95. Doing the Most with the Least with Mike Hughes

In this episode of Raising Tech, Matt Reiners chats with Mike Hughes,
Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Transformation and Innovation Officer at United Church Homes, about reimagining senior living through innovation. Mike shares his journey from AARP and healthcare tech into senior living, emphasizing the importance of a human-centered approach and his belief in “doing the most with the least.” He introduces their Entrepreneur in Residence program, where innovators live in communities to deeply understand resident needs and design practical solutions.

The conversation also covers AI’s growing role in senior care, United Church Homes' shift toward decentralized, community-based services, and strategies for successful change management in legacy organizations. Mike stresses the need to “fall in love with the problem first” and offers practical advice for leaders aiming to embrace innovation, from investing in digital transformation frameworks to fostering a culture rooted in empathy and collaboration.

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Transcript

Matt Reiners: [00:00:00] Welcome back to another episode of Raising Tech. Today I am so excited for our guest, the legendary Mike Hughes. Mike is the Chief Transformation and Innovation Officer for United Church Homes, a hundred plus year old nonprofit with about a hundred owned and managed seed and year living properties in 14 states and on two tribal nass.

Plus a growing set of community-based managed care services. I've known Mike for a while now. I think our first interactions was at an aging 2.0 conference in San Francisco, gosh, six, seven years ago. Something like that.

But uh, it's just been really cool to see your journey across senior living and all the awesome things you're doing with age tech. And I feel like you've got your hands [00:01:00] evolved at a little bit of everything and excited to jump into that today. Thanks Mike for joining us today.

Mike Hughes: Yeah no. Thanks for having me on. 

Matt Reiners: Cool. So Mike, first place, I always like to start with new guests. Can you share a little bit about your background and what led you to be, the Chief Transformation Innovation Officer at United Church Homes which I must say might be the coolest title I think I've ever heard for somebody 

Mike Hughes: My title, it's Senior Executive Vice President, chief Transformation Innovation Officer. The on my business card, I think it's eight point type. Wow. Yeah, that's me. And yeah, Mo my entire career has been aging and technology and health. I've been in I've been in A-A-R-P couple times.

I've been a organization called Surescripts, which is e-prescribing networking but always compelled with the age wave. Always compelled with just the fact. And my first degree is economics. So the, you look at these trends and what's certain in terms of market demand, most certain thing I know outside of climate change maybe is the age wave. So it started with how do we see opportunities, if one person needs. [00:02:00] This today and 10 people will need it in 10 years. How do we plan for that? But it's really migrated into just a fascination with social determinants of health and all the non-clinical things that affect us every single day that really impact our health and wellness and the fact that those just increase in importance as we age.

I was really looking for, it was a time where I was looking for a couple different opportunities. I, I was consulting, I was doing well, but senior living is quite frankly where I think we do the most with the least. And the opportunity to get in and really join United Church Homes at a very pivotal time in IT history where, you know at a very, with very integrative, sort, innovative agenda for growth.

It's been a real privilege to be part of the organization. 

Matt Reiners: Yeah, I love that. And I love that saying, I feel like you gotta put it on a shirt, like doing more with less. I think something like that. There was be the most with the least. Yeah, the most, with the least. All right. Yeah. Yeah. Messed up.

Some of the verbiage there, but no, I, and it makes so much sense too, I think in terms of the world of senior living and like what [00:03:00] we can do. And I'm wondering like, what does innovation mean in the context of senior living? And I'm wondering how United Church Homes has embraced it over its a hundred plus year history.

Mike Hughes: Yeah. United Church Homes is really it's an amazing organization over a hundred years old, affiliated with the United Church of Christ, very steeped in, in fellowship accommodating to all and really with a philosophy, what they call abundant life or abundant. Abundant aging or abundant life, which is what I see to be just.

Making sure people have more opportunities for connection and purpose and engagement as we grow older. It's so important. I'm the first chief innovation officer they've had, and I just really define on how do we bring in new things and how do we plan for new things within the organization.

