In this episode of Raising Tech, our host, Amber Bardon, has a captivating conversation with Brian McWade, Chief Product Officer for Sentrics, about how Sentrics has combined entertainment, resident engagement and life safety into one technology platform for Senior Living communities.
Learn more about how Sentrics' technology solutions are helping Senior Living communities save money and enhance resident experience while enabling Senior Living operators to make more informed decisions based on data.
Raising Tech is powered by Parasol Alliance, The Strategic Planning & Full-Service IT Partner exclusively serving Senior Living Communities.
In this episode of Raising Tech, our host, Amber Bardon, has a captivating conversation with Brian McWade, Chief Product Officer for Sentrics, about how Sentrics has combined entertainment, resident engagement and life safety into one technology platform for Senior Living communities.
Learn more about how Sentrics' technology solutions are helping Senior Living communities save money and enhance resident experience while enabling Senior Living operators to make more informed decisions based on data.
Raising Tech is powered by Parasol Alliance, The Strategic Planning & Full-Service IT Partner exclusively serving Senior Living Communities.
Welcome to Raising Tech. I'm your host, Amber Bardon, and today we have a special guest, Brian McWade from Sentrics. Welcome to the show.
Brian McWade:Thanks for having me, Brian .
Amber Bardon:So excited to have you on the podcast. I know we've been trying to get you on for a couple weeks now , so I'm so glad that you're here and we're gonna talk a little bit more about Sentrics. So to start us off, can you tell everybody a little bit about Sentrics, about your role in the company and just give us that background and that history?
Brian McWade:Sure! So I'm the Chief Product Officer at Sentrics, responsible for overall product strategy, vision, deployment of our software and hardware solutions. Sentrics is in about 7,500 communities in North America. So we have a very large footprint when you look at companies that provide technology in the room of residents, we're definitely one of the larger groups all of our technology is interacted with in one way or another by a resident. Personally, I have spent my whole career in senior living initially helping found Connected Living, which is a resident engagement product and helped see that through two acquisitions which brought me to Sentrics after Sentrics acquired Connected Living. So it's been a full circle experience for me personally.
Amber Bardon:Can you share a little bit about what the whole product suite is at Sentrics? Because I know you mentioned Connected Living and then there is Sentrics so what else is involved in that company?
Brian McWade:Yeah, so you know, when you hear 7,500 communities you might say, wow , I haven't really heard of Sentrics before. But that's a lot of sites and the strategy we've taken is actually to acquire our growth. So we've looked at different industries within senior living, life safety, entertainment and engagement, and have strategically acquired companies that have been around, have strong footprints, strong retention, strong clients. So we've acquired seven companies since 2016 that have fallen into, you know, one of those three categories. And when you think of life safety, those are things like eCall systems and motion sensors and you know, wearable pendants that provide service for residents . On the TV and entertainment side, it's more of your traditional phone, internet, tv, we're the largest direct TV reseller in senior living. And then on engagement, your traditional resident engagement products. So we're very focused on those three areas. There's a lot within each of those products that makes them unique, but that's the broader product line. And as we move forward, we're bringing those three divisions together into one product.
Amber Bardon:I think it's a really exciting time to see what's gonna happen with technology, especially on the resident side. I think we're gonna start seeing a shift where residents and or family members moving in the next few years are going to start asking questions about what technology do you have to keep me safe? What technology do you have to let the community know if I fall, what do you have to monitor my activities and my vital signs and all of that. One of the biggest challenges I see with this shift to this type of technology is infrastructure and Wi-Fi. And I'm curious, what have you encountered, what are your thoughts on solutions around that? Because it can be a very expensive problem to solve.
Brian McWade:Yeah, it's definitely important to, as more and more residents move in when I started in this space, less than 20% of seniors had access to internet. And today I think it's over 50% move in with a smart device they use multiple times a day . So it's there when we look at it from our perspective, we're deploying a lot of different technologies in the community and we want to find ways to deploy those that don't necessarily require wireless. All of our eCall products, a lot of our other products, they run off of other bandwidth, ZigBee and Z-Wave solutions. So we don't have to necessarily always bring in solutions that take away from the precious bandwidth the community has. We're definitely in a position since, in addition to providing technology products, we're also the provider of internet. So we need to be able to provide quality service, but we're in this position of controlling our own destiny in terms of what products will work best with the internet and really monitoring usage and peak usage and how we adopted that that.
Amber Bardon:Coming from your unique perspective as a founder of a company that was then later acquired by Sentrics and having been in this industry, what do you see are the biggest challenges facing the industry and what does Sentrics do to help solve those challenges?
