Senior living operators today face intense pressure to use data more effectively. Whether it’s driving higher occupancy, optimizing staffing costs, or improving care quality, leaders need fast, reliable insights to make informed decisions. That often leads operators to ask: Should we build our own dashboard solution, hire consultants to create one, or invest in a purpose-built platform like Skypoint?
At first glance, building your own dashboards — either with your internal IT team or with outside consultants — can seem like a flexible and cost-effective approach. But the reality is far more complex. Most senior living organizations who take the “build” route spend more, wait longer, and get less than they expected.
Here’s how the three approaches compare, and why buying a turnkey dashboard solution built specifically for senior living consistently comes out on top.
Option 1: Building In-House with Your IT Team
If you have an internal IT team, having them lead the analytics buildout might feel like a natural fit. They already manage your infrastructure and software, so why not your data strategy, too?
But there’s a big difference between maintaining systems and designing a modern analytics stack. Building an in-house solution means:
- Standing up and maintaining a cloud data lakehouse, typically using platforms like Databricks or Snowflake.
- Creating custom connectors for your systems (EHR, CRM, billing, payroll, incident tracking, etc.), many of which don’t follow healthcare standards.
- Normalizing and mapping data across communities.
- Designing and maintaining ETL pipelines.
- Creating consistent, board-ready dashboards in Power BI or another BI tool.
- Ensuring HIPAA compliance, data security, and long-term scalability.
Even with a strong IT team, these aren’t trivial tasks. You’ll likely need to bring in specialized data engineers, solution architects, and analysts, often at six-figure salaries each. You’ll also need to commit to an ongoing cycle of maintenance and iteration. That’s hundreds of thousands of dollars a year — before you get a single usable insight.
Option 2: Hiring Generalist Data Consultants
Another common approach is to bring in outside consultants—maybe a Power BI agency or a cloud data architecture firm. These partners often promise fast results and custom solutions. But here’s the catch: they rarely understand the senior living data ecosystem.
Most consultants have never worked with systems like PointClickCare, Yardi, Eldermark, or MatrixCare. They won’t know what a move-in looks like in your CRM, how to calculate staff-to-resident ratios, or why hospital readmission metrics matter to your regional directors. So, you spend valuable time and budget just trying to teach them your business.
And because these solutions are one-off builds, they often lack:
- Standardized metric definitions across regions or communities.
- Built-in support for compliance and audit trails.
- Ongoing support or product updates.
- The ability to scale or evolve with your organization.
It’s not uncommon for organizations to spend $150,000–$300,000 a year with consultants, only to wind up with dashboards that are outdated, unused, or simply don’t work.
Option 3: Buying a Turnkey Analytics Platform Like Skypoint
Skypoint is built specifically for senior living and healthcare organizations. That means:
- Robust, out-of-the-box integrations with systems you already use.
- A unified data model that handles senior living operational, financial, and clinical data.
- Prebuilt, ready-to-use senior living dashboards and data models tailored to key decision-makers — executive directors, community managers, C-level execs, and more.
- HITRUST r2 certified security and compliance.
- Implementation in weeks, not years.
- Expert support built on years of working with other senior living operators just like you.
- Continual updates and upgrades based on your feedback, and the feedback of other senior living operators on our platform as well.
Instead of stitching together tools, consultants, and processes, you get a solution that just works — for a fraction of the cost of building it yourself or with consultants. And because Skypoint evolves with your business, you’re not stuck rebuilding when your data changes or leadership wants new KPIs.
Most importantly, your teams can focus on using the data, not building infrastructure. That’s what drives faster, smarter decisions and better outcomes.
Invest in Outcomes, Not Infrastructure
The real cost of building analytics in-house or hiring generalist consultants isn’t just the upfront spend. It’s the opportunity cost: months of delays, inconsistent metrics, manual workarounds, and insights that never materialize.
Buying a senior living platform like Skypoint eliminates that risk. You get trusted data, shared insights, and operational clarity, all without the headaches. It’s the shortest path from data chaos to data confidence.
Ready to see what purpose-built senior living dashboards can do for your organization? Let’s talk.
