Making the Business Case for Recreation

Revera

Revera is a leading Canadian owned and headquartered, owner, investor, developer, and operator in the senior living sector. Through its portfolio of partnerships, Revera owns or operates more than 500 properties across Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom serving more than 55,000 seniors. The company offers seniors’ apartments, independent living, assisted living, memory care, and long-term care. With approximately 50,000 employees dedicated to providing exceptional care and service, Revera is helping older adults live life to the fullest. Through Age is More, Revera is committed to challenging ageism, the company’s social cause of choice.

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Executive Summary

After developing brand standards and benchmarks for recreational programming, Revera wanted a tool that would allow Directors of Recreation to track recreation programs, balance the dimensions of wellness, and evaluate the success of programs. Their national recreation team has been in search of a suitable platform to digitize and streamline recreation programming at the site-level to enable teams to perform accurate resident assessments, create well-rounded calendars, track participation and engagement in all programs, and perform program analytics.                                            

Revera’s National Recreation Team was looking to optimize the evaluation of established recreation brand standards and to assess how they impacted overall business outcomes. Working with Welbi, Revera was able to address these challenges by completely automating the administrative functions within their recreation programming for senior communities.

Outcome

• Reduction of over 25 hours per month on administrative tasks per site
• Access to real-time reporting, feedback and analytics in regional offices has made the audit and review process seamless and painless
• Personalized wellness programming paves the way for higher resident satisfaction and increased occupancy rates

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Before Welbi – The Case For Recreation

Caroline Proulx, the Regional Manager of Recreation at Revera, has spent decades working in recreation and wellness. She is a strong advocate for tailoring wellness programs to the needs of individual residents, which she considers a key driver for attracting future residents. Wellness programs are becoming an increasingly important consideration to older adults when choosing a community.  A recent study conducted by the International Council of Active Aging suggests that 47% of future residents choose a home because of a robust recreation program.

Proulx also believes a well-executed recreation program helps the bottom line. Recent data from the International Council on Active Aging says successful recreation and wellness programs can increase a resident’s length of stay by an additional two years.

This correlation led Revera to develop recreation programs that are focused on the dimensions of wellness with a significant personalization component. The recreation team developed signature programs and set benchmarks to gauge their success. However, challenges remained. Revera was still reliant on outdated tools and sometimes measured the results using only pen and paper.. The bottleneck of administration was becoming a tipping point.                                                            

Providing a holistic and personalized approach to programming is key to delivering an exceptional resident experience. Without reliable and computerized tools, resident assessment, attendance, and other reports were often late or sometimes missed altogether. Emera Kennedy, Director of Recreation for Westwood Retirement Residence, says it was a constant series of trade-offs:

“When you're spending time running programs you're thinking about your to-do list but then if you're in the office, doing all those things, you're not engaging directly with your residents.”

These delays created reporting and oversight challenges at the national level. Brand experience scorecard visits were done twice a year, but the national recreation team was not certain if benchmarks and goals were being met until they stepped on-site. Proulx says the company realized they needed a better way to manage this part of their business.

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To achieve its goal of providing high-performing recreation programs, Revera needed a solution that could organize and analyze the entire process.

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Welbi’s ground-breaking platform gives senior living communities the power to plan and deliver custom-tailored experiences in a fraction of the time it currently takes. The innovative software was expected to save hundreds of administrative hours while increasing the accuracy of the data used to support improved quality of life for residents. Welbi’s unique assessment tools and real-time analytics would help recreation teams identify trends and gaps, allowing them to develop and evaluate programming to engage residents in social activities. This is why Revera decided to trial Welbi’s platform in three of their communities.

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After Welbi – Giving Older Adults the Life They Deserve

With her experience in clinical environments, Caroline Proulx knew the efficiencies and insights advanced software could provide.

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Emera Kennedy says the initial concerns of learning and integrating a new tool into her daily routine were quickly put to rest. The benefits of automated data entry and reporting began to pay off immediately:

“To do a resident assessment, for example, we bring an iPad, that’s it. That information is encoded into Welbi automatically and gives us a result.”

No longer overwhelmed by pushing paper, managers now have more time to plan and execute high-quality programming.

“Welbi has become so much a part of the day now, that going back to the pen and paper process is unthinkable,” says Kennedy.

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Revera believes they have eliminated countless hours of administrative work each month.

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According to Jay Thomsen, Regional Director of Operations at Revera, this solution will improve management efficiency and oversight. Supervisors can walk through the door already having a clear understanding of whether a site is hitting its benchmarks.

“I see a lot more specific, relevant details so we can dive a lot deeper more quickly. There are results, there are analytics and there are numbers to show how the site is performing.”

Proulx says personalizing engagement has become a competitive advantage as prospective residents see the breadth of programs offered  and engagement/satisfaction rates.

“We want our residents to be out of their apartments or suites, living life to the fullest.”

Thomsen agrees, saying a significant increase in both referrals and occupancy rates is just a matter of time.

“With Welbi, at the click of a button we understand the health of the business at a glance. We save so much money and time because we're not chasing all this very valuable information – it’s all right there.”