60. Senior Sign- Streamlining Senior Living Admissions

Our latest episode introduces Neil Krauss, founder and chief product officer of Senior Sign. Senior Sign is an e-signature software designed for senior living communities, offering features like compliance tracking, remote and mobile signing, electronic faxing, and centralized cloud storage for documents. The goal is to simplify and streamline the move-in process for staff, residents, and their families.

Senior Sign supports various document completion methods (from home, in-person, or on paper) and integrates with other systems like health records and CRMs to avoid dual data entry. 

You can find more information or schedule a demo on their website. 

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Transcript

Amber: Welcome back to Raising Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Amber Bardon. On today's episode, we have Senior Sign. Senior Sign is designed to make move ins straightforward for staff, residents, and their families. Senior Sign is far more than e-sign software. Think compliance tracking, remote and mobile signing, electronic faxing, and all of your documents house in one location in the cloud.

 Their goal is to bring you peace of mind by keeping the moving process simple and error free and onto and representing Senior Sign today. I'm so excited. We have Neil Krauss, founder and chief product officer.

Amber: Welcome to the show, Neil. 

Neil: Thanks, Amber. Yeah, it's awesome to be on. 

Amber: As I shared before we started recording, I've heard a lot about Senior Sign. We have people using it. I've heard so many positive things. So I cannot wait to dig in today and learn more about Senior Sign and have you share it with our audience.

So let's start with that question. What is Senior Sign and tell us the story behind its creation. 

Neil: Yeah that [00:01:00] is a good question. So the story behind the creation, maybe I'll start there. And I think that'll probably answer the first question, which is what is Senior Sign. So in 2017 I walked into a senior living community had an idea for a project that I was working on.

Thought maybe there was a channel to market and sell through senior living communities. Through the process of a conversation with the director of sales and marketing here locally in Utah. She asked me to put their move in packet online. She's can you just put all of this paperwork online for us so people can fill it out?

My initial response was I'm sure somebody's already doing that. Why don't I do a little research and I'll tell you who to sign up with was my response to her. That kicked off about a 10 month process, which turned into back and forth with the community, creating a prototype understanding their process better.

And through the course of that, I realized, it's not just as simple as something that like a docusign can handle, a handful of signatures. One document, it ended up being, 20 pages, residents and [00:02:00] family are signing 19 to 20 times. They're collecting attachments, they're trying to collect physician forms.

So there were all of these problems with their process in trying to digitize, what was up until that point just on paper. I saw a lot of folders that were two sided. One side was for the family to fill out. The other side was for the physician to fill out. So they needed to go meet with their doctor.

 Through the course of that process, we created a tool that handles the move in process started out specifically for senior living. That's really what Senior Sign is. That's where we got our start. Was right there in the community an idea from a director of sales and marketing.

So I can't take credit for the idea. But we've grown quite a bit since then. Worked with a handful of communities since then. And then now we're working with 700, more than 700 communities. So across the senior living industry. 

Amber: Yeah, I think you, you can take credit because I've been in senior living for 17 years and anyone who's ever interacted with the senior living community knows about this problem of admission paperwork.

It's a problem in so many aspects [00:03:00] from faxes, from printing, from paperwork, from tracking, I've gone to sites where they have literally showed me folders and stacks of paper and they're like, this is what we're doing manually. And you did come in and you created a solution to solve that. So I think you should take a little credit.

Neil: Okay. I'll take a little credit then. 

Amber: So walk me through a little bit. How does this kind of work start to finish? So when someone has seen your sign fully implemented how does, how do they get the paperwork out? How's it signed? How does it talk to other systems like the medical records system? Can you talk me through that a little bit more?

Neil: Yeah, that's a great question. Up front, what I continually heard was. Other tools in the industry that maybe have come around to try and handle this process are a little bit cumbersome in that all of the setup is put on to the community and somebody in the company. Talk to a lot of people in the industry that were maybe paying for a software that handles admissions or move in that they really weren't able to utilize yet [00:04:00] because somebody in the company had to become an expert on, Building all the templates, things like that.

We really start and started with a customer success process, which We collect all of the documents that they're currently using, hopefully in digital form. Sometimes we get really bad scans of documents, etc. But usually it's PDFs, and then we build smart templates on top of that. They're using the same documents over and over again.

These sales and marketing managers know their packets inside and out. Sample templates could be like documents, the physician forms attachment requests all of that kind of works its way into a packet template.

So that's really where we start is with all of the setup, but as far as, the frontline workers that are working with families and the residents they would either import from another system to your point a health record or a CRM we do work with a handful of different softwares across the industry, we're open to integration.

