Product Management at ALIS
By 2030, all baby boomers (U.S. citizens born between 1946 - 1960) will be over the age of 65, over 20% of the total population. As our boomer parents age, the need for better care management across a range of needs and experiences will continue to grow. Assisted living facilities (which can house independent living, assisted living, memory care, and rehab individuals) must cater to many different levels of cognition, physical aptitude and health of their residents.
I worked at ALIS from 2022-2025, and as a product manager, was in charge of a team working to provide solutions for billing, sales, and family engagement staff in assisted living communities using ALIS to manage their populations.
The Business of Assisted Living
Assisted living communities are many businesses wrapped into one: hospitality managers, healthcare providers, accountants, business office managers, sales representatives, and family engagement coordinators.
Sales teams must be competitive, working to maintain occupational numbers in the buildings and ensuring the future of the company. As our national population ages, communities are now newly competitive - offering benefits and amenities at different price points for different types of customers and financial situations. Gone are the days of dreading the thought of putting mom and dad “in a home” - now, communities offer spas, swimming pools, 24/7 concierge services, and dedicated teams devoted to enriching the lives of their residents.
Billing teams generate invoices and take payments, and are responsible for generating reporting for corporate teams, confirming occupancy and A/R data. They also manage accounts of residents who receive some level of state-pay insurance (whether that shows up as VA benefits, Medicaid, or Medicare).
Family Engagement teams must ensure that family members are not left in the dark on their resident’s welfare. Engagement team members must track the needs of the resident and report any concerning changes back to the family if action must be taken, or even just to suggest changes to the resident’s daily schedule that could improve quality of life.
Product Opportunity:
ALIS’s sales team was attempting to close on a huge company (80+ individual assisted living communities and growing) and was having issues jumping over their billing workflow hurdles.
The prospective client was already using a full suite of revenue operations software that gave them the flexibility for each community to pull funds on their own, while funneling all their deposits straight to the company’s headquarters.
Biggest workflow hurdle for the team was check scanning - each community scans their own checks, cleans them up and processes them, and each community uses a different localized bank location to send these checks to.
Product Gap:
At the time, ALIS had no way of intaking check data without a user sitting at their computer and hand-typing in each check’s data individually, an impossibility for the client’s needs.
Case Study: Check Scanning
Several ALIS clients were already utilizing some level of check scanning, but functionality varied wildly.
Client 1: Using outside software (like our prospective client) that effectively scans checks directly from a check scan machine, usually bought directly from their local bank.
Client 2: Using personal banking technology on their personal phone, rather than a corporate computer, to take images of the checks and deposit them directly.
Client 3: Taking checks physically up to their local bank and manually depositing them with a teller.
Biggest Competition in this space was indeed BIG - we were up against either bank apps or heavy-hitting corporate financial software:
Personal Bank Apps
Pros: Convenient, Easy to Use, High Level of Scan Accuracy, No Middleman Software
Cons: Possible Security Breach (on client’s personal phone), Have to take two pics of each check individually (front and back!)
Corporate Financial Software
Pros: Trusted Financial App, Can scan multiple checks in one batch and parse
Cons: Antiquated and Confusing UX/UI (lots of clicking), Clients need to pay for and manage two apps just to do their financials between ALIS and the other program.
What did ALIS have that these other guys didn’t?
All-Inclusiveness. As a leading eHR in the Assisted Living sector, ALIS already had a powerful reputation in the industry, but our missing check scanning functionality highlighted that while ALIS has always excelled at resident care and health, we had gaps to fill in the billing and revenue space.
And we needed to fill those holes fast, or we risked losing our large prospective client to someone who could promise them that same functionality, even if that meant they were juggling two pieces of software for their teams.
Current Workflows + Competition
Timeline:
From first sketches and requirements gathering to release day, the team had eight weeks total to ensure we had the functionality built for the prospective client’s signing day with ALIS.
Acceptance Criteria:
Clients needed functionality that could scan multiple checks quickly and easily (front and back) without having to leave ALIS, that would be easy to review and send to the bank for deposit directly.
Single workflow to scan and review check images, and clean up any incorrect data.
Smart technology - tell clients if they accidentally scanned the same check within the same batch or if the system detected a duplicate from a previous batch.
A solution with many technologies baked-in → invisible to the user, but integral to maintain the functionality they were asking for, from trusted partners of ALIS.
Integrated Solution:
Because of the quick timeline and the need to build a lot of new stuff fast, I helped the team leverage technology gaps with some new (to ALIS) partners -
iStream, a provider of bank-connected technology that ALIS didn’t have the certification for.
ALIS partnered with iStream to split the fees associated with every check processed in our system - a win-win for both companies.
Azure, AI reader with the security backing of Microsoft to parse through check data without long-term storage.
DigitalCheck, a company that makes check scanners and typically sells them directly to banks to re-sell to communities for this purpose.
ALIS partnered with DigitalCheck to buy scanners in bulk, formatting them in-house for our clients and ensuring each one would work flawlessly with ALIS the moment they were plugged in for the first time.
Solution Design + Development
Sorry, no pics of the workflow - you’ll need a demo from one of our friendly ALIS sales staff for that!
Not only was the project completed on schedule, but the integrated solution and clean UX design work was so good, not only the prospective client but several of our other clients immediately jumped onto a waiting list to get onboarded to the feature as soon as our onboarding team could get them on.
I can’t lie, there were a couple of bugs, but the team set up a plan to squash them ASAP, and by the time the second client was onboarding to the feature, it was fully cleaned up. (We even made some UX/UI tweaks for maximum usability!)
Future Roadmap:
Medicaid Checks - Shredding a community check down and portioning it out to different residents, while keeping a record of the scanned check image associated.
Accounts Payable - Many communities partner with local small businesses like beauticians, nail salons, etc. to set up shop in the community as an amenity for residents to take advantage of. These partners pay rent in a different way than residents, and ALIS should support taking checks and ACH/CC payments from these partners.