Is AI the Magic Bullet for Senior Living? | The AgeTech Podcast S5E01 With Senior Living Foresight’s Steve Moran
If you’ve been living on earth for the past 2 years, you’ve definately heard the buzz: AI is going to change everything. In senior living, it could mean fewer staff headaches, better care, smoother operations – sounds amazing, doesn’t it? But is it really the magic bullet everyone’s hoping for? I sat down with Steve Moran, founder of Senior Living Foresight and one of the industry’s most outspoken voices, to dig into what AI is actually doing in senior living today, what’s just hype, and where the biggest opportunities still lie.
Catch the full conversation on Youtube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or scroll down for the transcript (auto-generated, so pardon any oddities – the bots are still learning!)
Keren Etkin: Steve, welcome to the show.
Steve Moran: Thank you. I’m delighted to be here.
Keren Etkin: Thank you so much for joining me. You know, I’ve, because I’ve told you this, senior Living Foresight is one of my favorite resources for thought leadership in the senior living industry. I. I wonder, what is the origin story that motivated you to start this? Because that, that website is sort of your, your life’s project, is it not?
Steve Moran: It is. So I’ve gotta go way back to college. When I was in co, when I was in high school and college, one of the things I knew about myself was that I couldn’t write. I almost didn’t graduate from college because I had to take a freshman English class. And we had to write a huge term paper. Huge term paper. Probably meant six or five or six pages, which of course seems trivial today as an adult. But in college it seemed massive and I sat down and I tried to organize it and write it, and I just could not write it. And so I expected to fail the class. It turned out that the teacher was much more gracious, and she gave me an incomplete. And, but it wasn’t very helpful because I still needed to complete this course. I changed colleges midway through. the rest of my coursework still couldn’t write. And came time to graduate. And this was of course before computers. Everything was, all the grad checks were done with a big file folder full of papers that showed the classes you’d completed.
And I went in and I knew that when I go, went in the, the, the counselor was gonna say, well, it looks like you’ve got exactly enough credits to graduate, but you’ve got this English class that’s an incomplete. And I was just terrified that I was gonna go, have to go back and take. Another English class, and I still couldn’t write even though I’d managed to get all the way through four years of college.
I don’t know what that says about the college system. But anyway I sat down and she went through all the stuff and she said, no, you’re clear. Everything’s done. You’re cleared to graduate. I was curious and I said, can I see? I reached over, I looked over and magically this incomplete had turned from a incomplete to a C grade. And so I was, I, I was sort of confused. I didn’t say anything ’cause I didn’t wanna spoil it. I wanted to graduate, but I, later I went back and I did some checking and it turned out the woman who taught my English class was an old, old woman. And sometime between the time I took it and the time it was my graduation, she had the good graces to die. And so that meant that she could not like do the complete, the incomplete, and so they had to convert it to a passing grade. So who knows, I might not ever have a college degree if she hadn’t passed away sometime in that period of time. But along the way, I learned I could write. And so was working in Silicon Valley selling software tools to be designed to be used into the design of computer chips. I wasn’t very good at it. I hated it. And I started thinking about my earlier life when I’d owned and operated some senior living communities and I learned that I could write and I came across a guy who had a, in the technology space who had a similar business model a blog site. And I thought I could go do that. So I went to work for a emergency call system company. And the same work week I went to work for them. I started writing. it was a free WordPress template and a, I don’t know, $2 a month, a $3 a month hosting plan.
And I was writing once a week and I wrote, and nobody read, and I wrote and nobody read, and I wrote and nobody read. And then I wrote, and a few people read and a few people read. And I remember one time I’d never even cracked a hundred. And I did an article that was titled Eat the Frog First Thing in the Morning.
It’s a common thing you see fairly frequently and it had like 300 and I was on top of the world. I was down in Los Angeles doing some sales calls. Every five minutes I was updating the numbers and it was just going up and up and up. And so anyway, after about 18 months of doing this, I decided to go out and, and look for some sponsors.
