‘Substantial Value’: How Senior Living Operators Are Shifting Tech Budgets for 2025

Senior living operators are shifting their technology budgets going into the new year to keep up with the times.

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Among the top areas of investment for operators going into 2025 are AI, electronic health records (EHRs), and finding ways and programming to leverage data to further streamline operations.

Some senior living operators are going all in on AI initiatives. For example, Maplewood Senior Living Vice President of Enterprise Intelligence Brian Geyser said the operator is now an “AI emerging company.”

“As we move into 2025 and beyond, we’re investing in AI enablement across most of our departments, resident care, HR, accounting, operations, engagement, compliance, marketing, IT, culinary, home office … all of it,” Geyser told Senior Housing News. “That’s a big component of what we’re looking at.”

Budgets shifting to meet resident needs

Senior living operators are in some cases retooling the amount of money they spend, with a need to keep their priorities on emerging and useful technology and their eye on the resident experience.

Dallas, Texas-based Sonida Senior Living (NYSE: SNDA) is spending as much as 30% more in 2025 versus 2024 to stay current with the times, according to CEO Brandon Ribar The company is seeking to improve resident outcomes through new technology and automated processes

LCS  is also upping its tech budget in 2025, if only by a few percentage points, according to Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer Frank Vedder.

Already, LCS is a big proponent of using data to power better operational practices. And looking ahead to 2025, the Des Moines, Iowa-based company’s goal f is to “maintain last year’s large project spending levels,” while offsetting them through “operational cost savings.”

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Goodwin Living plans to increase its technology budget by 6% in 2025 versus this year. The Alexandria, Virginia-based organization will use those dollars in part to invest in a new enterprise resource planning system and electronic health record system, alongside cybersecurity upgrades to better protect the company’s data, according to Rob Liebreich, president and CEO.

Goodwin Living has increased its tech budget 25% in the past three years and a $5 million investment in information technology systems.

Additionally, Goodwin Living is investing in support systems based on resident feedback, the biggest of which is a technology concierge. Liebrich said the company is about to hire a second person for the role, who will help support residents as they come into a community and connect their devices to get them up and running as soon as possible.

Investing in tech with ‘substantial value’

Senior living operators are spending more money than perhaps ever before on AI in 2025, with goals to revamp resident experiences and better track and automate data.

According to Geyser, Maplewood is experimenting with how it can utilize AI for data cleanup and management to ensure it is ready for the systems to use it. Additional investments are going into “specific use cases” in order to find processes that can be streamlined and made more efficient. So far, he said, investing its use in accounts payable and accounts receivable can have large impacts on the company’s corporate operations.

In terms of budgeting purposes, Geyser said a goal is to find and eliminate redundancies in the company’s tech stack, which currently includes around 50 different products. The company is looking to cull products that do not have AI capabilities or connections in an effort to keep its budget as flat as possible.

“We’re willing to spend and invest where there’s going to be substantial value, but our goal would be to keep our tech budget flat if we can,” he said.

Additionally, Maplewood is seeking to invest in and partner with emerging “AI native” companies that can put out programming and products faster and cheaper than legacy companies trying to add AI software to their existing products.

“That’s an interesting thing that we’re running up against and trying to figure out,” Geyser said.

LCS is investing in AI with a focus on staffing. As Senior Housing News has previously reported, the company has a team of data scientists who are building out reporting tools to see a variety of metrics at a quick glance, and the company seeks to further bolster its stronger data analytics program in the coming year. Vedder said doing so will aid its cybersecurity efforts and business systems.

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“We anticipate significant business benefits from our AI initiatives in the coming year. For instance, we aim to enhance occupancy rates by using AI to efficiently identify prospective residents for our communities,” Vedder said. “Additionally, we are exploring AI-driven insights to better understand and address the factors contributing to employee turnover, which could help reduce attrition.”

Duarte, California-based HumanGood is also investing in AI and building out a “modern data infrastructure” to utilize information across all of its systems in one place, according to Chief Technology Officer Nick Lindberg, and while it has been a buzz word within the industry for a while now, it reflects a shift towards additional automation.

“It’s an elegant tool that can create elegant solutions, but only if you’re equipped to deliver the data it requires with agility. And for an organization that generates the data of a small hospital, a large restaurant operation and a hotel chain simultaneously, this becomes paramount if you want to be able to differentiate yourself,” Lindberg said.

Outside of AI investments, LCS is investing in platforms to help streamline workforce management, electronic health records and a new financial system.

Additionally, Vedder said other investments coming in 2025 will include pilot programs for fall prevention, upgrading nursing call systems to “better monitor unplanned care,” focusing on robotic process automation through the Microsoft Power Platform and replacing its existing IT service management platform to “ improve service delivery for stakeholders.”

“By having fewer disparate solutions, we gain economies of scale and agility in implementing changes,” Vedder told Senior Housing News. “We are also seeing nice cost savings, having moved our infrastructure to the cloud and paying for the compute and storage we use vs. significant capital costs of hardware and software.”

Sonida’s tech investments in 2025 are meant to help keep residents in communities longer while avoiding trips to the hospital, Ribar said. As such, the company will focus on investing in monitoring programs and software to allow staff to more quickly respond to resident needs.

Sonida has already implemented a monitoring AI program that has reduced its typical response time for a resident fall to around two minutes, which Ribar says is “far ahead of where the industry has been historically.”

Despite the company’s tech investment ramp-up, Ribar is wary of implementing too many new technology platforms and systems for staff to handle at one time.

“That’s not the direction we want. We want people to be able to really understand the things that are most important to them,” he said. “So our technology investments are going to be limited to things that truly have an operational impact, or that really help our residents.”