What We Measure vs. What Matters

Written By Marko Savic

This blog post is part of a weekly newsletter written by Elizabeth, founder and CEO of Welbi. Subscribe to get this newsletter every week.

Last week I wrote about the move-in conversation.

The one where families share everything, and how most of it doesn't make it into the systems that support care day to day. The response surprised me. Not because people disagreed. Because so many said some version of the same thing: we know this is happening, and we don't know how to fix it.

That stayed with me. And it led me to a question I've been sitting with this week. Even when we do capture information about residents, are we measuring the right things?

The metrics we built

Senior living has gotten very good at measuring what's easy to count.

Occupancy. Attendance. Incident reports. Length of stay.

These numbers matter. But they were built to answer operational questions. And somewhere along the way, we started treating them as proxies for something much harder to quantify: whether residents are actually thriving.

Attendance at a program tells you someone showed up. It doesn't tell you whether it meant something to them. A stable length of stay tells you someone is still there. It doesn't tell you whether they are flourishing.

The gap between output and outcome

Outputs are what we deliver. Programs offered, meals served, assessments completed.

Outcomes are what actually happens to residents as a result. Whether their quality of life is improving. Whether they feel known. Whether the engagement they experience each day is genuinely connected to who they are as a person.

Outcomes are harder to measure. They require a deeper understanding of each resident than most systems are built to hold. So we default to outputs, not because they tell the full story, but because they are the story we know how to tell.

What this looks like in practice

I was speaking recently with a director of operations at a multi-site organization. Her communities had strong attendance numbers. Programming was full. On paper, everything looked healthy.

But when she visited and spent time with residents, something felt off. People were present but not particularly engaged. The calendar was full of things to do, but not necessarily things that meant something to the people doing them.

Her data didn't show her that. Her instincts did.

This is the gap I keep seeing. Leaders who know something is missing but don't have the tools to see it clearly or act on it consistently.

A different question to ask

If a family came to you six months after their loved one moved in and asked whether their parent was truly known and cared for as an individual, what would your data let you tell them?

Not whether they attended programs. Whether the people caring for their parent understood who that person was, what mattered to them, and whether their daily experience reflected that.

Most communities couldn't answer that question with data today. That is the gap worth closing. The metrics we have are not wrong. They are incomplete. And the communities that start measuring what actually matters will be the ones that can prove it.

If this is something your team is working through, I'll be hosting a session on April 21st with Ashley Vandoorn from Riverstone Senior Living on how communities are using conversational AI to capture richer resident insights and turn them into better day-to-day decisions. You can register here.

Thanks for reading,

Elizabeth Audette-Bourdeau
CEO, Welbi


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