I went to a conference. At the end of the conference when the vendors were, I, I was still working for a vendor company and the vendors were just selling to vendors. I went around and I talked to four companies about what I was doing, and they all four became sponsors. Wasn’t enough to live on, but it was a good start.
About eight months later, I had another eight or 10 companies come to me, want to be sponsors with what we’re doing. Pretty soon I was working two full-time jobs. quit my day job and have been doing this ever since. I started, I really saw what we were doing as being sort of a news outlet. Turned out that there are really some organizations that do a nice job, McKnight, senior Housing news. do a nice job on news, but really where my passion was. to write about workplace culture in particular, how do you improve the lives of people who live and work in senior living? And of course today we write about a lot of other things besides workplace culture.
And in fact, it’s actually something I’m moving back to doing, spending more time on, because I think it’s the greatest need. The, the one place where we can really make a difference in people’s lives is if we can create workplaces where people love coming to work every day. So that’s a long story, but that’s sort of how it came about.
Keren Etkin: That is. Fascinating. First of all, I did not know that she could get a c on a, a college course just because the person who taught it passed away. That is news to me and fascinating story, and I, it never occurred to me that this was how everything happened. So what is sort of your, we’re filming in end of May, 2025.
Where do you see the space for tech in the senior living industry in this day and age?
Steve Moran: So if you go to a senior living conference today, a a e and walk, the Trade Show, I would say 70, 80% of the companies selling products and services are in some way using technology. The, so there is technology that will touch just about every single part of senior living, you know, from tools to keep track of, to record and keep track of data to life enrichment, to transportation, to staffing, the scheduling, to fall detection.
It just goes on and on. It’s, it’s a bit confusing. It’s a bit expensive. Trying to figure out the best thing. It’s probably the hardest part. and today one of the things, everybody’s talking about is ai, and I used to think that robots were going to be the piece of technology that really transform senior living, and they’ve been kind of a disappointment. They’re being used in a few dining rooms. They started out as kind of a novelty. They’re being used talking to some people this last week where they are making a difference in staffing levels. A lot of opportunity I think for things like cleaning floors. People really nervous about that because of the, the liability of one running into a, a, an older resident. But I think those are the kinds of things ai is being clearly used since a lot of the sort of creative newsletters marketing campaigns, beginning to see AI used with data. And I think that AI is just at the forefront. I think there’s hardly anything that can’t be that senior living does that AI can’t make better. I think we are just scratching the surface. It’s been said by a lot of people, but the a, the, the AI that we’re using today, of course, is the worst AI we will ever use. It’s getting better and better every week and I use it virtually every day in the work I do for all kinds of things.
Keren Etkin: Yeah, absolutely. So I wonder from your conversations that you have with executives in the industry, is the perception of AI similar to what was the perception for technology a few decades ago? Like, we’re gonna wait and see. What everyone else does and then maybe will adopt it, or are people looking to be at the forefront of this?
Steve Moran: So I think that people are more willing to adopt AI than in the past. But there’s still lots of skeptics and, and there, there are some reasons people are, are afraid that privacy concerns, which are real. They’re afraid of getting wrong answers with things that could impact people’s lives, which is a, which is a real concern there.
It’s, it’s really confusing. I think that as I talk to people, and this is where I think the AI and other things get a bit jumbled up, is that, people seem more interested in creating big data lakes and then being able to have dashboards to look at the data, and there may be some AI in that, maybe not some ai.
I think most of what people are doing right now is sort of minimal ai. And it’s mostly just reporting on this massive amount of data, but really the, the data opportunity can only be tapped into with ai. I talked to, I, I talked to an operator yesterday on my livestream tech Tuesday. They have I think, six or seven.
