As the demand for home health services continues to rise, organizations and agencies are looking for solutions to accommodate it.
With more people preferring to age in place in the comfort of their homes, they're also preferring to receive care there as well.
The home health care sector has responded in kind with a slew of mergers and acquisitions between large organizations and smaller agencies, increasing service offerings, and investing in their employees to retain staff amid a severe workforce shortage.
Here are three HealthLeaders stories featuring insights from home health executives whose organizations are keeping pace with the sector's growth.
Culture is Key
After joining Harbors Home Health and Hospice as its CEO in December 2022, one of Ryan Larsen's goals was to foster a culture of education and creativity. From his observations, agencies that did similarly were better able to navigate the post-pandemic climate.
"I'm starting to see first-year clinicians that are coming out of school showing interest in home health and hospice care, but for them to be successful, agencies are going to need to create some sort of educational culture where we're not throwing these first-year therapists and nurses into the deep end," Larsen told HealthLeaders.
"At Harbors, we're trying to create that training culture."
Putting Things in Perspective
Interim Healthcare CEO Jennifer Sheets, began her career in healthcare as a nurse. Having that background, she believes, has helped her as a leader, enabling her to understand what her own employees in the field experience.
"We talk a lot about results, just like anybody else, but we also spend a lot of time talking about how we engage our workforce," she told HealthLeaders. "How we find, train, and keep the best people, how we add real consumer-directed care."
Collective Collaboration
When preparing his testimony for a Senate hearing on healthcare's workforce shortage, Leonardo Seoane, MD was assisted by other departments within the Ochsner Health System. Seoane, who serves as the system’s executive vice president and chief academic officer, spoke on the group's behalf to give legislators an idea of the struggles he and his colleagues are facing due to the workforce shortage.
Through additional collaborations with local partners, the system has created some solutions—for example, collaborating with community colleges to develop a pre-apprenticeship LPN program for high school students.
Jasmyne Ray is the revenue cycle editor at HealthLeaders.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Agencies that promote an organizational culture of education and creativity have been better able to navigate post-pandemic growth.
Having executives with previous clinical experience can bring valuable insights into the C-suite.
Collaboration and partnerships with local groups can benefit the organization and the community it serves.