Your Data Is More Valuable Than You Think

And that's worth understanding.

Senior living is maturing as a technology market. Operators are more sophisticated buyers than they were a decade ago, vendor options are expanding rapidly, and AI is changing what technology can actually do for communities. With that maturity comes a conversation the industry is ready to have — one about data, who owns it, and what it's worth.

Senior living operators generate an extraordinary amount of data. Every care interaction, every medication administration, every incident report, every staffing decision — it accumulates over years into a remarkably detailed picture of how communities operate and how residents age.

For most operators, that data lives inside their technology platforms and doesn't get thought about much beyond compliance and reporting. That may be worth revisiting.

The emergence of AI has changed what operational data is worth — significantly. Vendors who have been collecting data across hundreds or thousands of communities now have the raw material to train models, surface population-level insights, and build intelligent features that simply weren't possible five years ago. That's genuinely exciting. AI-powered early warning systems for health deterioration, smarter staffing tools, predictive maintenance — these are real possibilities and the industry should want them.

It also raises some questions that operators haven't had much reason to ask before, but probably should.

When a vendor uses aggregated operational data to build new AI-powered features, what's the relationship between the operators who generated that data and the product that results? Is it included in existing contracts? Offered as a new paid tier? These aren't accusations — they're just reasonable things to understand as AI becomes a more significant part of what technology vendors are selling.

Similarly, data portability is becoming a more important consideration. If you've been on a platform for ten years and decide to move, what does your data look like on the way out? Is it complete, usable, and timely? The practical answer to that question matters more now than it did when data was just records storage.

None of this is cause for alarm. Most technology vendors in this space are genuinely trying to build things that help operators and residents. But the conversation between operators and vendors about data — what's collected, how it's used, what operators receive in return — is one worth having explicitly rather than leaving to the fine print.

A few questions worth adding to your next vendor conversation:

How is our operational data used beyond our own reporting and analytics? Do you use aggregated client data to train AI models, and if so, what functionality results from that work? How is that functionality made available to existing clients? And if we decided to move platforms, what would our data migration look like in practical terms?

Good vendors will welcome these questions. The answers will tell you a lot.

At AgeTech Labs, we think sophisticated technology buying is one of the most important capabilities a senior living operator can develop right now. It's one of the reasons we build the tools and resources we do — to help operators ask better questions and make better decisions. If this piece sparked a useful conversation with your vendors, we'd love to hear about it.