In 2025, senior living operators are making progress in leveraging data and analytical insights into improving revenue generation while growing margins.
But these changes haven’t happened overnight, with many senior living companies taking steps to grow their IT infrastructure and build out standalone data models in the last five years. Using data in senior living operations today differentiates good from great senior living operators.
“Data has become part of our company DNA,” said LCS Vice President of Data and Analytics Joel Rosenberg during a recent SHN+ Talks webinar.
These new systems are helping shape the relationship between ownership groups and their operating partners, elevate care delivery and provide real-time insights into the fiscal health of a senior living portfolio.
This has allowed providers to be more nimble in identifying challenges in operations and shift strategy in many aspects, including sales and marketing, care services and resident engagement.
Operators including Life Care Services (LCS), Priority Life Care and Trustwell Living have all taken steps in the last five years to grow their financial reporting capabilities with robust data models supporting new insights with both community staff and capital partners.
Elevating operations, driving revenue gains with data
There’s been a growing number of senior living operators in recent years investing capital into building out robust data models, and in 2025, operators are using these systems to help realize improved financial performance.
Three years ago, Des Moines, Iowa-based LCS started on a journey to build a comprehensive data model with accessibility across the company’s over 140 communities. The model was launched and rolled out last year, with the company also bringing on a data science team.
These foundational changes to back-of-house functions have “led to a shift in speed to decision-making” at LCS communities and at the corporate office, Rosenberg said.
Through providing new algorithms for LCS sales teams, Rosenberg said the company has successfully improved conversion rates and increased move-ins with the new data model.
“Data availability allows all leadership levels to access the same information at the same time, shifting the focus to action,” Rosenberg said.
With its Insights Advantage platform, Rosenberg said LCS has been able to create a “one-stop-shop” for all metrics central to senior living operations.
With post-tour survey data, LCS is able to link those surveys with an artificial intelligence-supported tool to identify amenity or pricing issues in “real time,” Rosenberg said.
In LCS communities, which fully adopted the new data model, these properties reported a 150 to 200 basis point increase in inquiry-to-tour conversions and a similar statistical improvement in tour-to-move-in conversions. These improvements “directly tie to additional revenue,” Rosenberg added.
New York City-based Trustwell Living has grown its data model to support quick turnarounds of distressed properties, with the company’s portfolio of 45 communities relying on a new data model to guide improvements in operations, according to Trustwell Living CEO Larry Cohen.
In the last 12 months, Trustwell has reported occupancy gains of nearly 500-basis points compared to a year ago, while operating margins are up over 500-basis points. In June, Cohen said, Trustwell communities reported a 160-basis point increase in occupancy.
“We’ve seen a 500-basis point improvement in margin across the portfolio and some locations’ margins are up approximately 40%,” Cohen said during the webinar.
These improvements continued as Trustwell doubled down on investment in creating a new data model, with Cohen comparing the company’s data and reporting capabilities as being able to rival that of large scale institutional capital partners, including real estate investment trusts.
The platform’s “end-to-end” system provides real-time insights into key performance indicators to show financial health, tracking assessments, billing, clinical metrics and shift pickups. To hone in pricing strategies, Trustwell worked with third-party agencies to create market analyses to help refine care level pricing and marketing strategy, Cohen noted.
Fort Wayne, Indiana-based Priority Life Care in recent years has grown its partnership with REIT partner Ventas (NYSE: VTR), while also building out a data model to support sales staff and care teams. Priority Life Care operates approximately 60 communities nationwide.
That resulted in a “record-breaking sales month” in June, with Priority Life adding 55 move-ins across two portfolios. On the care side, the new model has helped reduce the time between resident health assessments and care billing to collect care revenue more quickly. Other areas, including fall monitoring, have helped reduce emergency department visits, Murphy said.
In recent years, operators have aimed to capture more care revenue in order to preserve value for the services providers offer residents.
“The turning point came a year ago when we hired a VP of asset management and built dashboards out with unified KPIs,” Murphy said. “We simplified data access from six software platforms into one interface.
In the future, Murphy said monthly calls with communities will help improve training and asset or labor reviews, allowing the company to directly evaluate staffing performance and offer greater visibility into how vacancies at important positions can reduce operating performance.
Training, staff adoption key to finding data insights
Staffing challenges in senior living have evolved in recent years, and that’s no different in the evolution of data models and adoption by frontline teams. In order to reap the insights from a large data model, staff play a critical role in adopting the platform.
Training also is vital for staff in order to get communities in the habit of routinely using a data dashboard to shape their weekly planning meetings, regardless of the department. Using data has also allowed operators to identify spending patterns on staffing and improve hiring while minimizing overtime.
Priority Life Care uses weekly training and monthly asset management calls with leaders to help educate community leaders on what aspects of generated reports to monitor when determining next steps in addressing staffing, from eliminating overtime and staffing agency labor, Murphy said. Other insights can also come from finding a community with an overtime spending issue, allowing corporate leaders to quickly address recruitment and hiring issues with community leaders more quickly, Murphy added.
Regional leaders at Trustwell communities are heavily involved at the community level, using data to reinforce outcomes, while also tying care hours to staffing, measuring assessment hours to “right-size” staffing patterns and balancing rising resident acuity, Cohen said.
In 2025, Rosenberg said LCS sees hundreds of daily users interacting with the platform, along with over 20,000 monthly reports accessed on the platform, a sign that live reporting data has helped improve staff adoption by site leaders across the company’s communities.
“Peer-to-peer analytics champions drive this adoption,” Rosenberg said. “It’s now an expectation—if you’re not using data, it becomes clear quickly.”
The future of senior living hinges on data, tech adoption
Senior living providers must act now to evolve or launch data initiatives, or risk falling behind in the future.
“Smaller operators that lack analytics resources will fall behind,” Murphy said. “Technology will make staff jobs easier and sharpen occupancy and expense control and success depends on leveraging those tools fully.”
Murphy added that senior living operators should track move-ins and sales forecasts to gauge operating performance. For LCS, tracking revenue per occupied room (RevPOR), occupancy, rate and pricing “shows where the gaps are,” Rosenberg said.
Better data tools, Cohen said, will let operators boost performance while improving staff efficiency.
“The big prize is using predictive analytics and AI to free up caretakers’ time, letting them focus on residents,” Rosenberg added. “That’s where the next efficiency wave will come from.”
