.png)
Laura Simonelli didn't plan to spend her career in senior living.
She moved to Florida after graduating from Northeastern, looking for a fresh start, and found herself answering phones at a Grand Villas community. She intended to stay briefly. That was years ago.
"You just get attached. The residents, the staff — they become your family."
Today, Laura is SenCare's compliance coordinator, working from the home office to oversee residency agreements, power of attorney documentation, legal notifications, and audit readiness across all of the company's communities. It's a role she grew into slowly, advancing from receptionist to business office coordinator before moving into compliance.
Her job, at its core, is protecting the company when things go wrong.
The financial stakes are real. A missing arbitration signature — or one signed by the wrong person — can turn a defensible situation into a $30,000 arbitration case. If it goes to jury trial, that number can reach $125,000 or more, regardless of whether the community did anything wrong clinically.
"It's going to cost us more to defend you than to settle, even when you did nothing wrong — unless we have everything in order."
Before August Health, keeping everything in order meant paper. A lot of it.
SenCare was a fully paper-based operation for residency agreements.
Packages went out across the country to collect wet signatures. Turnaround was slow. Compliance depended on individual communities remembering the right steps in the right order.
Staff had been asking for electronic signatures for years.
When Laura took on the August Health implementation as her first major project, she rolled it out in phases — holding back a handful of communities at a time, working through onboarding, and finishing with the final group in January 2026. The transition surfaced something she hadn't fully anticipated: how much the old workflow had been leaving room for error.
"We found that team members were piecemealing things after the fact. Now they can't skip a signature. It has to go in order. It's putting them in compliance almost automatically."
That shift changed the nature of her audits. Where she used to spend time hunting page by page for missing or misfiled signatures, that problem has largely disappeared. One community went a full month with 100% perfect audits — something she describes as nearly unheard of in her experience before August Health.
Adoption has been faster than she expected. She asked one newly onboarded community to complete a single agreement in January just to get started. They completed seven within five days.
"They wanted it. They loved it.”
Laura was handed this implementation as her first initiative, and it delivered.
“I'm so lucky that this was my first project. I was able to give the team something they'd been wanting for a long time."
.png)