Senior living is ever since COVID has, it is really just been an industry at Crossroads, traditional business model, senior living, and how COVID impacted that. Combined with the age wave combined with, the demand for services, two thirds of us are gonna need help at some point [00:04:00] in our lives, and that's comes a cost that Medicare are gonna cover.

People are not prepared for that. And really innovation is really in the heart of senior living, very human-centered. And that's why I spent a lot of time building human-centered design programs at United Church Homes. We need to think about just the Goldilocks principle of what makes us more efficient as we scale.

Where are we gonna scale and how do we make people feel today, I. Because that's really what the secret sauce is, how we make people feel today and how that leads to ongoing health and wellness. How do we take that where we are today in our communities and I think move to the much broader opportunity, which is serving people in the larger community where the demand really is.

When you look at the industry trends. We're moving from business models that are very centralized to decentralized. How does innovation help? How does technology help how do we scale into that model knowing that at our core we are. Absolute ninjas at taking care of the people that [00:05:00] cause the healthcare system the most.

And we support those people largely through nonclinical supports. Functional health, relational health local community service coordination. That stuff, that's what I say we do the most with the least. That stuff is very impactful and probably the best kept secret in aging. 

Matt Reiners: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.

And I think I've seen this interesting trend over senior living, aging grant I've only been in, in 10 years. But, to your point of like, how do we reach uh, you know, those people that might be aging in place and all that sort of stuff, but like technology really enables us to get out of these just four corners or these four walls that are around us today and really try to serve the greater good and really trying to help those around us and, help everybody on their aging journey.

And meet them where they are and making sure that they're set up for success that way. 

Mike Hughes: Yeah, and I would say that the age of old people can't use technology is over. But the testing that we've done with the workshops we've held, I see no, no issue. Not to say that there aren't issues, but at least it doesn't meet the height that [00:06:00] old people can't acclimate to technology.

If you think about it, the people moving into our communities today probably retired in the late two thousands. You know what was around in the late two thousands, the internet, smartphones, these are just parts of people's lives now. These are tools that they need to do jobs, and if they don't have a job for the tool to do, then the just the tools not have any use.

Matt Reiners: Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. And I know one of those ways that United Church Homes is being, like, doing super innovative stuff, is you have this Entrepreneur in Residence program, and I've talked to a couple people over the years that have taken part in this. And I'm just wondering if you can explain what this program is and how it fosters innovation in senior living and if there's been any cool projects or ideas that have emerged from it.

Mike Hughes: Yeah. And thanks for bringing that up, Matt. We're really pleased with the program. It, it started. It really started as part of my, my efforts to build a culture of innovation at United Church Homes. We have amazing, dedicated, just superhuman people that work every single day to, [00:07:00] and you don't know what you're walking into from day to day in our environment, right?

And these people rise to the occasion and they they make things happen. But making time for innovation, making chi time, that can be really challenging. And the idea of change. It doesn't hit everybody the same way when you talk about innovation change and the need for change. So how do we bring the spirit of innovation closer to our people?

We've created this program called Our Entrepreneur in Residence Program where people that are developing innovation solutions in the aging space, people who are innovators, people who are educators, come live with us. For two weeks. And this is at our Glenwood community in Marietta, Ohio, which is an amazing community and an amazing setting.

Very historic. But it's a two week program. We handle room and board. And really week one is job shadowing, getting to know the residents, and then week two's kind of a choose your own adventure. But we've had. People who are very early stage startups in this program, people with established solutions, [00:08:00] people from foreign countries that want to take learnings back to their own, it's been a nice variety and our residents love it, and our employees are super supportive of it.

So by doing this program, we allow people to see what their own eyes, what the workflows look like, you know why, if people come in with these ideas with a sense in their head about how it might work in our study, fall in love with our problems first before you before you come up with your solutions or before you enhance your solutions and the storytelling.

Come outta here with stories about a good day, about a bad day, about being bored. That's really the fabric of what we work in. And we get these wonderful end of end of stay reports. And we're actually using those reports to identify opportunities for process redesign in our community.

