K4Connect and community partners Cypress Living bring home bronze for the 2022 McKnight’s Technology Awards in the Building Bridges category helping to overcome older adult social isolation, keep residents informed, and connect them to both the community and their loved ones.
We’re proud to be a recipient of a McKnight’s Technology Award two years in a row! This year, we’re especially proud to be a part of the innovative technology strategies at Cypress Living in Southeast Florida where hundreds of residents are leveraging our K4Community technology to stay engaged, informed and connected. Cypress Living and K4Connect were awarded the Bronze Award in the Building Bridges category, defined as “recognizing the use of technology that improved connections between staff members and residents and/or their families.”
The community needed a way to deliver a unified digital experience for its hundreds of current residents and their families, community staff and prospective residents. In March 2022, Cypress Living launched K4Community at its Cypress Cove location, a fully integrated resident experience app with an advanced digital backend for staff. K4Community, the flagship solution from K4Connect, is now connecting hundreds of residents to each other, the community, supporting staff and most importantly, their families and loved ones outside of the community. K4Community has granted Cypress Cove residents more ways to communicate, greater socialization and a dependable and 24/7 accessible resource for information on events, dining and services.
Delivering a Digital Front Door
K4Community is now the “digital front door” of Cypress Cove, bringing the community together and outfitting it for the digital-forward future. This excitement is reflected in the rapid resident adoption and steadily growing resident usage of the K4Community Plus app in the first three months of launch. Nearly 97% of residents are live in the app, with 40% actively using the app daily and over 60% using the app at least weekly. As Cypress Living said, “K4Community Plus is undoubtedly building bridges between our people and our community.”
Using Technology to Overcome Residual Pandemic Challenges
While the pandemic has underscored the need for technology that can build better connections for older adults – to both people and services – Cypress Living has focused on this need to create a resident-friendly digital experience that provides immediate and long-term value. Cypress Cove residents are more connected to each other and the community than ever before – and they are excited about the technologies they have to help them live more comfortably, informed and connected. K4Community Plus is not simply an engagement or communication application, it is a fully integrated concierge platform that seamlessly connects and delivers our services and resources to residents throughout the campus.
Residents now have the entire community at their fingertips with K4Community Plus; relieving the need to physically find information around campus or remember login information to access multiple applications, residents simply open the app and find everything they need to successfully navigate their day.
Resident Response to Technology is Positive and Growing
K4Community’s immediate and constant access to information and interactive functionality built around campus services and events has dramatically increased resident engagement, communication, and social activity.
For example, in the first three months of launching K4Community Plus:
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- Increased resident access to the community – 91% of those residents are using the app to quickly find information about and sign up for daily meals, maintenance requests and transportation requests. These integrated services do not require a resident to sign in and out of apps, they simply go to one place to find it all in K4Community Plus.
- Connected residents with family and each other – Residents quickly adopted the new communication features native to K4Community Plus,
allowing seamless phone and video calling, in addition to chat messaging with their family and fellow residents. The resident directory is a most-used feature, replacing the old paper (and often outdated) contact lists to a vibrant digital directory that shares resident contact information, as well as personal biographies that make it easy to find common interests. Resident usage of the calling features grew by 72% week over week, with week-to-week usage of the Resident Directory increasing by 310% and an average of residents accessing the Resident Directory over 630 times a day. - Building social connections and happy lives –Residents were excited to use K4Community Plus to organize their personal schedules and ensure they were signed up for social and wellness activities. These activities included both in-person and virtual events, from birthday celebrations to art exhibit excursions and brunch, 95% of residents are actively using the events feature to learn about and sign up for activities. Cypress Cove staff increased virtual event offerings by 56% week to week with resident sign-ups for virtual events trending similarly at a week-to-week increase of over 50%.
allowing seamless phone and video calling, in addition to chat messaging with their family and fellow residents. The resident directory is a most-used feature, replacing the old paper (and often outdated) contact lists to a vibrant digital directory that shares resident contact information, as well as personal biographies that make it easy to find common interests. Resident usage of the calling features grew by 72% week over week, with week-to-week usage of the Resident Directory increasing by 310% and an average of residents accessing the Resident Directory over 630 times a day. Integrating Technology as a Long-Term Strategy
Cypress Living is truly an innovative community with strong technology leadership by its CIO, Joe Velderman. The implementation of K4Community Plus has laid a technology foundation that fuels Cypress Living’s much larger transformation strategy. K4Community Plus runs on top of K4Connect’s operating system built specifically for senior living (with over 40 patents); this operating system is what enables the seamless integration of other apps, services and tooling that can all be surfaced through K4Community as the single interface for the end user (accessible by both app voice technology).
Cypress Living is building a robust technology experience for both residents and staff that leverages this advanced technology platform, both for integrating experiences and collecting and analyzing resident and staff data. With K4Community, Cypress Living is currently gaining daily insights into resident technology adoption and usage that enables more informed decision-making for staff, critical trend spotting and the ability to make stronger health-related decisions in the future by combining behavioral and health insights.
Want to learn more about how Cypress Living is better serving residents through technology? Check out this two-minute video where Joe explains how technology will transform the future of Cypress Living.