Um. And I think they told me they expect between their seven communities when they have all, everything connected and everything flow into, their, their data lake, that they’re gonna collect a million lines of data a month across all their buildings and all their residents, and there’s no way you can, you know, even with a dashboard that will summarize and rank and those kinds of things, you don’t really get magic out of it until you can use AI to be able to go in and really explore what that stuff means. So I think it’s gonna come on the industry much, much faster. When I started writing 10 years ago, 14 years ago, when I started writing 14 years ago I would say less than 50% of the communities had pervasive wifi in them. Now, pretty much everybody has wifi now. Pretty much everybody is using a an EHR eMAR system. Most are, almost everybody’s using some sort of an electronic CRM, so it’s taken a long time to get there.
I think the adoption for AI will be much, much faster, and I think it’s a real game changer. I think it will save staffing costs and take away the drudgery, make the jobs more fun.
Keren Etkin: Was there any piece of technology that you saw in the past decade that you thought was truly revolutionary for the industry and you wish more communities would adopt it.
Steve Moran: I think that there is a lot more opportunity with two things. I think there’s a lot more opportunity with sensor technology. There are a few companies who are using it, who are playing with it, who I think are giving some valuable data. I think the area that is not really being tapped into, but has tremendous opportunity is voice, capacity. I think that an Alexa type device could easily replace a, a traditional emergency call system. You know, the argument is, well, what happens if people can’t talk? Fair argument, but what happens if somebody can’t reach the pull button or put reach and push the cord because they’ve fallen?
They’re always their risks that go with that. I, I, I have this dream on voice and AI is that you’ve got this great system and that every caregiver, perhaps every everybody who’s working in the community. Has two-way communication. So they’re wearing an earpiece and a, a microphone and a camera, much like a, a police officer might wear a body camera and that as a caregiver goes up to a residence room.
They hear this little voice talking in the ear that says, oh, this is Mrs. Smith. These are the things that you need to do for her. This is a, a brief paragraph of what’s happened in her life the last two weeks based on the medical records. And here’s what she’s interested in. So you can have a good conversation with her Resident then goes in does the things they need to do, has this great interaction. The AI is listening to that, translating that into notes and into data that they can read signals from. It creates a medical record. That gets updated continuously and that all of this goes into a big data lake and there is a care director who then every morning wakes up to a report that says, here are some here.
We’ve gone through and we’ve looked at all the data from yesterday, and we’ve compared it to the rest of the data for our residents. We see these weak signals that suggest that you’ve got a fall risk that’s coming, or you’re likely to have a health decline, or maybe we saw this big improvement. So you ought to go look at what’s going on to that big improvement, make sure that it’s real, or figure out what you’re doing right that you can use with other residents.
And it makes life easier for everybody. And then of course, the families would be able to tap into all this information to know what’s going on.
Keren Etkin: That is a really, really revolutionary idea. And I assume it will happen at some point maybe with smart glasses. Or any or something like that. And I wonder, ’cause in some of my conversations with owners and operators, one of the things that came up more than once was if we have all this data, then we’re expected to act on it.
And we’re not sure that our staffing, that our existing staff has the capacity to do it. And then if we get this data and you get these insights and we don’t have the capacity to act on them, then that creates a liability. And what would you say, what would you say to those people?
Steve Moran: So I, I guess on one hand it’s, it’s a, it’s a legitimate question, but what they’re really saying, I’m gonna get myself in trouble here, but what they’re sort of saying is, we’re gonna provide crummy care because if we provide crummy enough care and we don’t document it, that nobody will know. And so that’s better than providing. Putting a, putting a higher standard on the kinds of care we’re gonna have and fulfilling it. I think that you look at it and you say. you know, we gotta figure out how to be better. I mean, imagine airlines saying, you know, we know that the, you know, once a year we’re gonna lose an airplane full of people.
