ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Jewish Home has been named a finalist in two categories of the McKnight’s Technology Awards for successfully incorporating technology into the elevation of care and support for residents and patients, as well as heightening efficiency and support for staff.
The annual competition is presented by McKnight’s, the leading media publisher covering senior-care sectors. Winners will be announced on Sept. 16 during the virtual McKnight’s Technology Awards. Now in its 16th year, the Technology Awards recognize achievements in 14 categories. Jewish Home is recognized in two categories:
Innovator of the Year:
Jewish Home’s TekHub — “Closing the Digital Gap in Aging”
This category recognizes how technological innovation has been a key to success and its impact on the provision of care and services.
Jewish Home is recognized for the TekHub program, which provides personalized technical support to older adults, including use of devices, digital tools, and online services to maintain independence, access care, and stay connected. It transforms traditional technology support into a scalable, data driven service that directly supports daily living and participation in modern healthcare.
Originally launched in 2020, Jewish Home teamed up with RIT researchers to capture structured data from each interaction, enabling formal analysis and the publishing of findings that identified common technical barriers and adoption challenges for older adults. These insights directly informed the design of TekHub, shaping workflows, training, and service delivery.
The technology applied in TekHub is not a single platform but an integrated model that combines one-to-one support, structured workflows, issue tracking, a ticketing and visit log, and a digital worker manual. Support spans smartphones, tablets, laptops, televisions, WiFi, email, video calling, social media, health monitoring devices, and telehealth tools across residential, remote, and home settings. A goal for TekHub is building confidence and trust and overcoming frustration through the ongoing, relationship-based service.
TekHub has strengthened Jewish Home’s strategic position as an innovator. It has evolved from a resource for on-campus residents into a formalized service line available to the broader community. Since inception, TekHub has supported more than 5,000 encounters with older adults, establishing a replicable model for technology enabled independence.
Home Grown:
Jewish Home — “Building More With Less Through AI Development”
This category recognizes a non-profit senior living organization that has independently developed and implemented a technology-driven improvement that enhances care or services.
Jewish Home’s IT team began using AI platforms in April 2025, starting with autocomplete on a small ordering app that produces chunks of usable code. The team soon segued to agentic development, where the tools would plan, write, refactor, and test across an entire codebase. The list continued to grow, spanning background jobs, data transformation, utilities, and a wide range of clinical and non-clinical workflow tools.
The Jewish Home team has been able to build or substantially advance several applications, such as replacing paper signatures with an objective, time-stamped record of presence in the room. Overall, using AI tools has produced a 10x reduction in development time per process, enabling the rebuilding and extending of internal processes that feed clinical, financial, and operational reporting. Some tasks that had taken weeks to accomplish now take only days, enabling efficiency as well as cost savings and the ability to support more staff and departments. It is estimated the staff of one full-time and one part-time employee now has the output capacity of a team of more than 30.
“Long-term care providers are not only embracing technology to improve their operations and the lives of their residents and patients, they’re doing it with exceptional energy and creativity,” said Jim Berklan, McKnight’s editorial and custom content director.
McKnight’s Technical Awards entries were judged by an independent panel of 24 senior-living and senior-care stakeholders.