The National Investment Center for Seniors Housing & Care has acquired senior living industry market analytics platform VisionLTC, and together they have formed a new company called NIC MAP Vision that will include NIC’s NIC MAP Data Service, NIC announced this morning.
The new company will provide “significantly deeper and broader data for industry stakeholders,” NIC said.
NIC MAP Vision is based in Raleigh, NC, where VisionLTC has been based, and VisionLTC’s CEO, Arick R. Morton, is leading the new company. NIC continues to be based in Annapolis, MD, led by President and CEO Brian Jurutka. The two entities are affiliates.
Process began two years ago
Jurutka told McKnight’s Senior Living that NIC began discussions about creating a separate entity for NIC MAP in early to mid-2019, led by the Board of Directors and Data Analytics Committee.
“It was really this opportunity to take a step back and say, ‘NIC MAP has done a really good job providing transparency in the seniors housing space, of being able to connect capital seekers and capital providers,’” he said. “And the question was, how do we continue to ensure it is delivering on that mission in a world that is becoming increasingly more complex, and how do we find resources to do that?”
Out of the strategic process, he said, planners believed that creating a separate entity for NIC MAP would enable it to be “much more nimble and react to some of the demands of the market,” with access to healthcare outcomes data, “because the move from fee-for-service to value-based care is incredibly important, to understand the impact it has on senior living.”
The new company will help stakeholders understand, for example, the effect that living in a senior living or care community has on Medicare spending; health and healthcare outcomes; when a market becomes saturated; and ways to successfully increase access and choice for people in the underserved “middle-income market” for senior housing and care.
“Even more than most real estate property types, senior housing and skilled nursing care has relied on a wide range of both supply- and demand-side data providers to inform investors’ decisions and understand seniors’ housing and care needs,” Morton said in a statement.
Pandemic emphasizes importance of data
As 2020 began, NIC started looking for a CEO for NIC MAP, Jurutka said. The pandemic paused the process but also made evident the increasing importance of data.
“What you hear over and over again from investors is, ‘I need to know what is going on. What’s occupancy? What are the trends?’ ” he said. A search for a partner led to VisionLTC.
“We’ve always admired VisionLTC. They are nimble, they’re innovative, they’re exciting,” Jurutka said. “They have access to some of the healthcare outcomes data that was on our strategic plan. They have a complementary data set to ours.”
He described the affiliation as “a win-win for us, for Vision, for the industry.”
Existing NIC MAP and VisionLTC clients won’t see immediate changes, Jurutka said.
“They will continue to have access to all their services, but over time, as the platforms become integrated, there’s the opportunity to provide both data sets on one platform,” he said. “Particularly for those clients that have access to those data sets, to see it all in one place and to create additional tools and services based on those combined data sets, I think is really exciting. And NIC will continue to be involved from the standpoint of being able to analyze data and help NIC MAP Vision continue to get support for many of its data initiatives.”
NIC said it will continue to invest in events, networking opportunities, research and thought leadership consistent with its mission of promoting access and choice for older adults. NIC MAP Vision will provide NIC use of its data to continue and expand NIC’s analytics products and thought leadership.
36 employees based in North Carolina
NIC MAP and VisionLTC staff members are being invited to become NIC MAP Vision employees, NIC said.
Jurutka said that currently, the NIC MAP Data Service has approximately 22 employees, VisionLTC has 14 employees and the new entity will have 36 employees.
“NIC MAP staff will join the ranks of remote team members” based in Raleigh, NC, he said, noting that “much of VisionLTC’s staff was remote” and that NIC and NIC MAP staff members have been working remotely since March 16, 2020.
“Even before the pandemic, NIC staff had the option of working from home three days a week, so transitioning to 100% remote work was relatively seamless,” Jurutka said, “so NIC MAP staff joining NIC MAP Vision as remote team members is expected to be relatively seamless as well.”