It’s, and that’s just the way it is. And so we don’t, but we don’t really wanna try to fix it because if we try to fix it and then we lose an airplane, we could really be sued. And so we’re just gonna accept this lower level of care. Airlines don’t do that. The governments don’t do that. They look at it and they say. Zero crashes is the only thing acceptable. Even though we know that things bad happen, if something bad happens and we go figure out how to make sure it doesn’t happen again. So I think it’s, I think it’s a terrible argument.
Keren Etkin: Fair enough. So I wonder, well you, you probably meet with tech entrepreneurs all the time in all of these trade shows, and do you ever get people coming up to you saying, Hey. I wanna build something. What should I build? Do you see any existing gaps in the market that you recommend to these entrepreneurs to go after?
Steve Moran: I think fall detection, and again, I saw her come back to this idea of being able to really understand resident behaviors to predict changes in healthcare. Conditions is a huge opportunity. The vo, the voice connection system is something that nobody’s built and I think is a, that I just described is a huge opportunity. I think that figuring out how to create an integrated system right now, operators who are using AI and tying this together, they’re having to take 10, 15, 20 systems, pay for all of those systems, extract data from all those systems, put ’em into a data lake. And then have data scientists who can help you get out that information out of it.
And that’s really complex and it’s expensive. And so a big part of this has gotta be how do we figure out how to be able to do this at a, at a reasonable cost. Now I think some of this will naturally evolve. When I first started selling software that was used in the design of, of computer chips 30 or 40 years ago, there were a couple of big players that would do sort of the biggest, hardest.
Problems and, but you couldn’t design it without having another dozen or two dozen or three dozen other tools that were tied into this that would use the point tools that would take care of all this. Today, that’s a lot more sophisticated. There are. Two or three big companies that that do do pretty much everything.
There might be still some point come tools that come in and add to it to do specialty kinds of things. And so I think that consolidation will come, but we’re still probably five or 10 years away from that happening. And of course, the big unknown is. How AI plays into all of this because it, it will be in it.
It’s already in so many things. Even when people are saying, oh yeah, I’m not really doing AI or using it, they probably are in some of the tools they’re already using, and it’s just becoming big, bigger, and bigger.
Keren Etkin: Absolutely. I don’t believe we have any software product that doesn’t use AI in the backend
Steve Moran: That’s right.
Keren Etkin: and
Steve Moran: Yeah.
Keren Etkin: End users might not be aware of it, but it’s is is there for sure. To your point about fall detection not being solved that is one of those categories in the market that. You know, if we were to have this conversation, if we had this conversation five years ago, I would’ve expected that by 2025 this would’ve been solved because there are so many solutions, right?
We’ve got walls, mounted sensors, ceiling mounted sensors. We’ve got a bunch of companies doing wearables, but still in many communities. The besty thing you can see is pull cords. So do you have any insight on that?
Steve Moran: Sure. Well, I think the biggest problem, I think there’s several things. Fall detection is always going to be imperfect It’s expensive. Systems I think typically are, you know, in the ballpark of some upfront p plus a hundred dollars a month in terms of, of system costs. And so operators are reluctant to.
Do that again. You’ve got these liability questions. So I put a fall detection device in and I don’t go respond fast enough. What are, what’s my liability? A horrible, horrible story. In just in the last couple weeks, there’ve been a couple of news stories about people who’ve fallen and, and stayed on the ground for significant
Periods of time before they’ve been discovered. Talked to a friend of mine who’s in the industry yesterday, whose father was in a, a senior living community for a few months, and same kind of thing. He, he was experiencing this. And so it’s a very, very difficult problem. And and really the, the, the holy grail and fall detection should not be fall detection. It should be fall prevention. That being said, falls our reality for older people. I’ve got a 92-year-old stepfather who lives with me right now. He shuffles. His balance isn’t very good. I can’t get him to use either a walker or a cane. He’s got cognitive decline, which is part of it. But even if he didn’t have cognitive decline on, on.
Don’t think he would use the devices. I fully expect that at one one morning I’m gonna wake up and find him on the floor, probably with a broken hip. And that will probably be the thing that, that, that ultimately brings about the end of his life. We have, and we have to make this balance right.