So either importing some of that information or just starting out by adding a new resident into [00:05:00] their Senior Sign portal. And then from there, we have three options to help complete that paperwork. The first being from home so they can send it out. This wasn't nearly as common until COVID hit and then we saw a lot of people sending packets for completion from home rather than in person in the community.

Amber: Can I ask you, when you say they're doing it from home, is it like a portal that they're accessing? 

Neil: Yep. Yeah, exactly. They create a login, a lot of HIPAA compliant information, PHI payment information, things like that get collected in that. So we do password protected at this point for the residents.

 They can send that packet for completion from home. Oftentimes there's a prepare phase, so The manager is going to prefill a room number, rates, care types, feeds, things like that. And then when the resident does sit down, oftentimes it's actually an adult child, a family member, a power of attorney.

Sitting down to fill out that paperwork as they work their way through the packet, those templates that we've built begin to pre fill from document [00:06:00] to document. So I fill out the first one, we've collected a little bit more information that we can then push into the subsequent documents to hopefully help speed up that process. They work through, documentation, attachments we can fax physician forms, print physician forms,

email physician forms. It depends on the physician oftentimes. But that's the at home process. There's the in person process, which we see a lot of. We did see a lot of it pre COVID. We still see a lot of it skilled nursing actually does a lot of this as well like bedside, being able to do that and have a process there was pretty important as we were building the tool, so that's the second means, and then they can still do it on paper if the resident so chooses, so you can pre fill and prepare that packet as a manager, and then just print it and send it with them for completion from home to, again, hopefully help speed up that process, and then attach everything back and have it all live in one place.

That, that's what the process is like right now. You mentioned integration, et cetera. So something we've said all [00:07:00] along is we have to be platform agnostic is how I put it. Don't really care what your CRM is or what your health record is. It's we're fine to play nice with any systems that you're using.

And hopefully build a better workflow so that it's a little bit more seamless, Dual entry of all of that data is a really hard process as a manager to have to Go back to my crm type everything in or write everything into a packet And then secondarily on the flip side to get everything from the packet and try and type it into the ehr whatever it is they're using So yeah, we do integrate and we try to carry as much data through that process as possible so that the process seems seamless and then obviously finalized documents that are signed with compliance tracking, et cetera, built in audit trails, all of that gets can get exported to this, the health record, not the CRM.

Amber: So once it's implemented. Then staff can access that information either in Senior Sign directly or in the health record. It sounds 

Neil: yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [00:08:00] That's the ultimate goal. We don't like, we, we don't have any I don't know what the word would be, but it's it's not a tool that you're constantly going back to previous packets, except maybe in the.

The off chance the state walks through the door and needs to pull a few packets to review or things like that. So 

Amber: who who with the community is the typical user of this software and I want to go back to a question as you're answering that on implementation are you said you're getting PDFs or, versions of the documents.

Are you building everything in the system or is the staff doing that? Can you just talk about that a little bit more? What's the involvement from the community? 

Neil: Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Our typical daily user from the community is that director of sales marketing an admission coordinator, maybe on the skilled side at a CCRC or a live playing community.

It just depends on where they're coming in, if they're coming into the health center side, or independent living, etc. It can vary just depending on which company we're working with, but I [00:09:00] would say the majority of the time it's a director of sales and marketing. That's doing that kind of walking through the whole move in process up until move in day.

And then to your other question. So we have a whole implementation team that's the second half of our customer success team. So customer success helps with, answering questions and all of that. But our implementation team collects all of their documentation, attachment requests, position forms, anything to help build that packet.

And then we have a whole, I call it a fleet we have actually a whole bunch of, stay at home moms that want to work part time, et cetera, that, that build document templates for us. And once those are built, the way our technology works is, some other processes can be more robust with other companies, but the way we've tried to do is, do it is to simplify by, we get an updated PDF, hey, there's a, here's a new version of that same template that you've already built.

Okay. We can just swap out the background image and all of the fields and the data collection portion of that still lays [00:10:00] right on top of that PDF it's a really quick swap makes it an easier, quick update, so we get updates all the time and we handle that just as part of their ongoing subscription fees.

Amber: Okay. That, yeah, that helps give me a really good idea on what implementation looks like. So one thing I'm wondering as you're speaking is we all know AI is buzzword, it's gonna come on every single conversation you have with people about technology these days, AI automation, bots, process efficiency.

 I'm just thinking, taking like the hospital records, things like that, being able to just automate some of this data. If you can tell us anything new and exciting that's coming around that. 

