The senior living industry is full of people who care deeply about residents. The data from the first Resident Engagement Intelligence Benchmark tells a more complicated story: the people care, but the systems around them do not.
The Resident Engagement Intelligence Benchmark is an ongoing self-assessment designed to measure how well communities track, understand, and act on the signals that reveal how residents are actually doing. This report draws on data collected between March and September 2026. The respondents were overwhelmingly practitioners: activity directors, life enrichment directors, lifestyle directors, and program directors working inside communities every day. This is not an executive survey. It is a report from the front lines.
The Resident Engagement Intelligence Benchmark was developed in partnership with Alisa Tagg, MS, ACC/EDU, CADDCT, CDP, a nationally recognized leader in activity and life enrichment practice through the National Association of Activity Professionals (NAAP), and Dr. Robert Winningham, a cognitive aging researcher and professor at Western Oregon University. Both served as validation partners for the original REIS framework and helped shape the benchmark survey to ensure it measured what actually matters to practitioners and to the residents they serve.
What the data reveals is not a profession that lacks commitment. It is a profession whose commitment is running ahead of its infrastructure. Communities are reaching out to residents who appear to be withdrawing. They are tracking attendance at programs. They are building detailed resident profiles. But when you look at whether systems exist to connect those efforts, to make them visible, to make them consistent, the numbers tell a different story.
The mean benchmark score across all respondents was 69.7 out of 100. That number, by itself, says less than the patterns underneath it.
This is what the 2026 State of Resident Engagement Intelligence Report found.
The Resident Engagement Intelligence Benchmark is a self-assessment survey covering 11 dimensions of engagement practice, from attendance tracking and life story documentation to isolation detection and re-engagement strategies. Each response is scored on a weighted scale, producing a composite benchmark score from 0 to 100. The benchmark is open to all senior living professionals on an ongoing basis. The findings in this report draw on responses collected between March and September 2026.
Respondents represent a cross-section of community types: assisted living (45% of respondents), independent living (45%), memory care (28%), skilled nursing (25%), and life plan/CCRC communities (11%). Many respondents selected multiple community types, reflecting the reality that a single campus often serves residents across several levels of care. Community sizes range from under 50 residents to over 200. The majority of respondents (68%) work on engagement teams of one to five people, which is consistent with the staffing patterns life enrichment professionals report across the industry.
Because the benchmark captures self-reported practice rather than observed outcomes, the findings should be read as a picture of how communities perceive their own engagement capabilities.
Before the individual findings, one pattern is worth naming upfront: the data looks meaningfully different depending on the level of care.
Communities that include skilled nursing scored a mean of 81.4 on the benchmark. Assisted living communities scored 69.5. Independent living scored 66.2. Memory care landed at 70.4.
That 15-point spread between skilled nursing and independent living is not a coincidence, and we do not believe it is because skilled nursing teams care more about their residents. The most likely explanation is that skilled nursing operates inside a regulatory framework (MDS documentation, mandated care planning, required behavioral tracking) that forces infrastructure into existence. The documentation requirements create systems. The systems produce visibility. The visibility produces higher scores. There is variance in the data, and regulatory infrastructure is not the only factor at play. But the pattern is consistent enough across every dimension of the benchmark that we believe it is the primary driver.
Independent living and assisted living communities, where regulatory mandates around engagement are lighter, are doing this work without that scaffolding. The commitment appears to be the same. The infrastructure is not. This pattern repeats across every finding in this report.
This finding alone should change how the industry thinks about senior living resident engagement software.
When asked whether their community has a system for identifying residents who may be disengaging or becoming isolated, 58% of respondents said they rely entirely on informal staff observation. Another 19% said they notice signs of disengagement but do not act on them systematically. And 11% reported having no system at all or said it depends on the individual staff member.
Only 11% of respondents reported having a formal early-warning system for isolation.
That means 89% of communities in this benchmark are relying on the attentiveness of individual staff members to catch residents who are pulling away. Not a system. Not a process. Not a dashboard or an alert. A person noticing.
The level-of-care breakdown makes this worse before it makes it better. Every single life plan/CCRC community in the benchmark reported having no formal isolation detection system. Among assisted living communities, 71% had no formal system. Memory care communities fared slightly better at 53%, partly because cognitive care protocols bring more structured observation into daily practice, and partly because many memory care settings are small and intimate enough that staff know every resident by name and notice when someone is off. In a ten-person household where everyone attends every program, disengagement is hard to miss. That proximity is a genuine strength, but it is also a form of informal detection that does not scale or transfer when the environment changes. But even there, more than half are operating informally.