So it's really just a win-win all the way around. So that, that is our entrepreneur and residence program. 

Matt Reiners: No, and I love that. And and even thinking back to my own entrepreneurial endeavors like. Just to be submersed into that day-to-day and like what that looks like from the staff's perspective, resident's perspective.

Like to your point, [00:09:00] right? Like they might come in with these kind of blinders on of what they think the problem is and then can actually encounter that on a day-to-day. I know from my own standpoint, like maximizing the number of conversations you could have with a potential end user.

Like Who might use that. Like Is it really even a problem? Too many times I've seen. Entrepreneurs build something behind closed doors, assume it's gonna be the greatest thing in the world, reveal it to the world, and then wonder why no one's buying it or engaging with it. 'Cause they did not live in that.

They did not, walk a mile in those shoes to see what the problems and what that kind of looks like. To your point, seeing what those workflows are on a day-to-day basis. Yeah, and 

Mike Hughes: look, I've had the chance to stay in our communities. I want to do more of it. I'll check myself into the program really, because, you just really need to not just.

Hear about it. You need to live it, you need to hear it, you need to smell it, you need to taste it. You need to be with our residents and get to know these amazing people that we are so privileged to serve. It's really allows you to see beyond age and see more into, and [00:10:00] to need and to want and to, you, yourselves, as you get, as you work with our residents in this program.

Matt Reiners: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense and I applaud you guys for for doing that and inviting people in. That's, it's awesome for everybody, I would imagine. And I'm wondering, and you, I know you had mentioned you kinda like use those reports and like to be innovative or look for some of those other opportunities.

I'm wondering like how else you're thinking about what does success look like for the Entrepreneur in Residence program? 

Mike Hughes: It's really just, it's it's just first of all it takes a certain kind of person to participate in the program. Yeah. You have to be very humble. You have to be willing to do front end, like front of house tasks, help out with dining, help out with changing bedsheets, all nonclinical stuff.

But, there, there isn't just one solution here, I think really has more to do with the purpose that someone feels for, you just know that somebody's coming in for this, for the right reasons. And it's, we've had smart watches continent solutions emerging AI [00:11:00] solutions e even games and dementia care solutions.

It's because our location at Glenwood, it has all levels of care. It has independent living, assisted living, skilled nursing memory care OTPT rehab, and and really it's again, to choose your own adventure and. Sometimes in innovation you don't want to think things too much if it's working and let's keep going with it.

That's, that that's testing and learning. 

Matt Reiners: Yeah. No I love that. And and it's great to put it in a position with all levels of care, right? Because I think too many times people coming from outside of this world just all have seen living in one bucket, right? Yeah. But like the way that we think about a IL al skilled nursing memory care, it's.

All buckets within the bucket. And they'll, and they each have their own buckets. So it's like, how do we give people that, that experience and that understanding with that. And one of the things I'm curious about, Mike, and I know we were talking about this in the pre-call and with someone who's had this first role for United Church Homes, and I heard, and I hope your business cards aren't [00:12:00] charging you by the character.

'cause I feel like you might have the most expensive business cards out there. One of the things I'm curious about is. This idea of change management? 'cause I know it can be very challenging, especially in a long established nonprofit, such as United Church Homes, but like, how do you drive transformation while honoring or honoring your organization's history and mission?

Mike Hughes: Yeah. It's a lot, it's. It is it's difficult I think for people from other industries to understand, when you're talking about what we do on the day-to-day, we are all, we have very few people that are, can be offline and go off and think for hours and strategize and that sort of thing.

We're all revenue producing FTEs, so the idea of working with change and in our environment, it takes a lot of trust building. And what I mean by that is that the analogy that I've been using is right behind me is my TV room. In my TV room there is a Venetian blind [00:13:00] and it has three clips, and the blind is broken on one of the clips and a couple times a month, I have to open and close the blind, so I have to reach up and grab it and yank up and down on the string to make it work.

