Senior Living Providers Have the Opportunity to ‘Excite and Delight’ the Next Generation of Residents

Adding life to years:

One way the senior living industry is tackling the challenge of adding life to someone’s years, and not simply adding years to life, is through the active adult rental community product, speakers in another session explained. Such age-qualified, lifestyle-driven communities offer residents an opportunity to embrace wellness, health and longevity.

“This is vibrancy at its best,” Anne Martinez, True Connections Communities’ corporate director of life enrichment, said of active adult.

In the session following Kramer and Coughlin’s one, a panel of experts explored the growing demand for wellness-centered living and how active adult communities can take the lead in improving older adults’ quality of life.

Baby boomers and Gen Xers have seen their parents go through functional decline and move into needs-based senior living, panelists said. Now they are “looking for their own Blue Zone” — a place to have socialization, community, engagement, learning, healthy eating, exercise and wellness, said ATI Advisory founder and CEO Anne Tumlinson, who moderated the discussion.

Active adult, she said, is an “interesting operational model” that taps into residents’ desires to be engaged in a community and leaders in what programming looks like.

“When people move into active adult, they do so not for what the staff can do for them, but for what they can contribute to the community,” Tumlinson said.

Martinez said that the senior living mindset often is about giving up. Active adult, on the other hand, encourages residents to bring their life skills and knowledge and share them with others in the community.

Treplus Communities co-founder and CEO Jane Arthur Roslovic said that the typical active adult resident is still young and very much in control of their lives compared with other senior living residents. Resident volunteers tell communities what they want, and communities facilitate delivering it, whether it is community gardens or partnerships with local organizations to provide experiences.

“They still want to have purpose and don’t want to be invisible,” Roslovic said.

Compared with those in other senior housing options, active adult residents choose how to develop their communities, said Sevi Health co-founder and CEO Piyush Gupta, MD. He said he founded Sevi Health out of frustration in managing chronic diseases in senior living rather than preventing or reversing them.

The average lifespan of residents once they move into senior living, he said, is one to two years. Promoting health and wellness means starting earlier with individuals who are just entering the medical risk pool. The Sevi Health model uses care navigators — clinical concierges — to help residents manage prevention and wellness, infusing health into everyday life.

Viva Bene, the brainchild of real estate development firm Avenue, is bundling active-adult living with preventive health services, including primary care, in partnership with Sevi Health.

Avenue and Viva Bene co-founder and Principal Laurie Schultz said she learned the necessity of including a value-based care component that focused on social determinants of health into community living. Care navigators, she said, help take the burden off of staff and off of the adult children of residents.

Active adult, Gupta said, offers an alternative senior living option that is affordable, builds on the desire for community and embodies the dimensions of wellness older adults are seeking.

The conference concludes today.