The problem is not that staff are inattentive. The problem is that informal observation does not scale, does not persist across schedule changes, and does not survive turnover. When the person who notices things leaves, the noticing stops.
Social isolation is one of the most significant modifiable risk factors for cognitive decline, and the 2024 Lancet Commission identified it alongside hypertension and diabetes. The fact that 89% of communities have no formal mechanism for detecting it is not a commentary on how much the profession cares. It is a commentary on how little the technology environment has given them to work with.
Seventy-five percent of communities reported reaching out specifically to a resident who appeared to be withdrawing in the last 30 days. That is a strong number. It reflects a profession that pays attention, that cares about individual residents, and that acts when something looks wrong.
But 85% of those communities made that outreach without a formal system guiding them. No alert. No trigger. No protocol. Somebody noticed, and somebody acted.
The level-of-care data adds a striking dimension. Skilled nursing communities reported the highest outreach rate: 92% had reached out to a withdrawing resident in the last 30 days. Memory care was close behind at 87%. Assisted living came in at 83%. Independent living trailed at 62%.
The outreach happened because a staff member was paying attention that day, during that rotation, in that hallway. On a different day, with a different staff member, or after a period of turnover, the same resident might have been missed entirely.
The independent living number deserves a closer look. At 62%, it is the only level of care where a majority reached out but a substantial minority did not. Independent living residents often have the most autonomy and the least structured daily contact with staff. That makes them the population most likely to withdraw without anyone noticing. And these are the communities with the least infrastructure for catching it.
This is not a hypothetical. It is how most communities are operating right now. The care is genuine. The consistency is not.
Sixty-four percent of respondents report tracking attendance at every or most activities. That is encouraging at first glance. Communities are recording who shows up.
But the rate varies dramatically by level of care. Seventy-seven percent of skilled nursing communities track attendance at every activity. Memory care is at 53%. Assisted living is at 50%. Independent living drops to 21%.
And even among those communities that track attendance, the data does not translate into insight. When asked about their overall approach to measuring engagement outcomes, 52% of the communities that track attendance at every single activity still described their measurement as weak: they track attendance and review it occasionally, collect data but do not review it consistently, or track very little beyond headcounts.
Across the full benchmark, 75% of communities measure engagement below a comprehensive level. Forty-two percent track attendance only, either occasionally or as headcounts. Twenty-three percent collect data but do not review it consistently. Eleven percent do not measure engagement outcomes at all.
Here is where the level-of-care data tells the most important story. Sixty-two percent of skilled nursing communities reported comprehensive measurement (tracking wellbeing indicators alongside participation rates and reviewing them regularly). Among assisted living communities, that number drops to 12%. Independent living: 17%. Memory care: 20%.
Skilled nursing communities are not doing something exotic. Our read of this data is that they are operating inside a system that requires them to document outcomes, not just activities, and the regulatory environment has created the measurement habit. Other factors may contribute, but the pattern is hard to explain without the regulatory component. The question is why the rest of the industry is still waiting for a regulation to do what the residents already need.
The attendance data exists. The step from attendance to understanding is where most communities stall. They know who showed up. They do not know who stopped showing up, why, or what it means.
Only 11% of communities reported having a defined re-engagement protocol, a deliberate, documented strategy for reconnecting with residents after a period of lower participation.
Forty-five percent said they try to reconnect informally, with staff making individual efforts without a structured approach. Twenty-eight percent said it depends on the resident or the staff member. Fifteen percent reported having no strategy at all or said they tend to wait for the resident to return on their own.
This means 89% of communities are either improvising or doing nothing when a resident begins to disengage.
The level-of-care data follows the same pattern. Thirty-one percent of skilled nursing communities reported a defined re-engagement protocol. Memory care: 20%. Assisted living: 12%. Independent living: 12%. Life plan/CCRC communities: zero.
That skilled nursing number is three times the assisted living rate. And it is still only 31%. Even in what is arguably the most regulated, most documented care environment in senior living, fewer than one in three communities have written down what happens when a resident starts to pull away.
The pattern is consistent with Finding 1: the intention is there, but the system is not. Staff care. They notice when someone stops coming. Many of them follow up. But the response is ad hoc, uneven, and fragile. It depends on who is working that day, what else is happening in the community, and whether the right person has the bandwidth to reach out.