And I know, and I actually fixed it. It took me 45 minutes to take off the blind and figure out what was wrong with the clip and go down to my magic toolbox of screws and washers and things and jury re the solution. Then I got it all back together and I didn't want to pull the string.

If it falls off again, I would've done all that for nothing. And oh, by the way, that blind had been broken for two years. Wow. In order for me to come in and say, Hey, look, I've got a great new solution for you here. You're gonna have to work a little harder to understand it and learn it and integrate it and all that, but believe me, at the very end of this, it is gonna be better for you.

I'm not gonna be legitimate at all unless I really know what the existing process is. Soup to nuts, unless I fall in love with the problem first. Then I don't have that [00:14:00] believability and authenticity when it comes to, suggesting that new solution. That's really what the Entrepreneur in Residence program is.

Fall in love with the pro, fall in love with the industry that you aim to serve and then go off and and work within and hopefully continue working with us and iterating to develop your solution. 

Matt Reiners: I love that there's so many uh, t-shirt moments in here, Mike. I feel like sayings or you gotta put on a bumper sticker or a t-shirt here.

Mike Hughes: I think about advertising, man, that was my first job. Advertising, marketing, direct marketing. So yeah, I, I tend to sing thinking slogans and that gets me slapped on occasion. 

Matt Reiners: I. Yeah. No, I love it. And I think that analogy for the Venetian vines is perfect, right? I see so many times with technology, people are doing something one way.

'cause the problem isn't that big of a problem for them and they just work around it, right? And using the saying bandages over bullet holes. Some of these aren't bullet holes, right? But they're like just working rounds and have figured out how they can build that into their workflow and what that can do.

And I'm wondering like, as we think about. Change, manage it, right? Like change can [00:15:00] sometimes be met with resistance. I see it all the time, even in my own past working with senior living communities, somewhere better than others. But I'm wondering like if you've learned anything to help build that buy-in from staff, residents other stakeholders when introducing new initiatives?

Mike Hughes: Yeah. I think, falling in love with the current is current state is one thing. And then the other thing is really understanding. People's motivations and intents as they engage in the work. When you're I've actually just been taking some of our staff through a process or systems thinking and human-centered design, process management, systems thinking, and it is parallel to what we see with the Six Sigma work.

And, that, that idea of continuous improvement and all that, except, the Six Sigma type approach works good for, factories and IT systems and things like that, but we deal with human beings. And I think at the end of the, what you what's missing from a lot of these process design or process examinations is really the engagement of the end customer and their [00:16:00] sentiment.

So I get to tell you another story now. Because what we have to look at when we look at the way that our staff deals with people is they're not just dealing with process, they're dealing with emotions and feelings and feedback and anything that you would expect. 'cause we are a hospitality business.

And so when we look at our processes and our change, what needs to change, we can change for more efficiency or we can change for, maybe more revenue. But the idea of making our people feel better, comes back to the heart of why people are in this business to begin with. And and.

The example I use when I talk about that is my dentist and I have an amazing dentist and I ate lots of sugar when I was a kid, and all my fillings have to be re redone now. And so every time I go in for a cleaning, it's oh, another filling has to be redone. And I dread it because I don't like needles.

When I think about I, this strikes me 'cause I think about my own. The way that we teach this process design, step one, step two, step three, and then you overlay sentiment. So Mike has to park at the dentist's [00:17:00] office. Mike has to find the elevator. Mike is going up the elevator. What's Mike thinking at that time?

Is he feeling hopeful or fun or what? He walks through, people smile them, oh, I feel a little bit better. Then you get into the chair, then you see the needle on the table. Then the anxiety starts to grow. And then my dentist says, Mike, what is your favorite band right now? And I tell him, and he said, okay, lemme put that on Spotify for you.

And it costs him nothing. I don't know what Spotify costs to him but by anxiety is reduced. And I think that when we can see an outcome that, that leads to people smiling, people feeling less anxiety, people feeling more confident, people feeling more hopeful, that is that is a reason for change.

And at least that's my story right now. Interview me in six months and might, I might have a different one. 