We, we can, we can prevent a hundred percent of the fall falls if we take people and we tie them into their chairs in the wheelchairs and never let them get up. But then we destroy their quality of life and it’s a risk we take and we take it all through our lives. You know, we have. People who drive, we drive cars and we go for walks and we climb mountains and we go snow skiing and snowboarding and we jump, bungee jump and we jump off cliffs and all kinds of things.
And we take these risks because of the quality of life. And so there’s that human element, which it makes it very, very complicated.
Keren Etkin: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. And hopefully next time we have this podcast, we’ll have we, we’ll see some more affordable solutions that the end users are happy to use, not just, you know, willing to use or consent to use, but happy to use. Because it just makes the quality of life
Steve Moran: Yeah,
Keren Etkin: all that better.
Steve Moran: yeah
Keren Etkin: So the one thing that I, as we go down this technology road, the one thing that I worry a lot about is that we’ll use technology. As a way to decrease the amount of human interaction technology can never give hugs. It can never have, it can have fake empathy, but it can’t have real empathy. So as a, for instance, I create this system that makes documentation so much easier for caregivers. They don’t have to sit and write things down, and all of a sudden I say, that’s great. Now I can assign nine residents a day instead of eight residents a day, and what I’ve really done is increase the work burden.
Steve Moran: And I haven’t really improved the quality of life. Maybe I’ve, maybe I have it so that senior living will be a little bit less expensive or more likely what I’ve done is made it so it’ll be a little more profitable for the investors. And so I think that right now we are really, really struggling with. Do. I think we do a really, really good job for people who are fairly capable in living in senior living. So people who need intermittent and help with ADLs, a little bit of bathing, dressing who can get out and socialize. I think that’s a, it’s a great option. I’m really concerned that we. And technology is helping us do this.
We take people with more complex medical conditions and we don’t staff that adequately. We use technology to try to help us, but we’re still not doing the human part very well. And so I think making sure that technology doesn’t actually hurt the human experience is super, super important.
Keren Etkin: That is a, a really great point. How do you envision that happening? Because right now all of the tech solutions that I see that are supposed to help the staff are sort of, like you said, help them with the busy work. And in theory, they’re supposed to help them be less burnt out and less stressed out and just give them that breathing room to be.
Like to build those human to human connections with residents. And so it, it, it, like from what you’re saying, understand that we can’t guarantee that. So how do we.
Steve Moran: yeah, and I, and I think it’s so, I think it’s something that people ought to act. We ought to actually be studying, right? Somebody needs to do some research and say, okay, let’s actually take a look at these technologies. Has it improved the number of minutes that the caregivers get to interact with or has it decreased it? And other big part of this is that every time I ask a caregiver to use a new technology, no matter how great it is, there’s training that’s involved, there’s time to use it, that’s involved. There’s expertise that you have to have and it takes, if not. Physical time, it takes mental energy that I then have to pour into that. That means I maybe not, can, cannot pour that into human beings. And so we need to, well I think it’s an area that nobody is really looking at is the human impact on that to make sure that it actually is improving people’s lives.
Keren Etkin: That is a, a great, great, great point. So what would you say is like your number one advice for tech founders building in this ecosystem currently? I.
Steve Moran: I think the biggest thing is, is you’ve gotta start someplace. So ask yourself what your biggest challenges are. So, for, so for what are the what? So from a, from a technol, from a technologist standpoint or from an operator standpoint.
Keren Etkin: You know, let’s do both.
Steve Moran: Okay, let’s do both. Let’s start with an operator standpoint. ’cause that’s the direction I was going. From an operator standpoint. There’s so much technology out there, you can’t do everything. I’ve talked to lots and lots of operators who are doing some really, really interesting things. With ai And with data, nobody’s doing everything because the, the, there’s just too much that can be done.