A defined re-engagement protocol does not mean a rigid script. It means a community has thought about what happens after someone pulls away, has built that thinking into its workflow, and does not leave the response to chance. The fact that so few communities have gotten there speaks to how poorly traditional resident engagement technology has supported the work that comes after the calendar.
Fifty-five percent of respondents reported using either no formal tools (managed informally) or paper-based tracking such as whiteboards and binders.
The level-of-care split here is the starkest in the entire benchmark. Only 23% of skilled nursing communities reported using no formal tools or paper-based tracking. For assisted living and independent living, that number is 62%.
What fills that space in skilled nursing? Forty-six percent of skilled nursing communities use a general senior living EHR or CRM with engagement features, and 31% use a dedicated engagement platform. In assisted living and independent living, only 12% and 8% respectively use an EHR or CRM, and just 25% in each use a dedicated platform.
The benchmark data reveals a meaningful correlation between tools and capability. Communities using no formal tools averaged a benchmark score of 56.2. Communities using a dedicated engagement or activity management platform averaged 75.2. That is a 19-point difference on a 100-point scale.
This is not a claim that technology alone solves the problem. Plenty of communities with sophisticated tools still scored below average, and a few communities managing informally scored well. But the pattern is directional: communities with dedicated engagement platforms are, on average, better equipped to track, understand, and respond to what is happening in the lives of their residents.
The tools question matters because it is the infrastructure question. When a community has no formal system for recording observations, tracking patterns, or surfacing concerns, all of that work happens in someone's memory, someone's notebook, or someone's hallway conversation. The intelligence exists. It is just not accessible to anyone else.
Taken together, these five findings describe an industry where the human capacity for care consistently outpaces the systems designed to support it.
The respondents in this benchmark are not failing. They are compensating. They are reaching out to residents who seem to be withdrawing (75%). They are tracking attendance (64% at every or most activities). They are building personal profiles for their residents (75% track detailed profiles or information for most residents). They are learning new residents' preferences within the first week (68%).
The work is happening. What is missing is the connective tissue: the systems that turn individual observations into institutional awareness, that make isolation visible before it becomes a crisis, that ensure the care does not depend on whether the right person happens to be paying attention on the right day.
The level-of-care data makes the case even more clearly. Based on the benchmark data, the communities that score highest are not necessarily the ones where the culture of care is strongest. They appear to be the ones where external requirements pushed infrastructure into existence. We believe skilled nursing communities did not choose to be better at measurement so much as regulation required it. The result is a 15-point scoring advantage over independent living and a 12-point advantage over assisted living. There is variance within every level of care, and we are not claiming this is the only explanation. But the pattern is strong enough to take seriously.
That is not a model to celebrate. It is a model to learn from. If engagement infrastructure only gets built when regulatory mandates require it, the industry will continue to wait. The residents cannot afford to.
This is the case for Resident Engagement Intelligence as a category, not as a product pitch but as an operational necessity. The profession needs infrastructure that matches its commitment. Right now, it does not have it.
The 2026 benchmark establishes a baseline. The numbers are what they are. The question now is whether the industry is willing to treat them as a starting point rather than a permanent condition.
Three things would change the picture meaningfully by the time the next benchmark is published.
First, isolation detection needs to move from informal observation to formal infrastructure. When 89% of communities have no system for catching residents who are pulling away, the starting point is low enough that even modest progress would be significant. This does not require sophisticated technology. It requires a decision to make isolation visibility a priority, not a side effect of individual attentiveness.
Second, measurement needs to move past attendance. Tracking who showed up is the starting line, not the finish. The profession needs to start tracking what happened next: Did the resident come back? Did their mood change? Did their social connections hold? The communities already measuring at that level (25%) are not doing anything extraordinary. They have simply decided that attendance alone is not enough. The fact that 62% of skilled nursing communities already measure comprehensively suggests it can be done. The question is whether the rest of the industry needs a regulation to get there, or whether it can decide on its own.
Third, re-engagement needs a protocol, not just good intentions. When 89% of communities are improvising their response to disengagement, the profession is leaving its most vulnerable residents to the consistency of individual staff members. A defined protocol does not require a large budget or a dedicated team. It requires someone writing down what happens when a resident starts to pull away, and making sure that process outlives any single person.
The Resident Engagement Intelligence Benchmark is still open, and the data will keep growing. We will publish an updated report when the sample warrants it. The goal is not just a higher mean score. It is an industry where the systems finally match the people.
