Friendship Village rebuilt its fall program in 30 days

The challenge: Aging in place, with no margin for guesswork

Friendship Village has spent more than 50 years as one of St. Louis's most trusted senior living operators, and the only Life Care Community of its kind in the area. Residents move in with the expectation that Friendship Village will care for them for the rest of their lives, through every level of need.

However, residents are arriving at a higher acuity and with more co-morbidities than ever before. Falls, in particular, sat at the center of the operational and clinical risk that the Friendship Village team was trying to solve for. When falls become frequent, the clinical answer has often been a move to a higher level of care — from independent living to assisted living, or from assisted living to skilled nursing. While those transitions are many times necessary, Friendship Village’s main goal is for residents to be able to stay in the setting they call home for as long as possible.

Before Inspiren, the post-fall workflow was largely guesswork. Care teams wrote incident reports based on what residents could (or couldn't) recall. Interventions were applied based on best guesses about what had happened. And the visibility that care teams needed to see real resident behaviors, identify patterns, and intervene early, simply wasn't there.

Why Inspiren

Friendship Village had used a fall-detection system across its communities before. So when the team evaluated Inspiren, they weren't starting from zero, they were comparing.

What stood out was that Inspiren was clinically built. The team behind it had lived the workflows that Friendship Village's nurses and operators were trying to support: regulatory response, post-fall documentation, care plan reassessment, the realities of working in assisted living and memory care where staffing is leaner than in skilled nursing.

"Inspiren is completely set up with clinicians that have worked in the space, understand the regulatory responsibilities, understand the day in the life, but also understand the residents that we serve. It is a solution that can serve so many more purposes than just solving for the falls." – Stacey Zerban-Roth

That distinction, a unified ecosystem of hardware, software, and clinical expertise built specifically for senior living, was what made Inspiren the right fit. Friendship Village deployed AUGi, Sense, and Staff Beacons across two communities spanning assisted living, memory care and skilled nursing. 

Implementation: Collaborative by design

Training and implementation was personalized to each campus. When the team realized that night shift staff couldn't reasonably get off the floor at 10:30 am, Inspiren added a night shift training session. When Chesterfield's internet briefly went down mid-rollout, both teams paused together to make sure the broader system stayed stable before moving forward.

"It was just super collaborative. It felt like Inspiren listened to us. And when you have that on day one, that makes it really easy to move forward with the system." – Stacey Zerban-Roth, Chief Health Services Officer

Staff response to the new system was strong across the board, and especially energized in places Stacey hadn't necessarily expected. Assisted living teams, who don't always see this kind of technology investment first, were excited to be part of the rollout from day one. 

"Think about a nurse that has all these audible alerts going off and all this noise. That's not homelike. Inspiren is super user-friendly because they're used to carrying a device. It's not loud. They log in, they get the alerts. It’s simple." – Stacey Zerban-Roth, Chief Health Services Officer

Early outcomes: Faster help and stronger accountability

In just over a month of go-live, the data is already telling a clear story. Across every Friendship Village community, median alert response times sit well under two minutes , a benchmark that experienced operators recognize as exceptional this early in a deployment. 

At Sunset Hills Assisted Living and Memory Care, 94% of all alerts are being responded to in under five minutes , a response rate that rivals what skilled nursing buildings (with significantly more staffing) typically aim for.

In one early scenario, a care team member responded to a "lying on floor" alert in 38 seconds, with the ability to check the Live View of the apartment on the way to the room, knowing what they were walking into before they arrived.

For Stacey, the numbers matter because of what they represent. In assisted living and memory care, true one-on-one staffing has never been the model, but the kind of awareness that one-on-one care provides has always been the goal. Inspiren is closing that gap.

"This is as close to one-on-one care that we can get. It gives us a look into the resident's world, how they're moving, and what their true behaviors are." –Stacey Zerban-Roth, Chief Health Services Officer

A new standard for care planning

For Friendship Village's clinical leadership, the most meaningful shift may be the move from reactive to proactive care planning. Before Inspiren, an incident report was the nurse's best guess. After a fall, interventions were chosen from a shrinking list of options based on what the team had already tried.

Now the workflow has changed. Care teams can review what actually happened and have evidence-based conversations with families about what changed and why.

"Staff are now able to put meaningful and appropriate interventions in place after falls, rather than literally guessing. We can move away from “vanilla” care planning and use real data points to justify the staffing and the specific interventions we put in place." – Stacey Zerban-Roth, Chief Health Services Officer

Inspiren is also producing visibility into resident patterns that the team had never had before. Stacey pointed to social isolation as one example, being able to see how much time staff are spending with each resident is the kind of insight that gives families peace of mind in a way operational reports never could. Bathroom usage trends and care tracking are now data points the team can act on.

Holding the aging-in-place promise

For a Life Care community, the case for Inspiren ultimately comes back to the promise Friendship Village makes to every resident who chooses to live there for the rest of their life. Better data means residents can stay in their current setting longer, with care that adapts to who they actually are, not where the staffing model assumes they'll be.

"This just helps us be a better care provider. It's not just solving one thing, it's solving for so much more. It just solidifies what Friendship Village does."  Stacey Zerban-Roth, Chief Health Services Officer

Looking ahead

The Friendship Village team is watching for the outcomes that matter most to a Life Care community: a continued reduction in falls, sustained best-in-class response times, and the customer satisfaction lift that comes when families know, and can feel, that the community has invested in their loved one. Integrated eCall and Two-Way Voice, both already on the roadmap, will deepen the impact further.

For Stacey, the partnership itself is a piece of why this is working:

"They just get our world. They are mission-driven in what they believe in. Their excitement for what they do is truly infectious. When they're working with our Directors of Nursing, that resonates , and it goes top down to everyone our DoNs serve." – Stacey Zerban-Roth, Chief Health Services Officer

Friendship Village has been the trusted choice for St. Louis seniors for more than 50 years. With Inspiren in place across two communities, the next chapter of that promise has a new foundation: data, clarity, and care that's earlier, more accurate, and easier for families to trust.

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