Matt Reiners: No I love that. And as we're recording this, I have to go to the dentist on Thursday, and I am not looking forward to that. I wish they would play the music that I'm listening to right now.

Maybe I'll suggest to him 

Mike Hughes: [00:18:00] again, it costs em nothing. Nothing. 

Matt Reiners: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And no, but it, it's a perfect analogy, I think, right? Because it's like, how do we help these people to just. Enjoy their day to day more. Enjoy those experiences with residents. Maybe it's taking out some of those things that are, some of that mundane stuff and allowing them to maximize time being spent with residents and why they got in this industry I always go back to the idea of wif 'em, right? What's in it for me? And I find yeah, the way that I've talked to people in the past, like if I'm talking to the sales and marketing director about a solution, I'm talking to the activities professional a little bit differently.

Still, some of the core pieces are there. But again, like what's. How is it gonna make their life better or their job easier, and therefore making the residents lives better. And I think coming back to that, 

Mike Hughes: I remember this is not McDonald's here. You mean every single day is amazing.

But every single day is different. You don't necessarily know what you're walking into just like a hospital, just any other place where, people are humans and amazing, but they have complex needs. 

Matt Reiners: They really do. [00:19:00] And as we're talking about innovation, and I have to give us a shout out here 'cause we've gone 21 minutes before talking about it, but we have to bring up the most talked about thing, which is ai.

So we did great Mike. We did great. Hold on. I 

Mike Hughes: gotta take a drink. 

Matt Reiners: Yeah, exactly. Hey, if you had to take a drink every time you heard that, I swear by 9:00 AM I would be ready for a nap.

And it's every week we're seeing new news coming out around ai.

It's rapidly evolving across industries. And I'm wondering like where you see some of the most promising applications of AI in senior living and aging services, and wondering if you have any current initiatives at United Church Homes that are leveraging AI today? 

Mike Hughes: Yeah. Yeah, we of course we've been tracking it.

And I gotta give a shout out to Scott Collins with Linkage who took my group and a few others back in late 2023 through a prompt engineering course to really teach us and show us the world of AI and what it could do in terms of, the different use cases that we have.

And then, quite frankly, we sat 2024 out because the hype cycle [00:20:00] was really. Crazy and we were waiting to see what sort of boundaries the current capabilities of LLMs had. And I'm separating LLM and AI from machine learning. And I think people conflate the two.

And I see, machine learning and AI as compliments and, but not the same. So machine learning is absolutely essential. We have just all this historical clinical sales, marketing, customer interaction data and just the opportunity to make, better sense of it and automate some of that reporting is just fantastic.

But, in my view, the ai, if you're talking about the generative ai experiences, I really see that to standardize anything that's not value added. The, we have, our Navi guide service coordinators, we have our, we have people that interact with those we serve every single day.

And they should be talking and interpreting and thinking about the, their plans of care and not dreading having to then go and log in the conversation to a case management system and spend 20 minutes doing that. AI [00:21:00] transcription and then a, we're gonna start to test into ai, automated calling text.

Agent persona, like agent tools, to answer questions and things like that within the parts of our case management and our sales cycle, which are more standardized, like asking somebody for their certification within with the current certification expiry date within an HR case, or just checking in between live calls and saying, do you need anything?

Do you have any messages to come back all while knowing that this is an AI call? So at this point we've understood kind of the boundaries of what these systems can do. Discovered some use cases, we're gonna start small and now start introducing it into those use cases to see if people engage with it and if they can consistently and reliably get the, get content that, that matches the intent of those calls.

The thing I've, I, I. Is probably ahead of us that I'm not seeing as much of a challenge or opportunity as really, okay, [00:22:00] now I have all this, all these transcribed interactions. How do I sort through them? How do I summarize them? How do I organize them? So if I've got someone who's got a hundred people on a caseload and they go in and they have to skim a bunch of automated calls, how do they pick out those nuggets of gold within those calls that tell them how to, call someone sooner, call someone more specifically about something, get a more specific resource to them. That's what's ahead of us. But uh, we're sort of trying to be in that moment of not trying to get our two overhead of our skis on ai and just work within the reality of what we know it can do with us right now.

