Peter Kress, senior vice president and chief information officer for Acts Retirement-Life Communities

Consumers are changing, focusing on lives of full experiences, meaning, well-being and whole health — and senior living and care organizations need to get on board to provide holistic healthcare and wellness models for broader segments of the older adult population.

That’s according to Peter Kress, senior vice president and chief information officer for Acts Retirement-Life Communities, who gave a keynote address Thursday about the role technology can play in integrating collaborative care during the LeadingAge Center for Aging Services Technologies 2021 Collaborative Care & Health IT Innovations Summit. 

Well-being is not just about clinical indicators, but also about lifestyle, social determinants and other factors that the industry is “under-emphasizing,” Kress said. If the challenge of living and aging is about well-being, he added, then the solution is not based on the care setting. Instead, the industry has to move to person-centered approaches.

The information technology space, Kress said, needs to see a significant shift away from the use of narrowly structured data and workflows to a system of applications providing a data feed, which includes machine learning and artificial intelligence.

“A system isn’t just taking in structured data and creating structured outputs, but is constantly sipping at the lake of data and learning and producing more complex feedback and distributing feeds to other systems,” he said. Telemedicine and telehealth, paired with remote monitoring software, wearables, sensors, Apple and the internet of things are generating data feeds, Kress pointed out. 

The process, he said, is driving a whole new way for enterprises to think about their relationships with their customers. 

A problem, Kress said, is that collaborative care is “undersensored” — only 5% of data come from sensors, with the remaining 95% being personal report data. Either there is no electronic data, or the data are in a silo and not being shared, he said.

“For any enterprise seeking to support a consumer’s desire for whole health, they are facing the same thing,” Kress said. “That enterprise is still collecting a dearth of data that allows them to deliver meaningful engagement.”

Organizations need to focus on crafting person-centered experiences that are designed and curated for the individual, he said, adding that moving to experiences means moving beyond services to engagement.

“The most powerful interface and engagement is about attention,” Kress said. “Your ability to create results for your consumer is to the extent that they are paying attention to you.”

Collaborative care organizations of the future, he said, will be thinking about how technology is about marketing — how to motivate change and create impact for people. The winners, Kress said, will deliver affordability at scale and learn how to support consumers with as holistic as possible the personal well-being concept.