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Today’s senior living operators are expected to deliver safer care, stronger outcomes, and better margins — all with fewer resources.
Recently, OneStep and Innova Health came together in a 2-part webinar series to showcase how clinician-first, data-driven tools are helping communities do just that.
The focus? Efficiency through automation. Better outcomes through objective insight. Financial value that’s measurable.
Missed the live webinars? Watch Part 1 and Part 2 now!
This blog includes a summary of the webinar series discussions, spotlighting one of the most pressing frustrations in senior care:
Why is documentation and capturing objective measures still such a burden?
Why It Matters for Senior Living Leaders
The challenges facing senior living communities are mounting — and they’re measurable.
- Falls remain the #1 cause of injury-related death in older adults. One in four adults over 65 will fall this year, with more than 3 million ending up in emergency departments as a result.1 Yet most communities still rely on inconsistent, subjective assessments that rarely capture risk before it becomes a crisis.
- Clinician burnout and turnover are at historic highs. A recent report found long term care managers had a 43% average staff turnover rate, and 48% cited burnout as their biggest challenge.2
- Documentation is still a barrier, not a benefit. Real physical therapists and APTA members say that the time and resources required for documentation and administrative work often delay medically necessary therapy — which negatively affect patient outcomes.3
- Quality metrics are often surface-level. Scoring a resident as "max assist" or "mod assist" might meet MDS requirements, but it rarely tells the full story of functional improvement or real-world mobility. As value-based care models expand, communities need data reflecting outcomes and nuance.
- Revenue pressure is rising. With thinner margins, increased regulatory oversight, and growing interest in hybrid models in appropriate settings incorporating Remote Therapeutic Monitoring (RTM), operators are looking for ways to generate new, defensible revenue — without adding complexity to care delivery.
One Problem, Two Complementary Solutions
In Part 1 of the series, our experts focused on the need to drive better clinician adoption and efficiency through workflow adjustments and smarter tech. Luis Montes, CEO of Innova Health, summed up the problem from the start:
“Traditional EHRs were built to satisfy billing — not support clinicians. That disconnect is driving inefficiency, burnout, and missed opportunities for better care.”
With tools that simplify Section GG tracking, reduce clicks, and make onboarding almost effortless, Innova’s EHR changes that perspective. Theirs is designed to streamline documentation without sacrificing compliance.
Luis also reminded us that the MDS quality metrics alone often don’t tell the full story. “We can say a resident walked 50 feet with max assist,” he noted, “but that doesn’t tell us anything about how they walked — their confidence, their control, their risk of falling tomorrow.”
That set the stage perfectly for the next question, posed by Tomer Shussman, CEO of OneStep:
What’s the one vital sign often overlooked and hard to document objectively?
His answer: gait.
Gait is one of the most powerful — and most overlooked — indicators in senior care. While changes in speed, stride, cadence, and symmetry can reveal rising fall risk or functional decline, it’s rarely measured in a meaningful way. Why? Because it’s been hard to capture objectively without access to complex analysis tools.
Instead, care teams have relied on describing gait in terms of assistance level and distance only – which checks a box but misses essential nuances.
And that means missed opportunities to catch declines early, prevent falls, treat with precision, and document clearly when care is justified.
From Insight to Action
In the second half of the series, we focused on the technology that supports better care. OneStep’s Clinical Director Stephanie Wakeman walked attendees through a case example, demonstrating the benefits to both senior living leaders and their patients:
A resident’s gait declined subtly. Shorter steps. Slower speed. Greater asymmetries. Small changes — but enough to trigger OneStep’s fall risk notification.
That objective data empowered the team to:
- Intervene proactively after quickly identifying a functional decline
- Justify a referral back to therapy
- Document objective measures to establish a baseline and monitor progress
OneStep’s auto-generated progress note captured all the key data, making it easy to share with interdisciplinary team members and copy directly into the EMR system of choice — saving clinicians valuable time that can be spent with residents.
In the same light, Innova’s team demonstrated how their EMR supports real-time care coordination, point of care documentation, and outcomes tracking — with dashboards, alerts, and built-in automation that simplify the day-to-day without compromising documentation quality.
The end result?
Better care management and assessment tools that not only help clinicians prepare their interventions, update care plans, and manage schedules, but also streamline documentation — addressing key components of burnout and real-world job struggles clinicians face daily.
Watch the series
In short, senior living communities don’t just need more technology — they need the right technology: tools that reduce burden, improve safety, support staff, and align with business goals.
The right digital tools don’t add work — they remove it, clarify it, and elevate it.
Operators need tools that are:
- Efficient enough to ease staff burden
- Insightful enough to drive better clinical decisions
- And robust enough to support both care quality and business sustainability (you can check out just how much your organization could be saving with the right technology using OneStep’s Fall Risk ROI Calculator)
That’s what this webinar series delivered — practical, actionable solutions designed for today’s pressures and tomorrow’s expectations.
Schedule a call.