Brian McWade:Yeah, I think, you know today there's a couple things in my mind. We talk a lot about boomers. The average age of a senior living resident right now is I believe 82. The average boomer is 78. So we haven't even really hit the peak yet of that growth coming into the industry. You know, when the pandemic started, census went down 10% across the industry and it's really only come back about 5%. And then the third piece is, you know, unfortunately just given our industry, a community typically turns over in about two and a half years. So you would think at this point that your census, that's pretty much out of the pandemic, would've rebounded to where it was before, given how communities kind of turn over every couple years and it hasn't. So there's a lot of focus on cost reduction and efficiencies and how do we really identify where we're spending our time and where we're spending our money as an operator. So that's a lot that we're trying to do with the data we're collecting is how can we make the building run more smoothly. We're also finding from an engagement perspective that there are so many different factors that go into how people use technology, that you can't just be a one-stop shop, you know, you need to have different ways for people to engage from signage to TV experiences, to mobile apps. You need to have the full spectrum because everyone's coming in with a different experience.
Amber Bardon:Let's imagine a scenario where we're putting a new construction and we are outfitting the community top to bottom with Sentrics' products. What would that look like? What would that look like to the resident? What would that look like to the staff and the family ?
Brian McWade:Sure. Well a foundational piece is definitely the life safety side we've done for decades. Your more traditional eCall, your wired eCall systems. Where we're going today and where we're investing, all of our R and D is in our RTLS platform, which is real-time location sharing. So picture your traditional eCall platforms, but wireless. Everything's wireless. And then we put beacons and locators throughout the whole campus anywhere where you want to know and pinpoint a location rooms, different pieces of rooms, dining areas, hallways, courtyards, and we map it from a location standpoint. So on one side that gives you some more locational based insight into your emergency call system, but it starts to give you other operational efficiencies around where are my residents spending their time, where is my staff spending their time? What are my response times to to various things? So there's a locational component that you want to build, build into your new communities because you have that Capex to do it. On the TV and engagement side, you know, we want to look at entertainment services that folks are using at home. So how do we bring in streaming services integrated set top boxes with DVR service, which we built our own set top box that is DVR driven . So how do we take some of these consumer products that people have when they're bringing in and embed them in there. So those are some of the key pieces. And then you have obviously engagement in BYOD settings. So you want to make sure that you're set up for however that person wants to connect with the community.
Amber Bardon:I was just on-site with a client this week who was actively looking for the first solution you described to have that geolocation. We see a lot of clients wanting to move away from the more traditional pendants and wander guards. Does that solution also work outside? So could it cover an entire campus, including all the outdoor areas?
Brian McWade:Yeah , so there's two sides to it. The locators can go in or outside and it's all location based in alert base. So you could say, you know, between 8:00 PM and 12:00 PM these three or four residents or this aggregate group cannot exit this particular area. So we're giving a lot of flexibility to the staff to look at those alerts. And then that same type of thing could be outside, you know, no courtyard access, but we're also deploying and continuing to develop our own, you know, cellular-base pendants that can go off campus and be more of your traditional PERS device. But instead of just being a standalone pendant to a call center, it integrates into the broader emergency call system. So now a resident can have peace of mind, not just when they're on campus, but when they go out to the grocery store because they're an independent living . So we're trying to cover all those pieces depending on the demographic.
Amber Bardon:Yeah, I think there's gonna be a huge need for solutions like this as residents want to be more independent and more mobile and have less of that institutionalized feel to, you know, ensure their safety. One of the questions I frequently get when I talk about these types of solutions with our clients is, you know, there's definitely a case for the monitoring and the tracking and all the life safety pieces and all the sensors, but there is concern on the community side is who's gonna track all this data? Who's gonna make sure it's being responded to, it's being looked at and then how do you use this data? So what is your approach to that side of it?
Brian McWade:Absolutely. Well I think there's two sides to it where we look at our business line, when you look at Sentrics, there's dozens of products today, they're independent product line, you're buying emergency call, you're buying tv, you're buying, engage where we're going and we'll continue to do that and advance those products. Where we're going is those are vehicles of collecting important information and the fact that we own these different companies, we're in a very unique position to take a resident and to feed all the data from those product lines into a view and to do through our BI tools , business intelligent tools we have. And we're building to do a lot of that data work for the staff so that they don't have to say, hey, well rows and columns and all these different things and what does it mean? So you know , we're building our enriched platform, which is built to, from a resident perspective, give that 360-degree view, but also that operator perspective provide insights based off the data that we're collecting. So we're trying to take that off the plate. The plate from a day-to-day perspective, the products are built for life safety. You're gonna set up who's getting what alerts, you're gonna set up escalators, you're gonna choose who gets what and who doesn't. So we're trying to also not have alert fatigue across all the product lines, but also make sure that the people that need it can get it. There's a balance obviously that who's involved and who isn't.
