Client Testimonial – LifeCircles PACE

Background

LifeCircles PACE has offered an in-home alternative to traditional nursing home living since 2009, serving older adults across the Muskegon and Holland areas of West Michigan. The organization's population skews majority female, dual-eligible, and in the 70-79 age range, most within their first one to three years of PACE enrollment. Like every PACE organization, LifeCircles operates under a uniquely complex regulatory environment, one where documentation, compliance, and claims management aren't separate back-office concerns, but core to how the model functions.

Moving to CollabriosONE

As part of Collabrios's move to unify its PACE technology under a single, modern platform, LifeCircles PACE transitioned from TruChart to CollabriosONE.

"When it was announced that TruChart would no longer be supported, we were faced with a critical decision: find a replacement system quickly or risk operating on an unsupported platform with no ongoing development, security updates, or vendor support," said Joshua Knights, Health Systems Data Administrator at LifeCircles PACE. "That urgency forced us to evaluate the market and be deliberate about what we were looking for in a successor system."

That deliberateness mattered, because a generic healthcare EHR was never going to be sufficient. TruChart itself had served its purpose, but it also demanded significant manual workaround: staff pulling data from multiple sources, reconciling information in Excel, and assembling reports that should have been available natively. The sunset accelerated a transition LifeCircles likely would have needed to make eventually regardless.

Why CollabriosONE

When LifeCircles evaluated CollabriosONE, the fit was clear: a true single platform for documentation, service orders, claims, and compliance tracking, with ongoing development built around the evolving CMS regulatory landscape, and built for PACE in a way nothing else on the market matched.

Implementation, Under Pressure

The timing could hardly have been more difficult. LifeCircles moved to CollabriosONE during an active CMS audit, adding significant pressure to an already complex transition.

"The transition process was challenging, we will be honest about that," Knights shared. The approach that got them through it: designating staff members as "superusers," true system experts who could support colleagues and troubleshoot in real time, paired with a transition plan that explicitly accounted for staff resistance rather than treating it as a surprise. "Building that expectation in from the beginning, rather than being caught off guard by it, made a meaningful difference. It takes time, but once the team gets over that initial learning curve, the system's depth becomes an asset rather than a burden."

Resistance, when it came, was met with transparency. "Any time you ask clinical and administrative staff to change the systems they rely on daily, there will be pushback, and our team was no exception," Knights noted. "We addressed it by being transparent about the transition timeline, acknowledging that it would be difficult before it got easier, and giving staff designated go-to resources, our superusers, who could answer questions and troubleshoot in real time without pulling from leadership bandwidth. Over time, as staff began to see the system's practical benefits in their daily work, the resistance gave way to appreciation."

The Results

The clearest outcome shows up in LifeCircles' compliance record. The organization was audited by CMS in fall 2023, right in the middle of its EHR transition, and came out with corrective action plans to address. Using Collabrios throughout that period, LifeCircles closed those corrective action plans in just three attempts, when the typical minimum is four.

That trajectory continued. In 2026, LifeCircles' annual state audit produced zero items requiring correction, a first for the organization.

We believe the documentation discipline and compliance workflows built into Collabrios contributed directly to that outcome.

Day to day, the shift shows up as recovered time. Reports that once required pulling data from multiple sources and stitching them together in Excel now generate directly. Built-in workflow prompts and required fields keep staff on track with compliance documentation without a separate oversight process, and modules like the Morning Meeting tool have become seamlessly integrated into daily care team rhythms.

"Perhaps most meaningfully, time that was previously spent on administrative reconciliation is now redirected toward participant care," Knights said. "Fields within the system, like those in the Grievance Module, are built to keep staff compliant by requiring key details before allowing a record to move forward, which both protects the organization and gives staff time back. This also has a trickle-down effect in improving participant care and ensuring more of our time and resources can go towards their care."

A Candid Take on the Transition

LifeCircles was direct about what surprised them, in both directions. The depth of reporting available in CollabriosONE stood out immediately, no more manual Excel work to make monthly and quarterly reports reflect accurate data, along with the level of support from their account manager, who proactively loops in the learning services team whenever LifeCircles wants to explore a module further.

The organization also noted they're still discovering the platform's full scope: "We're starting to learn that we can do just about everything inside the EHR, and that's how it was built and intended to be used."

Advice for Other PACE Organizations

LifeCircles' recommendation for organizations considering a similar move centers on preparation. "Deeply research all details and compare what different systems offer," Knights advised. "Having so many different modules available in one robust system is hard to beat." They emphasized building a detailed transition plan that accounts for staff resistance from the outset, and investing early in superuser development. "That expertise takes time to build, and having it in place earlier would have shortened our learning curve considerably."

Looking back, LifeCircles wishes they'd grasped CollabriosONE's full scope sooner: "We were initially solving problems outside the system that the system was designed to handle." Their advice to incoming organizations is to invest heavily in the exploration phase, both before and immediately after go-live, digging into every module rather than just the basics.

Is It Worth It?

It's worth the troubles transitioning to Collabrios, especially if you are a PACE organization who is looking to self-adjudicate and manage your claims. There's a bit of a learning process, but once you get used to the software and understand what it's built to do, you find a deeper appreciation for it.

LifeCircles pointed specifically to how CollabriosONE incorporates new annual CMS rules directly into the system, citing the SDAG dashboard as an example that helps track requirements like lab review timeframes and service scheduling. "It helps encourage us to stay on top of regulatory requirements and stay audit-ready, but you need to take initiative and utilize it."

Compared to peer organizations still managing care, claims, and compliance through general EHRs never built for PACE, LifeCircles sees the PACE-specific design as a meaningful differentiator, one reinforced every time a CMS rule changes and the system already reflects it, rather than requiring manual adaptation.