Leader Spotlight: Leveraging analytics to keep people at the center, with John A. Wilson

John A. Wilson is Director of Insights and Analytics at Brookdale Senior Living, where he leads data strategy across operations, finance, HR, and marketing. With nearly 15 years of experience in analytics and business strategy, he’s built and led data teams at Brookdale and IDEMIA, driving initiatives in people analytics, pricing, and workforce optimization. He holds an MBA from Vanderbilt University.

In our conversation, John talks about what it’s like to build technology for senior living, where every solution has to serve residents, their families, and staff. From dashboards and marketing tools to people analytics and AI, he walks through how Brookdale stays ahead while keeping resident, family, and staff experience at the center.

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Managing complex operations in senior living

To start, could you say a bit about Brookdale and share some challenges you face building technology in the senior housing space?

Sure. As the largest senior housing operator in the country, Brookdale Senior Living leads the sector in innovation and technology adoption. The company primarily focuses on assisted living and memory care, with a smaller presence in skilled nursing and independent living. Its strengths really lie in serving higher-acuity individuals. For example, an 85-year-old resident might need help with daily activities like medication management, dressing, or getting something down from a cupboard. At its core, Brookdale follows a residential business model, like a real estate operator, but with layers of care and hospitality. Many of our communities offer two or three meals a day, and that adds operational complexity. From a technology standpoint, we essentially run three different businesses in the same building: hospitality, real estate, and healthcare.

There are all kinds of challenges — from managing day-to-day operations, to enabling clinical leaders to deliver the best care, to supporting hospitality services like menu management and even white-glove service in some cases. Building systems that support all of this and ensure residents and their families have the best experience is a big part of my job.

It's exciting because every day is different. There's always a new challenge, a new system to integrate, a new combination of metrics to observe. Ultimately, we build tools that improve residents' lives and make it easier for our associates to focus on what really matters: providing exceptional care.

How do you approach compliance and operational consistency when working across so many different state and local regulations?

We operate in 41 states, which means we have 41 different sets of state laws to follow, sometimes more, depending on the metro area. This became especially daunting during COVID. We had to comply with strict local guidelines, sometimes city by city.

I partnered closely with the senior leaders in operations and our nursing leadership on the emergency response team to build reporting and tracking systems that ensured we remained compliant — and exceeded compliance when we could. Safety was everything during that time. And a fast response made a critical difference.

It was a tough but rewarding initiative to be a part of. COVID couldn’t have hit a more vulnerable population, but despite that, we earned recognition from regulators and industry groups for our response. I think that shows how seriously we approached it and how effective our systems were.

Did that moment of crisis push forward any new tools or systems that you still use today?

It elevated our sales and marketing to a much higher level. It’s extremely important that we provide residents and their families with the best experience and highest level of care that we can. But we also need to attract new residents, and help them understand why Brookdale is a better option than remaining alone at home.

We introduced different products during the pandemic, both video tours and engagement tools. There’s one called TSOLife that has a great reputation in the industry for helping residents build community and feel closer to one another by identifying similar interests through a kind of social network structure. Those kinds of programs drive value and help build brand affinity. The adult daughters of our residents, because it is usually a daughter who makes those senior housing decisions, need to understand why Brookdale offers a better experience.

Even before a prospective resident or family member signs up for a tour, they need to have a good impression of our communities from our website or from different marketing channels like A Place for Mom or Caring.com. These aggregators might identify the top five or ten communities in an area that suit a prospective resident’s needs. We partner with those organizations to track the leads they introduce to our sales leaders. That way, we can reward those partners, but also keep our finger on the pulse of which digital sources and marketing campaigns are strongest, what copy performs best, and how it integrates with the rest of our systems: our call center, promotional tools, and CRM. It all starts externally and flows through our CRM, pricing tools, and into the platforms the marketing team uses.

My team takes a holistic approach. When you’re a 40-year-old company like ours, you can’t just buy a shiny new tool and plug it in. We’ve built several new tools that need to be integrated into existing systems. That requires deep knowledge of all the downstream systems, where you might feed in third-party data or add enhancements across different products.

Building tools to support sales and care teams

Do you have an example of a tool you built that had measurable impact on the business or on resident experience?

There’s one dashboard in particular that I’ve owned and operated since joining Brookdale. It pulls third-party data, integrates it with pricing and CRM data, and serves it to our call center associates — the largest team at the company — so they can quote the correct rates to prospects. That’s important when we’re talking about a premium product that’s largely private pay. The cost of senior housing can be $5,000 or even $10,000 per month, depending on the level of care. We need a customized approach to ensure we’re providing correct information to the family members of prospective residents who are budgeting and financially planning for this major life event.

