K4Connect, an AgeTech Collaborative™ enterprise participant, delivers innovative technology solutions to help residents in senior living communities live their best lives through easy-to-use tools that streamline communication, elevate engagement, and enhance wellness, comfort and safety. K4Connect’s suite of software-as-a-service products equips administrative and caregiver staff with data insights and robust enterprise-level tools that automate processes and workflows, improving efficiencies to make their jobs easier and more enjoyable.
We recently spoke with Jonathan Gould, cofounder and CTO, and Rebecca Cook, vice president of marketing, who discussed the unique benefits that K4Connect’s products and integrations bring to the table for senior living communities.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Please tell us about K4Connect.
Jonathan: K4Connect serves the senior living industry with two distinct products. The first is FusionOS, which is our data and integration platform. It connects all the different systems and data that a senior living community has and makes it all work together as one cohesive system.
The second product is what we call K4Community, which is part engagement platform and part smart home platform. It sits “on top of” FusionOS and works with a senior living community’s Internet of Things (IoT) devices, digital signage, apps that residents use, and more.
FusionOS and K4Community work together: All the data that flows through FusionOS is fed into the K4Community engagement platform, which provides major benefits for a living community’s staff and residents.
Can you walk us through a typical use case to illustrate some of these benefits?
Jonathan: Residents in senior living communities can use a phone app, a tablet, a computer or other devices to use K4Connect to find information, such as what activities are on the community's schedule for the day or what’s on the menu for lunch. K4Connect also has messaging and video chat built in, so people can reach out to friends to make plans to meet for breakfast, or to sign up for an activity.
The system can also do things like turn on the lights when a resident gets up in the morning. This also benefits the staff: When a resident’s lights go on, that information is relayed so the staff is alerted that that person is up and around. And if the staff is automatically notified that 190 out of 200 residents are awake and moving around, that means they only have to do a resident check for 10 people instead of 200.
How does K4Connect work hand-in-hand with FusionOS?
Jonathan: Information flows through FusionOS into K4Community, which reduces the staff’s workload. For example, let’s say tonight's dinner menu gets changed. Normally, staff would have to reprint the menu, change digital signs in the lobby, and do a lot of other things to make sure that information is communicated to residents. But because FusionOS ties into the dining platform and K4Connect, that information flows into all the systems that need it — such as digital signage in the lobby — and K4Community updates all those systems in real time. So a staff member has to enter that information in only one place. It’s all about disseminating data and making sure it gets to all the right places.
Does the system gather data on people’s health, too?
Jonathan: That data does flow through our system, but it’s important to note that the staff has complete control over how that data is used — we don’t collect that data for ourselves. We believe that data is not valuable unless it is actionable and benefiting the residents, and the senior living communities understand their particular community’s needs in ways that we can’t as a software company. Our products allow them to focus their time on those insights, instead of the “plumbing” of gathering the data.
It sounds like a very robust solution. Have you had problems with integrating it into senior living communities’ existing systems?
Jonathan: We identified the top 10 or 12 categories of systems that are typically used at senior living communities, such as electronic health records (EHR), work orders and dining platforms. We then built integrations for the top solutions in each of those categories, and we now have a library of about 50 integrations that we can plug into a community’s existing solutions. But if a community has an EHR system, for example, that we haven’t built a connection to, we’ll often build it for them. We see it as our job to make those connections and take that responsibility off the community’s IT staff.
Another thing that FusionOS does is flatten the data that comes in from all those different existing systems into a standard format. That means all the data looks the same, no matter where it originated from. That way, if a community changes their EHR two years down the road, all that data from the new solution will flow in the exact same format. It also means that senior living community operators who have multiple locations that use different systems, will now have a standardized format across all their locations.
Among other things, this allows operators to focus on coming up with meaningful interpretations of data and actions they can take with it, instead of just trying to get data into the correct format or platform. Our goal is to get IT teams out of the data engineering business and get the data flowing to them automatically so they can focus on the data science, because that’s where the data actually provides benefits.
How did you get involved in the AgeTech space?
Jonathan: When we started the company, we were thinking of hotels and commercial office buildings, not senior living. After about a year of building the platform, my co-founder and I had coffee with a friend who had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. When he heard what we were working on, he told us that it could change his life. He said, “I look at my days as if I have a budget of 1,000 good steps. If you can save me from having to get up to change the thermostat or answer the door for a delivery person, I might have enough steps left at the end of the day to meet my wife at the door when she gets home from work.”
At that moment, we pivoted our entire focus and decided that if we were going to build this platform, we would use it to serve people who are aging in place or in senior living communities.
What inspired you to become part of the AgeTech Collaborative ecosystem in particular?
Rebecca: The AgeTech Collaborative is trying to bring technology to the forefront of aging, which is what K4Connect has been trying to do all these years. And we’re intrigued by the number of startup companies that are coming up with all these new technologies that we’re interested in integrating with and that our senior living communities could benefit from, but that we don’t necessarily want to undertake ourselves.
We’re considered an enterprise because we’re already established in this space, and we see that we can benefit from what these startups are doing and also support them, so that we’re all raising each other up. The ultimate goal is to get the message out that all this can make a real difference for the residents and staff at senior living communities.
Your website has a cool new feature, the FusionOS Experience. What is that?
Jonathan: We were looking for ways to explain the difference between FusionOS and K4Community and what each can do. Even some of our own customers saw us mostly as an engagement platform and didn’t understand the power of what FusionOS does “underneath” K4Connect with all its integrations and data.
So we came up with the FusionOS Experience, a kind of virtual tour that’s a fun way to engage with FusionOS. You can visit the data center and meet Jeff, who’s responsible for moving all the data around and keeping all those integrations flowing. Then you can go upstairs to the lobby to visit Kelly and see how K4Community helps the staff on a day-to-day basis. You can even visit an apartment to see all the IoT features available to residents. It’s a fun, interactive way of exploring and learning about our products.
What’s on the horizon for K4Connect?
Jonathan: The next big thing you’ll see from us is our K4TV product. We already use the TV as digital signage, but with K4TV we’ll offer a fully interactive TV product that residents can use to browse events, explore dining menus and more — just like the app on their phones, but using their TV.
We’re also working on making the AI-assisted search function in our app more interactive. For example, if a resident searches for upcoming activities, instead of just returning a list of events, the app will be able to help them actually sign up for them. We’re excited about leaning more into AI and making things more interactive.
You can find out more about K4Connect and take the FusionOS Experience at the company’s website.
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