Neil: Yeah, anything that's around that is very high level at this point.

We've got a pretty simple process. Anything that we've toyed around with, or are starting to explore has to do probably with interpreting legalese. Going through a document, maybe explaining it if A resident a more senior individual is reading through that.

And it's like [00:11:00] those packets can be cumbersome. So it's like what am I really signing and agreeing to here or highlighting any key portions of a legal agreement? That's really where we're starting to look to help some of that or. Even in that process of having a little bit of a companion in some instances, some people don't have that power of attorney adult child to help them go through that process, so they lean on someone in the community to do that.

But how could we do that with AI or a signing wizard? If you remember back in the days of Microsoft Office with the magic paper clip kind of thing. So something to walk them through the process and help you should bring that 

Amber: back, bring that right here for clip. I love that was your answer, because I was thinking more in terms of like data automation, but you're talking about actually being able to add value to the process by explanations to residents, which is really cool.

Neil: Yeah, I've seen some amazing things happening with AI, especially on the [00:12:00] CRM side, patient intake on the skilled side, really figuring some of that out. But, the primary issues or problems that we continue to face just in that little move in process that kind of lives between CRM and EHR, we're in between those those problems are, can we find, a specific legal agreement?

Did they agree to, arbitration? How do we pull some of that? So there is for sure a data component where we could, have them, have a tool of sorts that they can go through and call that information. But I don't know that AI would be needed for some of that, some of it can just be tracking.

Amber: Another question that occurred to me, as you were speaking is another sort of common very manual process I see that I haven't seen a good solution to is like, what happens post admission?

Admission, so right now. Everybody's sending emails. So there's like an email goes to maintenance. It goes to housekeeping. It goes to dining. It goes to is there anything built into Senior Sign that automates the post admission and starts the workflow of what has to happen next?

Neil: What we're looking to do is go deeper [00:13:00] into the move in process which expands necessarily into some of those offline tasks. Let's call it. So what we have today and Senior Sign our tool basically has digitized that paper folder I mentioned earlier, which is what they used to send family home with.

Where we're looking to go is, what are all of those offline tasks, unit turnover, for example, getting keys, made a nameplate for the door, a welcome packet. What is moving day like planning some of those things t minus 10 days to move in. How are we handling X, Y and Z kind of thing. So that's really where we're looking to go with the tool.

More automation, more task tracking again around that process. So that's where we're headed. A lot of those features aren't sitting in Senior Sign today and available to our customers. We're not resting on our laurels saying, "oh we've got e-signature, so let's move on."

We've got a lot in the works. 

Amber: Yeah, and I'll just say from having visited many communities that is definitely a challenge that doesn't have a good solution. So it's still very manual that move an email, move out email, stuff like that. [00:14:00] And if you can solve that, I think that would be fantastic.

Neil: Yeah, even move in day I think there's so much that happens move in day to make that. As stress free as possible, a great experience for, these residents that are giving up one home for a new home and. That's emotional, etc. So anything that can help make that go more smoothly is a huge advantage for a community. 

Amber: Yeah. That's what we do on Raising Tech. We come up with new ideas. Yeah, there 

Neil: you go. 

Amber: Sounds like you guys were working on it already though. So I know you mentioned at the beginning when you were talking about your founding story is that you had looked at other systems like DocuSign, you tried to find an existing system.

So now that Senior Sign is built and rolled out to so many communities, can you talk a little bit about the difference between Senior Sign and something like a DocuSign? 

Neil: Yeah. I had a bit of a tech background prior to coming into the senior living space. This is the first industry where I've seen people really seek out and look for technology solutions for their communities that are very senior living [00:15:00] based, directed at senior living, designed for senior living, built for senior living.

A great example is the CRM space. This was, I came in, I had never heard of Sherpa, I had never heard of Welcome Home, never heard of, At the time, you had Enquire and some others so had never heard of these CRMs. You hear of HubSpot, Salesforce, SugarCRM.

Like I could name a thousand CRMs out there. So really what we've tried to do is, we hear time and time again that DocuSign just doesn't work for senior living. It's not a knock against DocuSign. It's just the process is more robust than an e signature. E-sign is the easy part.

 The e-sign act is only 14 pages. There's not a whole lot of parameters in there that you have to adhere to. So really going deep in that movement process is what makes us maybe a little bit different from a DocuSign. A couple of other points, our pricing is really geared towards senior living, so we price per community, whereas Some of the bigger players.