After a resident moves in, we use NPS to track satisfaction. We send surveys to a random sample of residents and families each month. My teammate Simon Lynn is a survey research wizard, and he built a statistically rigorous program for tracking that data. We utilize APIs and different processes in Tableau with dashboards and custom reports to pull NPS into everything we do. It’s one of the most important metrics we track to ensure we’re heading in the right direction.

One example is that we take a continuous NPS variable and make it categorical by putting it in different bands and then measuring our usual KPIs — occupancy, revenue per unit, and ROI — against those bands. We see, clear as day, that high-NPS communities perform better on all fronts. Having a visual like that, one that both the CEO and caregivers can understand, is key to emphasizing why the resident and family experience needs to be front and center.

Is there a digital project you helped launch that really moved the needle on an important KPI?

A few years ago, right before COVID, our VP of Financial Planning and Analysis was working closely with one of our senior HR leaders. We came together and organically developed the idea to establish a people analytics practice. I led the reporting, communication, and project management side, and they championed it as executive sponsors.

New projects often come about from merging two departments or ideas. In this case, it was a future-of-work meets future-of-technology conversation. In healthcare, it’s critical to have a pulse on your workforce — from nursing to maintenance, custodial, sales leaders, executive directors, and business office managers. By partnering with HR and leadership, we started to see more opportunities, from turnover in a market where a new competitor opened, to retention issues related to compensation or benefits. But until you develop a system to identify people's issues, you’re just reacting.

Establishing a people analytics practice helped us become more proactive. For example, we created a new job code in key markets — a regional recruiter — to bring more people into the pipeline and coordinate between communities, especially when we might be competing for talent. We know associates who stay past 90 days and again past one year provide better service. NPS goes up. Occupancy goes up. Initiatives like this help drive that longevity.

On future trends and scaling for demand

As you look toward the future, what’s the next frontier for improving the resident, family, or staff experience?

Anything that makes associates’ jobs easier, especially the care team, is key. Over the next 10–20 years, the number of seniors in our core age range will increase dramatically. There’s simply not enough labor in the country to meet that demand, not just for Brookdale, but industry-wide.

We've made it this far without talking about AI, but this is where that technology becomes relevant. Generative AI can help unlock productivity and free up time. Associates used to use one tool to enter data, another to follow up on sales, and another for clinical tasks, dining, or programs. Tools that have a simplified front end and are “smarter” enable associates to do things more quickly and easily.

If we don’t push innovation in that direction, the labor challenge won’t go away. Senior care hasn’t historically been the most forward-looking industry, but it has to be. Larger operators like Brookdale have to lead that change.

Compared to now, how much will demand increase when the peak number of Baby Boomers reaches the age where they may need assisted living or memory care services — 2x?

Probably 10x. It's a very serious issue. Just look at the age gap. Fewer people are having kids. Immigration, which plays a critical role in staffing, comes with its own set of challenges. And there’s no one silver bullet. It’s going to take a combination of solutions: people analytics, AI-led innovation, and simply making our communities more effective and attractive to developers and real estate investors so we can expand supply. That part’s important, too, because this is a business at the end of the day.

Even if you’re a nonprofit operator, you still have to invest in a nice kitchenette in every room. You still have to upgrade HVAC systems. You still need a fresh coat of paint in every building. Those small details matter. At the end of the day, all of it comes together to improve the lives of those who cared for us in the twilight of their own lives. That’s really what it comes down to.

Empathy in data storytelling and mission

With so much complexity and pressure around growth, how do you personally stay connected to the human side of the work, especially when it comes to decisions driven by data?

On a personal note, last year, we lost our toddler son, Asher. It was obviously incredibly traumatic, and we’ll carry that grief with us forever. But it gave me a new sense of empathy and a deeper appreciation for the work we do. Any kind of trauma or grief brings that. It’s so easy to get bogged down, “Oh, this is just a dashboard,” or “Just a number on a spreadsheet,” or “Another system to integrate.” But really, these are tools for people in very fragile situations. Maybe Mom just fell, maybe she really needs help right now.

I was talking about responding quickly to prospects earlier. In one way, yes, that leads to better sales, and that’s a business way to look at it. But these are people at the start of an extremely difficult grief journey, and I empathize with that deeply. They need our help.

So the moral of the story is that, at the end of the day, people are what matter. It’s not just numbers or systems. Sometimes, out of grief can come some of the most astounding art and creativity you’ll ever develop or witness. Channeling that creativity into an innovative mindset for solving business problems is more important than ever.

We need to be problem solvers who help people, not just mindlessly follow methodology or aim to hit metrics. They say there’s no mission without margin in our business, but really, there’s no margin without mission. That’s what you have to remind yourself of every day.

Keeping the mission — the real mission, not the financial one — top of mind is what matters. Because when you do, everything else follows.

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