Caregiving can be hard; technology can make it smart. Dushyanth Biyyala, Strategy & Business Development at Sage, shares how modern day operations management systems can change outcomes for communities with data, insights and analytics. 

This episode was recorded at the ASHA Mid-Year Meeting. 

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Produced by Solinity Marketing.

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Welcome to season seven of Bridge The Gap, a podcast dedicated to informing, educating, and influencing the future of housing and services for seniors. Powered by sponsors Accushield, Aline, NIC MAP Vision, Procare HR, Sage, Hamilton CapTel, Service Master, The Bridge Group Construction and Solinity. Produced by Solinity Marketing.

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Lucas

Welcome to Bridge the Gap podcast, the senior Living podcast with Josh and Lucas. We are here at ASHA in a beautiful setting here at Dana Point. A great and beautiful morning. The clouds have passed away, and we got the sunshine outside and the cool air. And a great friend and a partner of the podcast and welcome, Dushyanth with Sage. Welcome to the show.

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00:51

Dushyanth

Hey guys, how are you?

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00:52

Lucas McCurdy

I'm doing well, doing well. And, you know, we were kind of commenting, and remembering the first time that we ever met.

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00:59

Dushyanth

Yeah, it's, it's kind of a full circle moment, I think, we all met in 2018. It was spring NIC, no, fall NIC in Chicago, 2018, I was at an NHI dinner. I had just joined the industry, joined Maxwell Group, and I believe you guys had just started the podcast in early 2018. I was like looking for new news sources.I'm a big podcast guy. Sat next to you guys at dinner. I was like, I actually, listen, you guys, podcast, you guys are just starting off and look at us now, six years later.

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01:27

Lucas McCurdy

And you're here, So much has changed. And, this is going to be a great conversation for our listeners. They know that Bridge Gap has some awesome partners to help us bring this content every single week. And it's fun to reminisce back, you know, seven years ago, and continue to bring this great content. And so, Dee, tell us about your transition and this kind of great insights that you have as a former operator and now on board with Sage. How are your insights as an operator helping affect how Sage brings your product to market.

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02:05

Dushyanth

I got my start in the industry almost six years ago, started off in finance. Did investing for a couple of years. Then, the CFO of Maxwell Group, you guys know our friends in Charlotte, North Carolina, shout out, Donald, Ben, Josh Thompson, Michael Gerber, who's now the chief investment officer since Sarah was CFO at the time, needed someone to help him out with the day to day functions, you know, acquisitions, asset management, strategic finance, budgets, labor management, etc..

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He knew my boss at the time. So I joined him and then I was there for about five and a half years, doing all those functions I just mentioned. And then actually yesterday, one year ago yesterday, got married. My wife's job took us to New York, so I was remote for a couple of months. But then again, part of my role on the operations side was figuring out, okay, how do I help optimize our communities? In Sage, which is where, you know, a company based in New York City, actually, a couple subway stops away from where I lived, seemed really interesting. So I asked for a demo, to see if this would be a good fit for our communities and Maxwell group. And then we started talking. They figured out, you know, we were all in the same area. It was a good fit, we actually are going to be doing a pilot with them pretty shortly, but then started meeting with Raj Alessandra on the team. Kind of talked about what their goals were for the company, where they were kind of aiming for kind of where I was in my situation. It kind of made sense. I joined the team, trying to go and help scale the business.

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And then in terms of where the value is coming from Sage, from an operator perspective, you know, being in my role, we didn't really have and I think a lot of operators can agree, there wasn't really a good way to manage and track what was going on on the day to day functions, like the true day to day caregiving, right, from a caregiver to a resident. Like what was going on? How do we quantify all that? There's so many unplanned care events that occur on a day to day basis, but is there a good tool software dashboard that kind of shows you and quantifies that, and that's never really existed, right? I can think, in my opinion, a lot of operators that everyone has their BVAs, their KPIs, their PRDs right. That's all in Excel. It's very simple to quantify. Everyone can kind of apples to apples you know, manage that amongst their portfolios. But how do we know in terms of the residents health in the day to day care that was being given, how can we quantify that and actually act upon that? And that's kind of what we were doing at Sage.

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When I saw what they were doing, I actually asked them to take me to a community before I joined to see if this was real, like what was going on, and it was pretty real and it was working. So it's been pretty exciting so far.

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04:45

Josh Crisp

Well, and it's such a cool story and glad to see you with our partners there at Sage and, honestly, Lucas and I were just talking about this before you came up to be on the podcast, Sage is assembled quite a strong team of, people that have been in the industry a long time, a lot of success, friends and colleagues that have come out of operations just as you have, which it seems like that is a huge advantage and a value proposition, for those conversations and talking to the operators and the owners, for our listeners who may still not know exactly what Sage's I've heard you say, we're not the accounting software. That's a popular name out there, but it's nurse call, but it's more of what you've called as the operating system and explain, like, how it works and how that adds value to what operators are dealing with actually at the community level.

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05:46

Dushyanth

The way I think about Sage is we're a modern day operations management system, right. Where we're able to derive really good data analytics and actionable insights on top of that, data and analytics and how we're able to do that, both from the resident care perspective, but also from the employee perspective of labor management perspective, is by replacing the traditional archaic nurse call systems of the past, right, with our cloud based solution.

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And basically we're able to derive things such as, okay, if a caregiver, or if a resident had 50 alerts in the past month of those alerts, were able to track, using our Sage app, which is the phone, it's our software. The Sage software on there are proprietary buttons. And then what look like routers, like internet routers throughout the community, that's all the system is, right? But when a caregiver comes and logs in on their shift every day, all the alerts that ever come through come through the Sage phone. They triage everything through a smartphone. 