Amber Bardon:Let's talk a little bit about the cost side of things. I'm sure the people listening to the podcast think that this all sounds really great and it's the future, but how do communities pay for this? Is there an ROI that you can point to or has the cost replaced by another cost? Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah,
Brian McWade:Each product's a little bit different. You know, on the emergency call life safety side, there's typically an existing product you might have in place and there can be retrofits where you retrofit pieces or whatnot. And then in new construction it's more of a Capex expense. But in emergency in the insure side it's much more of an upfront investment and then there's recurring fees for service fees depending on pendant replacements and things like that. So the pricing is very similar to what communities would be doing today with, you know, your emergency call side of things. On the entertainment side, it's primarily how you're paying for your TV service because we're providing TV in bulk and we're doing it as a large dealer, we're able to look at pretty significant pricing differences from various carriers and the fact that we can do both. So we're seeing $15 to $20 per room savings on your regular cable and TV programming with the fact that we can put a set top box in too . So as a niche provider in senior living, we can be a little bit more flexible than some of the big box carriers.
Amber Bardon:Do you envision scenarios where some of these monitoring services and additional technology would just be billable à la carte or what would be the model for that?
Brian McWade:Absolutely. So we are looking on the cellular pendant side. It doesn't have to go through a community, it can be more of a case by case , especially in independent living. The more communities get into streaming, streaming is much more of a case-by-case basis. So we see that as à-la-carte offering where a community can offer traditional TV service or a non-volt streaming platform, you know, so I think there'll be options on that side and a lot of flexibility. The same thing for internet. You know, we offer resident internet and that can be done on a per-resident basis since we're the ISP for that community. So there's a lot of flexibility in terms of how it's offered, how it's packaged, how the community markets it, if they're giving it for free or charging for it. So, you know , in most of these cases, especially the phone, internet and TV business, we're giving the operator a platform for them to really decide how they want charge and pay for it.
Amber Bardon:Brian , if a community is interested in exploring some of the solutions that Sentrics has, what would you say? What's your top advice? What should they do to prepare? What should they know? What would be lessons learned? Things to get started,
Brian McWade:There's three areas that we're trying to solve. There's the operational efficiency, the resident experience, and you know, one that doesn't get talked about a lot, but's on the minds of every owner and operator is just the investor accountability, the financial accountability. So I'd like to ask our customers, our clients, our prospects, give me some examples in those three that are your biggest concerns. You know, our products touch most of the operation of a community and in one way or another we can help tie in ROI to specific things. When you look at our product line, where we're going is we want to be able to walk into a community and say, forget about tv, internet, or phone. Here's all of the products. You pick which ones you want, you want engagement and you want motion sensors and you want to do that because you want to provide an auto check-in for residents at events. Well , we can combine these products and do that holistically. We're trying to break down the barriers of our product lines and just say, here's everything, which pieces do you want? And we'll make them work together.
Amber Bardon:What do you see is the future? So is there anything out there that we haven't heard of yet or that might be coming or that might be in other industries that you think is coming to senior living?
Brian McWade:I think it's more on, we hear a lot about data and I think it's easy to talk about data, but there's isn't a lot of movement in our industry right now to provide, you know, centralized machine learning and you know, predictive and prescriptive data insights to clients and communities. We hear a lot about it. And one of the challenges with that is most of that today is done through integration. You need to integrate with the company and when you integrate your data, you only control what that company will provide to you. And when I look at what Sentrics is doing and some other companies is the more where you can be the source of truth for the data, the more impactful it can be and the more that these companies can share that together, we'll start to have some really strong predictive insights that can help with those key things around, you know, length of stay, how we can, you know, improve the net income or the community if the Sentrics product or any product can extend the length of stay of a resident by five days, which seems little, you're making a big impact to the operator. So I think we're gonna see a lot of advancement in the business, intelligent tools that can be brought to market.
Amber Bardon:Brian , thank you so much for everything you've shared today. Is there anything that you wanna make sure our listeners know about Sentrics that we didn't talk about yet?
Brian McWade:I think just the only thing I kicked it off in the beginning saying you may not know much of Sentrics, but just so you can hear some of the companies that are tied to it on the life safety side, companies like CISCOR and Silversphere to long-term emergency call companies on the TV side, companies like SeniorTV is a part of Sentrics. And then on the engagement side, companies like Connected Living. So if you've heard of those companies or worked with them now or in the past, they're actually now part of Sentrics and you know, we continue to both sell those products as standalone, but really bringing them together to form Sentrics 360.
Amber Bardon:That's great! And if our listeners want to know more, where can they find you?
Brian McWade:Our website is Sentrics . net. LinkedIn conferences, we attend pretty much every regional show. We'll be at the large LeadingAge Conference in the fall, but you know, if you're attending any conferences, look us up. If not, please reach out through the website .
Amber Bardon:Thank you so much for joining me today, Brian . It's been a really great conversation. Thank you.
Brian McWade:Thank you!
Amber Bardon:Listeners, if you have feedback on this episode or have ideas for a future podcast, you can find us on our website, www.ParasolAlliance.com. Thank you for listening!