Meet Dave Eskenazy

Senior Living Industry Expert

By Nik Edlinger on Oct 14, 2020 in People

Data analytics may not be easy, but they’re often necessary. You can’t just gather data. You’ve got to know what the numbers actually mean if you want to push your teams forward in senior living.

That’s just one piece of advice that Dave Eskenazy, an industry expert with over 25 years’ experience, recently shared with us. We sat down with Dave to hear how he’s used the Yardi Senior Living Suite to drive growth through technology. From the importance of integration to the value of easy-to-understand metrics, he had plenty of insight to offer.

Q: How do you track prospects in senior living?

What I love about RENTCafé Senior CRM is that from the very first moment an inquiry is made, the prospect’s name is entered into the system. And I begin to track that. At some point, that prospect moves in, but the ability to move that prospect in and change them from a prospect to a resident becomes so much easier and so much quicker.

Oftentimes, when somebody is looking for senior housing, they take a lot of time to really make a decision. But once that decision is made, it’s time to move. Having a lot of that information already in the system – and being able to simply pick up from before – is a key benefit of RENTCafé Senior CRM and the complete stack of Yardi products. One of the things I like most about Yardi is that there are a lot of modules that follow us all the way through the system. And it starts with RENTCafé Senior CRM.

Q: How does data sync improve billing?

One of the problems with billing is if you have separate systems for capturing your care than you do for billing your care, you have a big reconciliation that you have to do. I’ve been involved with companies where we assess residents, we create service plans and we manually calculate how much we are charging for that service. Then we have to figure out how to make sure that those amounts get into our system.

With Yardi EHR, there is a seamless integration between the service plan and how much is charged for that service. Those charges move into the accounting records. There’s no more reconciliation, and I can tell you from experience, the amount of revenue that’s simply been lost by not being able to have those two systems synchronized is real. That’s a true savings. That one feature alone is worth probably the entire cost of the EHR module.

Q: How do you evaluate business performance?

Having the Yardi Senior Living Suite enables me to house every piece of information I can possibly have, from financial statements to prospects and sales through EHR to acuity. Every key metric I need becomes captured inside one ecosystem.

From my standpoint, the more Yardi modules, the better, because I take that information and repeatedly mine it. I’ve used so many analytical tools, but it all starts with having the right data in a single place. So, by spending less time manipulating data and trying to find all the financial and non-financial information, I’m better able to quickly evaluate the business.

Q: How do you work together with Yardi?

I personally have been in three different companies that have implemented Yardi, so I knew a little bit about Yardi. One of the things about Yardi that I find remarkable is that Yardi is not a small organization. When organizations get large, they can become impersonal. Yardi’s never done that. We can work honestly together. I know there’s people I can talk to.

Q: How has technology changed the way you approach your job?

Technology has played a big role in being able to not only produce numbers but transform information to help managers understand the business a lot better. There was a time that has passed where a manager would look at white paper with black ink and columns and rows. We expected managers to understand everything and use that information to run their business the best way they can. I honestly don’t think that’s a great way to communicate trends or business performance.

Technology today, particularly with the analytical tools that Yardi and others are developing, enables us to change the language. You see a lot of “Oh, now I understand.” It’s really important that managers understand the why behind things. And I really believe that technology has led us down that road, particularly in the back office.

Craving more insights? Check out these other videos from Dave.