Me too. 

Matt Reiners: Yeah, no, I love that pragmatic view. I think, and I think it's good to call it the different types of AI models out there, right? In terms of machine learning and LLMs. 'cause there's definitely, again, we talked about buckets earlier in terms of senior living. A lot of people just have this AI bucket, and I know I've talked to clients and senior living providers and they're like, we wanna use ai.

And I'm like, for what? And they're like we don't know that answer. So it's okay 

Mike Hughes: [00:23:00] well. I get cynical about this, Matt, because, I see just these solutions chasing problems, especially now at this time of recording the new hot thing are these AI agents they talk about agents that can go off and return your shoes for you or book an airline ticket or via personal assistant.

And I see we watched the Super Bowl this year and I think Matthew McConaughey did commercials from Google and I remember this one commercial, and he is in an airport and he is he says to the camera, this is. He says, oh no, I didn't check my Google LLM assistant to find the fastest way from the security gate to my departing gate.

Now I'm gonna be late for my flight. And I'm thinking in my head, how many times has anybody been late for a flight? Because they couldn't wave, find themselves from a security gate to a departure gate in an airport, unless you're late already. Airports are made for way finding and somebody, so somebody sat around the Google ad.

Advertising agency. What are the what's the use cases that are gonna really mean something to someone? And they bring out that one and I'm, it just did it, [00:24:00] it's solutions chasing problems. We're trying to, again, there's a theme going here in the conversation, but falling in love with the problem first.

That's what we're doing. 

Matt Reiners: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And yeah, to the commercial, right? I don't know. I think there's a lot of validity just looking up and seeing where my next gate is and knowing where that is and running as fast as possible. 

Mike Hughes: Yeah. Maybe some people get lost that way, but I've never, but it, I've never heard the story telling about, oh my gosh, I got so turned around and lost inside an airport that I couldn't get to my gate.

Matt Reiners: Yeah. Yeah. It's, and I think too, what I've seen with ai, even in like my own use cases, like the way you're thinking about it too at the enterprise level for multiple people and multiple things, it's gonna be a lot more difficult in terms of like, how do we figure it out and pull things out, having multiple.

Full data sources. I've seen it be very helpful in my day to day, but granted, I'm just a one person team trying to make it happen. So I find it to be helpful on that end. But yeah, it'll be interesting to see how that kind of develops. And, I think we've almost seen this influx of, you go to every company, every.

Product or service out there, it's [00:25:00] AI enabled something and it's almost become this like marketing word like organic is and has been for certain foods where, it might not necessarily be organic 'cause you don't have to cer hit certain things in order to have that, yeah. And when I think about ai, and I'm curious of your take, 'cause I think I said pragmatic you're a little bit more cynical.

I'm curious of your take around how it raises concerns around privacy bias and this idea of human touch and caregiving because, how do you balance those technology advancements? And based on how we've talked so far, I'm gonna guess how you're gonna answer this, but how do you balance those technology advancements with the need for that compassionate person-centered care?

Mike Hughes: Yeah that's that. And that's the thing we're keeping an eye on. I think that the idea of AI evolving to the point of being a relational companion, it was interesting when you have time of writing, or at the time of recording, there's a story out there about a woman who has an AI boyfriend, and she was using chat GPT to construct this world with a boyfriend and [00:26:00] enough so that even though it violated their, the chat g sorry, open AI's terms of service, she would have to spend.

I dunno, half an hour retraining the bot back to the original case and then engage with it that way. So it can, for certain people finding certain things and if you've heard these conversational ais, they're pretty good. Yeah. They are very good. We have an AI policy.

Our staff can use AI and we encourage use of AI for research. If you wanna write me an email, I hope this email finds you well. Whatever type of I, that's fine, that's label your work If it's, over 75% AI generator or whatever percentage we have in there. So we're not individual contributors are using ai and we're not saying don't use ai, that's fine.

