Editor’s note: This article was originally published in February 2022 and has been updated in 2025 to reflect new product features, industry tools, and assisted living software trends.
Assisted Living Facilities and Senior Living Communities are much more than just a place to live. The best communities support their residents across all facets of their lives, from clinical needs like supporting the activities of daily living and ensuring that the right meds are taken, to helping residents enjoy a rich and fulfilling community and social life.
Assisted living needs to do more than providing housing to their residents - they need to support them too. Supporting residents and their families can require the collaboration of dozens or hundreds of team members, and it is the role of assisted living software and senior living software to help the teams collaborate and work together.
Senior living communities are also regulated by HIPAA - the federal statute regulating security and privacy for healthcare data. The best senior living software is HIPAA-compliant to enable communities to focus on their residents and not complex IT regulations.
In addition to supporting their residents, ALFs are businesses too, with their own unique compliance, operational and business responsibilities like attracting, training, and scheduling staff; complying with state regulations and completing required reporting; and marketing to prospects, invoicing residents, and collecting revenue.
Choosing the right technology is key to growing your business, attracting residents in today’s competitive senior living landscape, and providing seniors with the best possible community to call home. This article will help Assisted Living operators understand their technology needs and how they can select the best technology to help their organization thrive.
Supporting clinical needs is a key responsibility of every assisted living community. These responsibilities include:
A key responsibility for Assisted Living operators is conducting assessments of new residents to understand who they are and why they are moving into your community.
Assessments will typically include biographical information, family information and key clinical information such as what medications a resident takes, allergies, illnesses, communication abilities, dietary requirements, and what kind of assistance is needed with the activities of daily living.
Assessments must also meet state requirements. These requirements can be updated from time-to-time and vary by state, which can create operational challenges for both larger operators with multi-state operations as well as operators without dedicated compliance teams.
The care plan – also known as the individual service plan – is a detailed plan of action that describes how an assisted living community will help a resident achieve his or her individual goals. A great care plan starts with a strong assessment to understand what a resident’s needs are and is then individually tailored to meet the needs raised by the assessment across multiple areas.
The best platforms will automatically generate care plans directly from assessment responses—saving time and ensuring consistency across resident profiles.
Typical residents in assisted living communities consume 12–14 medications per day. Safely administering these medications – making sure that the 8 med rights of medication administration are fulfilled – can be a complex undertaking. The best Assisted Living Software will include a medication management component, electronically connecting to a resident's pharmacy to access medication information, and using this information to automate med-passing.
Some systems now include AI-driven alerts to help staff avoid PRN over-administration—prompting caregivers if a med is being passed too early based on order instructions and previous pass time.
Assisted Living Facilities are regulated at the state level. As such, every Assisted Living operator has compliance and reporting obligations they need to meet. The best Assisted Living Software will make it easier for communities to meet all regulatory obligations by providing easy-to-use clinical workflows that meet state requirements (e.g. around assessments and care plans), reduce mistakes like med errors, and allow administrators to export built-in state-required reports.
Founded in 2004, ECP is the leading provider of EHR and eMAR software to Assisted Living Facilities across the US. ECP's key clinical features include:
No Assisted Living operator will be around for long if they can't take care of core business needs, such as:
Assisted Living Facilities are typically private-pay, and therefore need to invoice and bill residents and their families on a monthly basis. Different operators will employ different philosophies to billing: some will bill a fixed rate, some will bill based on care-rate or care-level, and some will bill on a variable basis for actual care received.
If you use a fixed billing model, then general-purpose billing software will likely suit your needs. However, if your Assisted Living communities bill by level-of-care or use a-la carte billing, then choosing a billing system that is built for AL specifically will be key.
The right billing platform should help capture every charge, pro-rate level of care changes, avoid missed revenue, and reduce the time your team spends on monthly invoicing.
Growing and managing census is a key part of building a successful Assisted Living and Senior Living business. CRM software can help operators track potential prospects and ensure that follow-ups are taken to convert prospects into residents.
Like most businesses, Assisted Living Facilities need to keep a general ledger - a central book compiling all financial activity including accounts payable (money your communities owe to others) and accounts receivable (money that residents owe to you).
Used in over 8,000 communities across the country, ECP is one of the most trusted providers of Assisted Living business software.
QuickBooks, available as both a desktop application and a browser-based web app, is used by thousands of assisted living operators to manage finances.
HubSpot is one of the most popular general-purpose CRMs (it isn't specifically built for Senior Living). It has powerful automation features and is easy to use.
Some operators, both small and large, still use spreadsheets to track medication administration, resident data, billing, or incident reports.
Salesforce is a powerful, enterprise-grade CRM platform used across many industries.
FreshBooks is an invoicing and accounting platform aimed at small businesses and freelancers.
Choosing the right technology is key to growing your business, attracting residents in today’s competitive senior living landscape, and providing seniors with the best possible community to call home. When choosing an assisted living software, make sure to look for a web-based, technology leader that provides clinical, business, and compliance software, explicitly built for assisted living communities and other long-term care providers. Integration with long-term care pharmacy partners is also a vital component. When your software provider has your business operations and the seniors you serve in mind, your organization will certainly thrive.
It’s tempting to piece together tools that are “good enough.” But assisted living communities deserve software that fits how you operate—not the other way around.
As of 2025, ECP supports over 8,000 communities nationwide and offers a fully integrated platform that includes clinical tools (eMAR and EHR), billing, CRM, and our newest offering—Move-Ins—to simplify the entire resident journey.
With ECP, you get a platform designed for your world. One that combines:
All in one. All purpose-built for senior living.
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