Senior living providers are evolving wellness programs and services to focus on healthspan, a practice often referred to as “adding life to years, not years to lives.”
Operators including 2Life Communities, Garden Spot Communities, HumanGood, Mather, Lifespark and WesleyLife view healthspan as a way to connect otherwise disparate services with an emphasis on individual outcomes, longevity and quality of life.
They are creating new resident assessment protocols, more personalized lifestyle programming, coordinated healthcare services and other new efforts to connect older adults to one another and help them feel like they belong.
“We’re not just a place to come to live,” said HumanGood Senior Vice President of Healthspan and Innovation Andrew Smith. “We are communities people join to build more good years with.”
Operators believe this work on healthspan couldn’t come at a more critical time. Researchers from the Mayo Clinic, cited in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that the U.S. has the largest gap between healthspan and lifespan, at 12.4 years, according to the study that analyzed 183 World Health Organization member countries. The research indicates that while older adults are living longer, they are living longer with fewer good years, more chronic health conditions and a diminished quality of life.
The primary factors leading to this gap include years lived with disability due to mental health conditions, substance misuse disorders and musculoskeletal-related health conditions. Many senior living providers now view their communities as longevity hubs, with value-based care plans providing a funding source for the coordinated healthcare services that make an impact on a resident’s quality of life.
Improving quality of life and offering older adults improved healthspan require providers to make changes in staffing, technology, partnerships and funding. It also requires providers to distinguish between programming that is popular with residents and an experience that can actually improve the quality of a resident’s life.
From wellness to improving resident outcomes
In the past, senior living wellness programs have oriented programming around physical and emotional well-being. Those goals remain important today, and operators are now connecting their services to the impact engagement can have on residents.
Duarte, California-based HumanGood started using healthspan terminology roughly two years ago. The organization’s leaders started the practice after the company entered into the XPrize Healthspan Competition, a multi-year, $101 million global competition to develop therapeutics to improve muscle, cognitive and immune support for older adults ages 50 to 90.
HumanGood incorporated various elements of aging research into operations, including strength, balance, cognitive performance and social connection, using the “same measures researchers use,” Smith said. This has led the provider to establish baseline data for roughly half of all HumanGood residents.
“In practice, that’s the shift from describing what we offer to measuring what changes for the resident,” Smith said. “And for a resident, a longer healthspan simply means more years doing the things that matter to them: walking to dinner, traveling, keeping up with their grandkids.”
Evanston, Illinois-based Mather supports residents through a voluntary, non-medical “healthspan profile.” The assessment includes grip strength, gait speed, heart rate variability and body composition. The assessment also includes data on sleep, nutrition, loneliness and belonging. Mather’s “Healthspan Navigators” help residents understand the results, identify goals and create actionable plans to move forward, according to Mather CEO Mary Leary.
Mather also offers quarterly immersive wellness programs that emphasize eating, sleeping, moving, relaxing and connecting with other residents.
“Ultimately, healthspan moves the senior living industry from simply offering programs to helping people build or preserve capabilities and from counting attendees to understanding whether residents are making progress toward outcomes that matter to them,” Leary said.
Leaders with Johnston, Iowa-based WesleyLife are also reframing the organization’s approach to wellness and healthspan. The organization’s four-pronged platform focuses on physical health via natural body movement, eating wisely and finding social connections alongside mental health awareness. These efforts stemmed from WesleyLife’s “Vision 2030” framework, according to CEO Allison Pendroy. Now these changes must also include brain health, restorative sleep and personalized nutrition planning.
“Our well-being initiatives, practices and experiences are all designed to extend healthspan,” Pendroy said.
But moving methodically and strategically when addressing wellness and healthspan is critical, Leary said. This means remaining “ambitious about measurement but modest about attribution” in the quest to find ways to improve the quality of life for residents today.
“Wellness Living Communities may observe meaningful changes, but that does not mean a single program caused a complex outcome,” Leary added.
Building healthspan into daily operations
Operators are also taking steps to reorganize operations, staffing and the ways they connect residents with support that is geared more toward wellness and healthspan, not only healthcare.
Pennsylvania-based Garden Spot views healthspan as “the operating system” that ties together physical fitness, cognitive health, nutrition and opportunities for new residents to build social connections. Garden Spot is also working on a partnership with a local healthcare provider on a “longevity concierge model” to bring primary care offerings to Garden Spot communities. This could include priority or same-day primary care access, longer physician visits and improved coordination between medical providers and Garden Spot staff.
Adapting technology platforms to integrate data from multiple aspects of operations, such as lifestyle programming, healthcare and dining, is underway to create a foundation for predictive analytics that can inform operational strategy.
This pairs with Garden Spot’s cooperative living model, which leaders designed to offer affordable, supportive and community-based services to older adults in an environment that encourages social connection.
“My hope would be that that’s where we end up: that healthspan is just a vehicle to get us toward lives of purpose, meaning and impact as we age,” Garden Spot CEO Steve Lindsey said.
Extending and improving the healthspan of older adults must start with whether residents can afford the housing and support that allow them to feel connected, according to new 2Life Communities CEO Lizbeth Heyer. Operators must prioritize supporting independence, dignity and quality of life, she said.
The organization’s Opus concept is a middle-market community that offers affordable living options paired with healthcare through a home care provider and builds social connection through resident-led engagement. Residents are required to volunteer 10 hours monthly, improving programming and engagement through things like art classes, choir and book clubs.
“It’s not just about living longer. It’s about the quality of those years and how we focus on the things that help people to live well,” Heyer said.
But funding middle-market senior living remains a tough challenge, and the healthspan movement faces a broader challenge of the industry “paying for healthcare treatment rather than healthcare prevention,” Heyer added.
This year, leaders with St. Louis Park, Minnesota-based Lifespark unveiled plans for the company’s “Complete Senior Living” operational model that brings together key areas including property management, activities and wellness programming, alongside medical services and hospice. The goal is to reduce the noise residents may hear as they adjust to senior living, navigating both healthcare and aging.
Tying it all together, Lifespark is pulling data from primary care, pharmacy and community services into a unified data platform known as SparkIQ. This will allow the provider to be more agile and responsive to the lifestyle and healthcare needs of older adults, according to CEO Joel Theisen.
“Ultimately, it allows us to be predictive and prescriptive,” Theisen said, instead of being “reactive and lagging.”
Part of the effort to move wellness forward to a focus on healthspan and longevity means taking bold chances in engagement, Theisen said. Last summer, Lifespark took 58 assisted living and memory care residents to “Camp Joy,” an outdoor retreat for activities like archery, canoeing and zip-lining.
Operators are also adjusting leadership and staffing to support better coordination and facilitate this shift toward healthspan.
Smith’s role with HumanGood shifted from traditional operations to healthspan and innovation, with the organization’s community life division reporting to him. Mather has made distinctions related to healthspan and wellness through differentiated responsibilities among Healthspan Navigators, Healthspan Coordinators and Wellness Resource Nurses. Pendroy added that WesleyLife is improving coordination between engagement, nutrition, rehabilitation, housing and healthcare.
But these changes address a structural problem with senior living, Leary said, noting that residents should not be required to assemble a coordinated experience from disconnected specialists.
“Healthspan has reinforced that having excellent specialists is not enough if residents are still expected to connect all the pieces themselves,” Leary said.
