browse platform offer unparalleled insights into senior housing communities, their operators, and their residents. We help you:

Understand the healthcare needs of senior communities – Learn about demographics, incumbent provider relationships, operator portfolio connections, and geography. Fifty-eight out of 77 of the largest owner/operators partner with us to share their data.

Make smarter strategic decisions and important relationships for faster growth – Our data synthesizes public and proprietary data, then applies our powerful analytics to deliver actionable insights. The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post recognize us as the industry leader in senior community insights.

See into the future of your market – Identify new development projects years ahead of groundbreaking in any market nationwide. In addition, we ally with National Investment Center for Seniors Housing & Care (NIC) economics experts and recognized thought leaders for essential information about senior housing communities and how they connect to healthcare services.

Ready to Try NIC MAP Vision Yourself?

Schedule a demo with one of our product experts for a detailed explanation of how you and your team can benefit from our product suite, save time in an increasingly competitive market, and grow your healthcare business.

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NIC MAP Vision gives operators, lenders, investors, developers, and owners unparalleled market data for the seniors housing and care sector.

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