But if we wanna standardize it and make it part of our operation, then we need to figure out our boundaries. And, and hallucinations still happen. We just ran a couple of tests on gimme a list of local market resources for, elder or [00:27:00] aging services in such and such city, and such state, and 30% of the phone numbers were wrong.

Matt Reiners: Wow. 

Mike Hughes: So halluc, they ha they have not dealt with a hallucination problem. And so it can't be a hundred percent reliable where it really counts. We haven't seen that yet. So I know I have colleagues that are working on companion bots. We're keeping an eye on it. But I'm still. I still haven't made a decision yet about how to use 'em.

'cause I just don't know the relative benefits or harms yet. 

Matt Reiners: Yeah. And hey, at least you acknowledge that. And I think, I love how you call it, like these hallucinations. I remember one time I was asking Chad GPT about myself and it said that I was a Stanford MBA grad, which couldn't be further from the truth.

And I was like, yep, all this is accurate. Sounds great. 

Mike Hughes: You could be a Stanford MBA grad. Yeah. That's what the what open AI is telling you. 

Matt Reiners: Oh, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Goals, right? Goals. Yeah, it, I think you, 

Mike Hughes: the other Matt Reiners is that trends x number of times more in the [00:28:00] probability mo model that at, there's a Matt Reiners out there that is attached to the Stanford MBA program that is probably getting confused with.

This has my, there, 

Matt Reiners: there's definitely other Matt Reiners. I remember someone recruited me once asking if I wanted to be a CEO of an oil and gas company. And I was like, what? And then they're like, you're the person from this other oil and gas company, right? I was like different Matt Reiners. It's funny how that works.

It, Hey, 

Mike Hughes: you know what? You give it a shot though, man. You could, you might, you never know where that road would've taken you if you had said that you were the Matt Reiners. 

Matt Reiners: Exactly as long as I can just dominate the Google searches from the Matt Reiners today and own, and I own matt reiners.com. So I feel pretty established there.

So yeah, at the end of the day, doing the important things right. The 

Mike Hughes: other Matt Reiners is gonna come to you one one day wanting to buy matt reiners one.com and you'll be holding all cards, man. 

Matt Reiners: I try to buy reiners.com and there was someone overseas who owned it, was trying to sell it for $15,000 and I was like, yeah, that's not gonna happen.

But 'cause I wanna make my email matt@reiners.com, but I was just [00:29:00] mad@mattReiners.com. But it's all good. Um, I think we kind of acknowledged it in the beginning here, Mike, but we're talking about some of these different growth models and like what we're thinking about as we're thinking about senior living, but the industry evolving, new care models are emerging, and I'm wondering if there's any innovative growth strategies that providers should be considering to stay relevant and sustainable?

Mike Hughes: Yeah, if you're talking about a senior living provider everyone needs to grow from strength. And the strength that is, I think, just absolutely foundational to growth is gonna be just the relational health model that we practice in our communities. And in, in our case in particular, we, 75% of our portfolio is affordable housing.

And for decades we've been participating in a program sponsored by HUD called Service Coordination, where we received support. To hire people to be in those affordable housing buildings, to work with the residents assess them from a social determinant point of view, connect them with [00:30:00] local community resources with whose numbers and contacts and, are always changing.

And we are extremely effective at keeping these very high need people more so than average high need, high risk patient populations. Out of the hospital reducing readmissions. I'll throw some stats at you right now. There, if you have three or more chronic conditions, you cost the healthcare system about 50% more on average.

Wow. If you have three or more chronic conditions and a functional limitation, you cause the healthcare system, 330% more on average. Wow. And that's about 5% of the total US patient population. That consumes almost 25% of all healthcare spending because they trip in the fall and they go to the hospital, which is the most expensive site of care.

And then when they come out of the hospital, they mourn the loss of their function and they fall into depression. And then the cycle continues. And that's where we see all the healthcare spending happening. I'm overgeneralizing this, but I'm saying that we and others of our [00:31:00] type are highly proficient. At building relationships with and in a longitudinal way, taking care of these people because in the healthcare system and doctors didn't learn social determinants of health and EMR systems don't do longitudinal care.