I don't want to keep knocking on DocuSign. I don't want that to be, there's Adobe Sign, there's HelloSign there's a [00:16:00] handful of other e signature softwares out there but they're really priced per packet, per signature, per user, per whatever it is and so it doesn't really cater and it gets quite expensive when you start adding in, I need a regional to have access and six people from corporate and my director of sales and marketing across

19 buildings, and we're sending out 80 pages of documents four times a month, you know It's it just adds up really quickly. So that would maybe be the first point. Secondarily, Five community, a 10 community, senior living company is a big deal to us. You know, we want to make sure that they're using the software.

We're tracking. Are people logging in? Are they using it? If not, we reach out with our customer success team. Whereas you're going to be a really small fish to an Adobe sign, a DocuSign. And then lastly, we're really looking to integrate with all of the systems that they're probably already using today that are also senior living specific, the Point Click Cares, there's MatrixCare. There's all the different health [00:17:00] records. You've got Align now Etc. WelcomeHome. All of those integrations are important to us just because it does smooth out that workflow for the end users that are using those other systems. 

Amber: Yeah, that led me to think of another question.

I know you're managing the admissions process. Can you also do other contract management? 

Neil: We do a little bit. The one we get asked about all the time is human resource documents. 

Amber: Okay. 

Neil: So we haven't played in that space.

We, we've tried a couple of times with a few different communities. There's a couple that are using it for that. It's not really designed for that process. If we did something and we would do it in a big way to really handle that, but we do see all sorts of documents and contracts, et cetera, internal company ones as well as external.

Amber: Yeah, I'm starting to see this request pop up a lot more recently. I just had someone text me a friend at a community and ask me, who do your clients use for contract management? And I was like. I don't really have anybody doing that yet, but it is popping up. I've heard of [00:18:00] contract works, but, I don't know if there's anything seen living specifically like we're talking about.

Neil: Yeah and maybe I'm sure I could ask a lot more questions around what they're trying to use it for something we're also working on, long term roadmap in terms of the product is a little bit smarter contract builder for the community. Taking into account, a lot of the fringe questions, etc, But being able to, for example, type in resident, Amber's moving into 201, room 201 and pulling in all of the information around that to build that card contract a little more smartly.

So rather than having them have to prepare and fill that out, we know 201 is a two bedroom unit that rents for 4, 500 a month base. It's in Building A at our CCRC, and it's on the second floor, and just pulling in rates, fees, care types, et cetera, so automatically knowing that's an assisted living, and that's under, Neil's management, and so assigning Neil as the community [00:19:00] contact, some things like that maybe a little bit more of the contract building again, longer term, we're not there just yet, but something we're working towards.

Amber: Now I've learned a lot today. I I'm really glad I got to hear more about Senior Sign. Like I said, I've heard really positive things . Is there anything we haven't talked about? You want to make sure our listeners know? 

Neil: We're very senior living focused. We're just now starting to venture and get pulled in naturally into skilled nursing a little bit more But very senior living friendly. We love the industry We feel very fortunate that we get to work with such great individuals. 

Amber: I didn't comment on this earlier, but everything you were mentioning about the senior living specific and the vendors and the specific needs.

100 percent true. And we definitely look for partners who are focused on that and understand that. I've talked to people who are trying to come into the industry and we'll just integrate with anybody. It's it doesn't really work that way in senior living. Like you, you think it does, but you have to really know the right people and right, understand the players and how they all want to talk to each other.

Neil: Right. Yeah, exactly. I always joke. [00:20:00] So when I partnered with our CEO, when I brought him in as my business partner joked, we went to our first conference and I said, just buckle up, this is A really big high school reunion. Everybody knows everybody. The industry is very small in terms of, who knows who and everybody's worked for everybody else and they've jumped companies.

But that's actually what I really love about it is going to conferences, seeing customers, seeing other vendors that, that we integrate with and other partners. I'm looking forward maybe to running into you all at a conference and this has been great. Thank you very much for having it. I love

seeing more of this happening around senior living, which I think is probably an underserved industry when it comes to podcasts and information and technology, etc. So thanks for what you're doing. 

Amber: Yeah, I'm glad to be here. So where can our listeners find out more about Senior Sign? 

Neil: Senior Sign. com is probably the best place if you want to actually see the software.

You can sign up for a demo and one of our sales guys are happy to jump on at any time. I don't think anybody needs to seek me [00:21:00] out individually, which is great. 

Amber: Unless they want to hear more about your founding story.

Neil: There you go. 

Amber: Thank you so much for coming on today, Neil. 

Neil: Yeah. Appreciate it. Thanks Amber for having me. 

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