ALIS
By 2030, all U.S. citizens born between 1946 - 1960 will be over the age of 65. This is an enormous group of people, called “boomers” because of the boom of children born after soldiers returned home from WWII. As our boomer parents age, the need for better care management across a range of needs and experiences will continue to grow. Assisted living facilities (which can house independent living, assisted living, memory care, and rehab individuals) must cater to many different levels of cognition, physical aptitude and health of their residents.
ALIS is software built by Medtelligent, and as a product manager, I am in charge of a team working to provide solutions for billing, sales, and family engagement staff in these communities.
The Business of Assisted Living
Assisted living communities are many businesses wrapped into one: they are hospitality managers, healthcare providers, accountants, business office managers, sales representatives, and family engagement coordinators. My team is responsible for deeply knowing the needs of a few of these roles:
Sales teams must be competitive, working to maintain occupational numbers in the buildings and ensuring the future of the company. As our national population ages, communities are now newly competitive - offering benefits and amenities at different price points for different types of customers and financial situations. Gone are the days of dreading the thought of putting mom and dad “in a home” - now, communities offer spas, swimming pools, 24/7 concierge services, and dedicated teams devoted to enriching the lives of their residents.
Billing teams at communities generate invoices and take in payments, but are also typically responsible for generating reporting for corporate teams, confirming occupancy and A/R (accounts receivable) data, and managing the accounts of residents who receive some level of state-pay insurance (whether that shows up as VA benefits, Medicaid, or Medicare).
Family Engagement teams must ensure that family members are not left in the dark on their resident’s welfare. Engagement team members must track the needs of the resident and report any concerning changes back to the family if action must be taken, or even just to suggest changes to the resident’s daily schedule that could improve quality of life. Part healthcare provider, part cruise ship coordinator, they ensure that both residents and families both have a high quality of life while the resident is in their building.
Three Projects
For each of the groups my team worked with, I want to briefly highlight my favorite project that we worked on, and share the product management learnings that I gleaned from each.
Sales
Sales teams using ALIS were doing too much clicking around trying to find what they needed. Occupancy data, lists of potential prospects, and sales tasks all lived in different places in the app - could we build them a better tool to manage all these necessary modules?
Billing and Revenue
Our client came to us with a tricky billing problem - when their residents leave the community for certain periods of time (usually a hospitalization, or even just to visit family) they put a pause on charging them for any care they would have received while staying in the community. How could we help their billing team track these stopped-and-started charges?
Family Engagement
Family engagement teams were putting a ton of time into calling and texting family members to update them about activities their residents were engaged in that week, with family members rarely calling back (or calling back after office hours, making response times tough on the staff). Could we give the staff a better low-impact way of communicating quality-of-life updates to families?
User Issue:
Sales teams want to track a lot of figures every day: how many people already live in the community, how many beds are available, or could be available soon, how much time it takes from first contact of a potential new resident to the moment they move in, and all of the different points of contact the team engages in to get turn that applicant into a resident.
Product Opportunity:
The team could have spent weeks going back and forth on what to add and what to leave on the cutting room floor. Instead, because the user experience was already so frayed and sales associates were checking so many places, the team moved forward on putting together an MVP of a “dashboard” for sales folks with only our existing modules and data in ALIS. Consolidating the disparate modules into easy-to-read widgets, we created a helpful tool for sales associates to check in on their daily tasks and activities across the platform.
Product Management Lesson:
As product manager, the hardest part of this project was cutting bells and whistles that would have added unnecessary development time. When doing competitive analysis, I found many CRM platforms that seemed to have it all, with fancy analytics tools that ALIS didn’t offer in the same way. Rather than add these, I chose to rely on ALIS’s robust CRM functionality, and build a solid foundation for future cool analytics tools we can add as we build the dashboard out.
Sales: CRM Dashboard
Billing: Automated Leave Events
User Issue:
Our client has a policy in place for all private payers in the community - after two weeks of any type of leave away from the community (hospitalization, rehab facility, family trip, etc.) they no longer charge the resident for care fees, as the resident has not and will not receive care for the duration of their time away. However, the community still wanted to charge residents rent charges for the full duration of their leave. The kicker? Only private residents should have all of these changes applied to them - any residents with medicaid payments would not be applicable, as medicaid has different rules set between the community and the state.
Product Opportunity:
Residents go on leave for any number of reasons, and after chatting with a few different clients (as well as the original client asking for a solution) it was clear to me that the issue was a complicated one. Some communities wanted to keep charging, others (like the original company) wanted a set number of days charged before ending the fees, while others wanted care charges to end immediately after the resident left.
I took this problem to the team’s developer, and we discussed adding this more complicated automation to ALIS’s “Billing Center” which at the time was a new feature that few companies had begun to use. The Billing Center was originally created to automate adding rent charges when residents moved into the communities, could we leverage this to add a start-stop-start functionality for residents on leave?
Working with the UX designer to build a customizable “rule set” that communities could customize and set up as needed, we not only completed the brief, but since then have onboarded several other companies onto the full Billing Center feature, increasing value in our Billing module going forward.
Product Management Lesson:
The team’s UX designer worked hard to make sure setting up rules with many variables (different lengths of time, different possible leave locations, different rules around ending and starting fees) was somewhat feasible for our users, and we went back and forth on how these settings should look. In the end, we still have our internal teams setting these billing rules up for our users, so I would love to one day take another pass at this and make it more user-friendly for clients to tackle themselves when they need to make changes.
Family Engagement: Connect Messaging
User Issue:
Family engagement teams in communities shoulder a lot of emotional labor, especially when residents are in the beginning stages of dementia and cognitive decline. Families are worried, scared, and have a lot of questions to ask. While ALIS does have a family portal, messages sent through the portal are one-directional, with staff able to update families about their residents, but no way for the families to respond to the messages or engage, leaving both family members and staff at the communities burnt out and looking for alternative ways to communicate.
Product Opportunity:
After talking to several clients and getting some incredible (horrible) stories of late night phone calls and panicked emails with family members, my first thought was upgrading our existing “Facebook-lite” posts coming from the community - adding ways for family members to “like” or comment on the messages from the staff, so that staff could know they had been seen and appreciated, in a format both sides would be familiar with.
When I chatted with my manager about the idea, they pointed me at their child’s school app - a place where parents and teachers could communicate through a text-messaging-like system, with parents able to ask non-emergency questions and teachers able to respond when they could. Taking inspiration from these apps, I realized this was a clearer path forward that many Gen X and Millennial children of residents would easily take to as a way to check in on mom and dad.
Product Management Lesson:
Sometimes, the best way to get clarity on projects is to ask a third party! This is obvious, but engaging with clients and looking at competitive analysis only got me so far on this issue, and while both solutions are familiar to users who typically engage with social media, breaking up the “social” posts and the “messaging” posts into two different functions in the app was a better solution, as it gives communities more options for how best to communicate with families through the portal.