It's all single points of time. We're the ones that do care over time. And importantly for organizations like ours, nonprofits that are affiliated with a religious denomination that do have spiritual care services. Ours in particular are very agnostic. But the idea when you're older of an idea of spiritual wellness, that people who are older generally do better when they have a pur, a purposeful pursuit or a set of purpose pursuits opportunities for relationships, opportunities for ent, spontaneity.

That's why a lot of senior living communities have birds and kids and dogs walking around. And then these opportunities to ask yourself questions that are maybe just, where do I fit in the larger hole? When you have those things, generally you do better. [00:32:00] And those are the things that I think that we recognize or that we can bring into the managed care world that will be able to impact and effect at scale.

Because we're just at the start of the age wave and we've got a huge. Problem with healthcare costs coming at us, and our industry, again, does the most with the least just by calling people up once in a while and asking 'em how they're doing, working it within certain standardized assessments.

Those are the things that I think will lead us from housing providers to health and wellness providers with housing at its core, and for us in particular, we're very excited with. Our joint venture with Care Source, a managed care payer based in Dayton I'm very excited about our participation in the CMS Guide program.

And then from an innovation standpoint, now you're looking at moving your core service that you do every day that is very scalable from a centralized to a decentralized business environment. And what does that look like from a tech perspective? What data do you need? If you're, if you just run into people [00:33:00] in the community any way that's overgeneralizing.

Okay. How do you make, if you've got a hundred people in the surrounding community, who do you phone first? Who deserves that extra phone call? And that's the that's where, the data that we collect and interpret that is just gonna be gold as we scale. 

Matt Reiners: Yeah, I love that. And I love how you're, really pushing the boundaries when it comes to some of that stuff, right? And like thinking about the future, embracing the future, and really, going away from the standard, I think senior living model. And I, so I'll give you guys kudos on a lot of that. And then my last question here for you, Mike.

For leaders looking to implement innovation in their own organizations, what key lessons have you learned and what first steps would you recommend for those looking to embrace change? I. 

Mike Hughes: Yeah, I'll just, say again that the problem first approach is definitely one that I think is especially valuable, I would say, in terms of innovation.

So the things that we've done that I think have [00:34:00] worked here, one, is to develop an overall visit vision for your digital transformation. And I think that's what we talk about. We talk about digital transformation. One of the first things that I did when I came in was I made my boss and I take an MIT course on like an online executive education course on, on digital transformation that gave us a framework and a language at the executive level to talk about how we were gonna grow.

But then again, what we do as human and how we change and grow is through human-centered design. So I'd highly recommend folks to really adopt their own framework for human-centered design. We use one that is based upon our relationship with the A-A-R-P-H Tech collaborative. There are others out there.

We have an amazing a trainer that we work with that I can. But we have we have a five part program for human-centered design, visioning, customer investigation, ideation, prototyping, and testing and learning. And we've found out some amazing things about our customers, our potential customers, what needs are met in community and what needs might be more [00:35:00] unmet that that gives us the opportunity for new offerings to to serve them.

And I can't tell you what they are 'cause that's gonna be our secret sauce. I think affiliating yourself with others. So we work with the leading age cast, that's our trade association. Our gen probably has one as well, but a RP age technical collaborative. American Society on Aging, the age tech Atlanta group.

Just being in environments where you have new solutions being offered to you, but knowing that adopting those new solutions really comes from that problem first approach. Otherwise, it's just bright, shiny object syndrome and that's just a waste of time. So that's what I would say. 

Matt Reiners: I love it.

Mike, really appreciate your time today. So many golden nuggets throughout this and so grateful people like you are focusing in senior living and the aging tech space and know the industry is better because of people like you. So thank you my friend. 

Mike Hughes: Oh, thanks. And Matt, thanks for everything that you do.

I appreciate for the opportunity on the show and looking forward to hear more from other [00:36:00] guests.