Something they're already very comfortable and used to using, and then all of that data because it's being tracked by the caregiver and inputted by the caregiver. We're collecting all of that and then creating actionable insights from. 

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So now you can see if a resident had basically 50 alerts in the past month, for example. Of those alerts, how many were false? How many were for toileting needs? How many for bathing? How many were accidentally pressed? This is all data that's never really existed up until our software today, where it's like, okay, historically, you know, someone hits their big pendant, maybe you'll get like an alert on your pager, a walkie talkie.

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You go triage the alert, take care of it. And then how you document that if you were even doing that, never really existed. So now we're able to see. Okay, look, is there a resident who may have a toilet in need? Because of the past 50 alerts they had in the past month, 30 of them were toilet needs.

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Do they need to go to the doctor and see something, or is it something where they're maybe no longer in the right care setting? If that was a resident who is an independent living, maybe it's time for them to go to assisted living, right? And that's actually the value we provide too, because on top of all the data and analytics, it's one thing for us to collect all of that and just give it to you as an operator and say, look, hey, ED, here's all the data, figure it out, right?

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We know how important and how busy an EDs job is on a day to day basis, right? It's providing the day to day care. It's our job as Sage to actually help you figure out where are those, areas of improvement or recommendations in terms of this is time for this resident to move to this care setting, or this resident has been on AL level of care 1 for a while, but based on the level and time of needs that we're having to spend with this resident that the caregivers are, it's time for them to be level of care 4. So that's kind of the idea of what we're actually providing.

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08:25

Josh Crisp

Well, so the conversation around Sage and the value proposition is always a relevant one, but it seems like the timing of where we are as an industry, is extra relevant. You know, everyone's talking about labor. So how do we get more with what we have? How do we get more margin from existing operations?

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So many developer-owner-operators out there haven't been able to do a whole lot of new development. So really the focus is like on existing assets or maybe we’re acquiring new assets and figuring out how do we help this operation be more successful, provide higher quality care, operate more efficiently? It seems like a lot of the things you're talking about are extremely relevant to those specific conversations that are very strategic for the direction of these communities.

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Lucas is in these communities every day, acquisitions, renovations, and so everyone's looking to better position existing assets. So I will also say traditionally, historically in the industry, when you start thinking about, oh my gosh, changing nurse call, that's sometimes a really big ticket item. Sometimes depending on what you have in and the wiring or lack thereof in the Wi-Fi and how it's all connected, it can be something that may make, operators eyes roll back in their head a little bit like, oh my gosh, that's that's so much to take on with an existing community and retrain staff.

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What would you say to that? Like how have you all made that even in and of itself a value proposition to make that transition easy and efficient, for those operators out there?

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09:54

Dushyanth

So there's a couple things to unpack there. I think one thing, you touched on a little earlier, I want to talk about is how important that kind of the labor aspect of things are is because, you know, one thing that also we're able to really identify for operators is like the caregivers, we're able to see based on them logging in and the data that they're tracking and kind of input into our software, which caregivers are doing the most work, right, which is doing the best work.

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And in terms of where we are in the labor market, it's really, really important to identify and celebrate those individuals, right? Because I think a lot of time we're always focused on, okay, there's so much turnover in this industry. These are always the caregivers that are maybe not doing a lot of work or kind of, you know, the bad actors. And we need to, kind of, turn them. But equally, if not more important, is identifying those caregivers that are doing a really, really good job and celebrating them for retention purposes. For a lot of this whole labor management effort, it's about keeping your best caregivers. And how are you able to quantify and actually show them that they're doing a good job today through our platform that you can do that. 

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And in terms of implementing, Sage at your community, right. Traditionally, again, versus a traditional nurse call system, all we are, are your smartphones, the Sage software, are proprietary buttons, it takes about 90s to install per room, that's it. You know, it's a long range bluetooth, long range LoRaWAN technology. And then it's about, you know, 3 to 5, like, like internet routers, we call them gateways in your community. They all have about three miles of coverage, but that's it. 

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So we can actually come in within a couple of days and install, there is only going to be a little bit of cabling for the router, for the gateways. And that's it. We come in, but then we then train your teams over two days. And we make the implementation so easy because there's data that we need from your EHR, there's data that we need from your HR system. We need your level of care data.We actually work and we have an implementation team dedicated to doing this with your operator, with the community. And give all the information, until that's all set, we don't even go live with Sage. So it's completely relative to what I've experienced on the opera side. It's seamless and pretty.

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12:01

Josh Crisp

Well, easy implementation is key these days with so many things that operators have to deal with on a daily basis. And then you're right, rewarding the type of behavior, knowing what that is, and being able to reward the type of behavior that you want to encourage. That's way more important than focusing on the negative and so, solidifies that culture, that quality of care change in the community.

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So, what an awesome opportunity, Lucas, I love that we have partners like this, that are having a great impact in the industry and, just willing to put it all out there to help positive change.

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12:37

Lucas McCurdy

It is. And, you know, it makes me remember our conversation we had with a very long time industry pioneer. And we asked her, what's the future of senior care and senior housing and what's going to impact it the most? And she said, technology. And that's obviously at the forefront of a lot of people's minds and conversations. And I can see how this is really changing, outcomes ultimately to impact and positively impact to care for older adults and staff. 

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So, great to have this conversation with you Dee. Thanks for your time today here in Dana Point, California. And, it's fun to have this full circle moment. I know you got a busy day of meetings. We'll get you back to those. 

And for all of our listeners, go to a btgvoice.com, connect with us there, his content and so much more. Hit us up on LinkedIn. We'd like to hear your thoughts and opinions on this topic. And thanks for listening to another great episode of Bridge the Gap.

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13:34

Thanks for listening to Bridge the Gap podcast with Josh and Lucas. Connect with the BTG network team and use your voice to influence the industry by connecting with us at BTG voice.com.

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