FOR CLIENTS WHO OUTSOURCE
Maximizing Outsourcing Provider Performance & Enhancing Resident Dining Experiences
For senior living communities that outsource dining and hospitality services, maintaining quality, cultural alignment, and financial sustainability is critical. IHS serves as an independent advocate—ensuring food service providers deliver on their commitments, enhance resident satisfaction, and operate with excellence.
We partner with senior living organizations to oversee third-party hospitality providers, ensuring they deliver nutritious, engaging, and community-centered dining programs.
HOW WE SUPPORT SENIOR LIVING COMMUNITIES THAT OUTSOURCE
How We Support Outsourced Senior Living Dining Programs
Since 2006, IHS has provided targeted consulting services designed to elevate hospitality operations in senior living communities. These engagements are structured as clearly defined scoped projects, which may include:
Operational Assessments
We help communities define their dining vision, evaluate current performance, and identify service, experience, and financial gaps. Our assessments often lay the foundation for a stronger RFP process.
Request for Proposal
We design and manage RFP processes that reflect your vision while requiring financial consistency across proposals—allowing for clear, apples-to-apples comparison and informed vendor selection.
Contract Negotiations
Vendors often propose non-binding commitments. IHS ensures that operational and financial expectations are clearly defined contract term and conditions—protecting your community from underperformance.
IHS is often brought in to help senior living communities address underperformance, realign outsourced provider delivery with expectations, and strengthen accountability. These consulting engagements may include:
Operational Assessment
We review your existing contract and evaluate the outsource provider’s performance across resident, guest, and team member dining. Our goal is to identify discrepancies between your expectations, contract obligations, and actual outcomes—including quality, service, and financial performance.
Contract Review / Renegotiation
Following the assessment, IHS works directly with your outsourced provider to update the agreement—clarifying operational expectations, financial requirements, and accountability mechanisms.
These services may be delivered as part of a broader engagement or offered independently to address specific operational needs:
Strategic Planning
We partner with your leadership team (and the provider, when appropriate) to define clear organizational goals and build a practical, results-oriented roadmap. Plans are grounded in financial realities and tailored to each community’s specific needs and aspirations.
Financial Assessments
Our consultants conduct an in-depth review of current financial performance, including analysis of KPIs, meal costs, floor stock, waste, supply chain usage, labor optimization, and retail revenue. The goal: identify actionable opportunities to reduce spend and improve value.
Resident Engagement & Feedback
Resident and stakeholder feedback is critical to operational excellence. IHS collects input through online surveys, focus groups, intercept interviews, dining committee sessions, and staff engagement activities. Findings are synthesized into actionable recommendations to elevate satisfaction across all user groups.
Resident-Centered Dining Innovation
We observe current practices and provide guidance on improving meal variety, presentation, personalization, and wellness alignment—ensuring the dining program reflects resident preferences, lifestyle, and health goals.
Pre-Facility Design Programming
IHS provides design input for kitchen, café, and dining space renovations or new construction—helping ensure operational flow, future scalability, and an enhanced dining experience.
Quality Assurance
CrossCheck℠ is our proprietary, web-based performance evaluation tool that tracks operator performance in key areas like safety, nutrition, compliance, marketing, and retail execution. Assessments are conducted on-site by trained professionals, with remediation plans tracked digitally for accountability and follow-through.
ONGOING PROGRAM MANAGEMENT
How We Support Senior Living Dining Programs by Providing Ongoing Program Oversight
When a senior living community outsources its dining program, there’s often the assumption that active management is no longer needed. But time and again, we see that vendor performance can drift from the promises made during the RFP process. Even strong providers benefit from structured accountability, coaching, and innovation support.
That’s where IHS comes in.
We serve as your independent strategic partner—focused on ensuring continuous improvement, operational excellence, and fulfillment of all service commitments made by your dining provider. Our role is to ensure that what was promised on paper becomes—and remains—a reality in your day-to-day dining experience.
IHS offers three flexible engagement models to help senior living communities oversee outsourced food and hospitality programs effectively, aligning vendor performance with your expectations and the needs of your residents.
IHS offers a range of services across three different models of oversight to our senior living clients in the area of managing their outsourcing partner’s performance against contractual commitments and client expectations. These services include:
Adviser Model
- Initial Operational Assessment and development of a customized Roadmap to Operational Excellence
- Annual program review to evaluate vendor alignment with community goals and resident expectations
- Best practice sessions and insight sharing to support continuous innovation
- Quarterly business reviews with vendor and community leadership
- Initial Assessment of CrossCheck℠ Quality Assurance across resident, guest, and team member dining services
Partner Model
Includes all Adviser Model benefits, plus:
- Quarterly financial reviews and variance analysis to improve cost performance
- Dining program strategy reviews, including resident participation and satisfaction trends
- Operational studies focused on priority areas identified in the roadmap
- Annual procurement and supply chain assessments to enhance value and efficiency
- Virtual roundtables featuring best practices from peer senior living communities
- Scheduled CrossCheck℠ Quality Assurance evaluations to maintain accountability and service quality
Program Manager Model
Includes all Partner Model benefits, plus:
- Comprehensive outsource provider oversight, including site visits and monthly consultation
- Monthly financial performance tracking and action planning
- Annual budgeting and contract compliance reviews
- Customized mid-year and year-end CrossCheck℠ Quality Assurance assessments
- Evaluation of vendor marketing plans, dining promotions, and satisfaction survey results
- A dedicated IHS program team to ensure long-term partnership and continuity
WHY CHOOSE IHS
Outsourced Senior Living Dining Programs
• We advocate for your community, enhancing your operator’s performance through client-focused RFP processes, and by designing third-party contractual agreements containing accountability measures, creating strategies to course-correct underperformance on the part of a provider, and providing long-term oversight and, in some cases, management of the third-party contractor on behalf of our client.
• We provide independent, data-driven oversight to maximize service quality.
• We ensure your residents and employees get the best food and nutrition experience possible.
• We create sustainable success through financial, operational, and strategic oversight and support.
Let us help transform your outsourced food and nutrition program into a competitive advantage for your community.
Partner with IHS for Transformational Hospitality Solutions
Call us at 234 CENTICOR (236 8426) | Email info@ihsimpact.com