So you look at your own operation and you say. What are the thing, what are the biggest problems that we’re trying to solve? You know, is it occupancy? What are the, what are the ways I can use technology to help occupancy Is the quality of care? What are the things I can do to improve quality of care? Is it my workplace culture?
How can I use technology to improve the quality of the, the, the, the working experience for people who are in the community? And for, for technologists, I think that the first thing is, is you actually gotta get out and talk to senior living operators. Seeing a need that your grandmother had or your grandfather had is not a good enough reason to try to build a whole company because it might be just your grandfather, your grandmother, yeah, you need to make sure. And the other thing, the other part of, of, of that is you gotta make sure that you’re actually solving enough, a big enough problem for people who want to spend money on it. There are lots of problems out there that can be solved with technology, but. They’re So what problems?
There are problems that are not big enough that people are gonna pay substantial amounts of money, put time and energy and effort into it, and, and then you’ve gotta think about how you tell that story because you could have a great product, you could solve a big problem, but if your story, if you can’t tell the story in a way that operators are gonna see the value, you’re gonna be dead in the water. I can remember going to some very early. Pitchfests at talk technology conferences and being so excited about how I was gonna see really this neat, new, cool stuff. And frankly, most of ’em have been to disappointment. The, the people who’ve come up with these ideas have not thought them through, they haven’t done enough research. You know, they did it because their grandma wanted it. Their, they perceive their grandmother needed it, their grandfather needed it, and that’s not good enough. I will say that’s getting better. I think people are spending more time thinking about it. I think the incubators at the universities are helping students to better think about that. But it’s really hard. I talked to, a couple of young graduates yesterday who have some new technology and I, I think it’s pretty interesting the things they’re doing. They’re having, and they’re in a couple of senior living communities that are piling, but they’re having a very, very difficult time finding leaders that will even talk to them to allow them to, to advance it.
And I get it from the leader standpoint, they’re just being bombarded by. who want to sell them stuff, who people want to experiment. And so they have to guard their time very carefully. And so be thoughtful about how you tell the story. Build relationships. If you’re gonna build a company, you’ve gotta build relationships with people who are potential buyers and talk to them and listen to them.
Pay attention to them. And if it, if it, if it solves a problem, you’ll make money. You’ll make the world a better place, and that’s really wonderful.
Keren Etkin: That is golden advice, Steve. Really? I can’t, I can’t stress it enough. So that was actually my last question. Is there anything that we didn’t talk about that you’d like to add? Any call to action to people in the audience?
Steve Moran: Yeah, I think that the, the biggest call
to action
I have is that for anything you do, whether you’re an operator, whether you’re a technologist, whether you’re just interested, everything has to be centered around. The experience for the user, whether it’s team members, whether it’s residents, whether it’s families. I think there is a huge opportunity out there to better serve families of residents. I was a senior living consumer for about 60 days. It was not a good experience. One of the biggest lessons I learned out of it that I. not really aware of, and I wish I had been as I’ve been writing about the industry, is how little attention is paid to the families. The families are actually the consumers. It’s not the residents. They’re the ones who make that typically make the decision as to what community gets selected, what levels of care. They’re typically the ones who control the checkbook, who write the checks. Who decide to leave somebody in a community or to move them out. And I moved my stepfather out of this community because they took, they, they didn’t take a very good care of him and they took zero care of me as the family caregiver. And so now he’s back at home. I would never go back to that community because it was a terrible experience. It didn’t serve me well, didn’t serve my stepfather well, and and it was a complete failure. So crew, think about the experiences for your users.
Keren Etkin: Absolutely, and that’s, I think. One thing that technology could really excel at helping you customize your basically your user journeys, both for the resident and for the family members.
Steve Moran: Yep.
Keren Etkin: Steve, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. It was an absolute pleasure and super insightful to chat with you as always.
Steve Moran: Thank you very much for joining me. It was great great conversation. I hope you have a great rest of your day.