Latest / The Shift Ahead with Ken Bell / The Execution Gap in SNF Care with Leigh Ann Frick
Transcript
- speaker-0: Administrators that sit in their office are not effective leaders. They have to be out there. You have to get in there and see and hear and smell and do all the things to really see what's being executed. speaker-1: I'm Ken Bell with Careability, and this is the shift ahead. Five minutes, three questions, and one expert, helping operators and clinicians prepare for what's coming next. Let's get into it. Why do so many SNFs know what better care looks like, but still struggle to make it happen? speaker-0: Most organizations have strategic plans, they have dashboards of of KPIs and information, they have committees and and meetings and all of those things. At the end of the day, it's the execution of those things, right? Utilizing those things to truly operationalize the vision, mission, values at the bedside, day in and day out. So sometimes a facility will identify a problem, it just can't improve. So at the end of the day. What I would say is we haven't truly dissected the problem such that we got to kind of the root cause. We haven't identified everyone's role in addressing that problem, or we haven't held folks accountable to their tasks. Quality assurance performance improvement is a great way to formally work through those kind of things so that you have the data and you have a plan to execute on so that you do get the improvement you're looking for. I have a a good friend in the industry, a colleague who says a person is not a process and a process is not a person. We've got to have backups and systems in place so that those things get done regardless. Therapy is a great example, right? We work to try to get them occupational therapy to dress themselves, but that has to be supported in the morning through the CNAs or the STNAs or or whomever to allow the patient to work to be successful, to do that on their own, even though it's quicker if I help. And do it for them. speaker-1: What should providers measure to know whether their quality initiatives and teamwork are actually improving care and outcomes? speaker-0: Let's just talk about therapy for a minute. For 20 plus years, we looked at our time with the patient. It was all about minutes. Really, the focus should be what are we doing with those minutes? How do we make the minutes matter? A lot of times we focus on the activity and not the result or the impact. But let's take functional outcomes. I'm a physical therapist, right? So if I improve their gait speed or we improve their functional reach so they're no longer a fall risk, we then have to connect that functional outcome to the clinical outcome, risk of falls. Weight loss, infections. How do you measure the things you prevented? How do you count the falls you that didn't happen because you were proactive and mitigated the risk? Or the rehospitalizations or the infections? speaker-1: What's the next shift that healthcare leaders should be preparing for? speaker-0: We've been talking about value-based care for for many, many years, but I really feel like we might actually be headed towards a true health care system instead of a sick care system. Going from reactive care to proactive care, identifying those risks sooner, mitigating the falls, mitigating the rehospitalizations, the infections, so that the outcomes and the quality is there, but that's going to take that. That interdisciplinary team. And it's also going to take some technology to be proactive. I think that's where AI might come in and some of these wearables. There's a lot of opportunity there to look at our residents and monitor and manage so that we can be more proactive than reactive. To have true alignment of value-based care, everybody should have some skin in the game. The incentives should be aligned. And that's not always the case, mostly because of logistics and fear, because it's all new. But we're certainly headed in that direction with some of these innovative programs and things of that nature. And honestly, I think it's a lot easier to show our value because I have confidence in what we can do. We being the skilled nursing facility as part of the health continuum, or we as therapy, to have some of what we do be reliant on the outcome. Everybody's got data, we've got reports, we've got this and we've got that. It's acting on it. That's where the rubber meets the road is using the data to to become better. Know your associates, know your employees, and know your residents. That's the key, right? Because you gotta have the relationship and the rapport with your employees for them to want to do their best work. And you gotta listen to the residents and the families to understand where we might be falling short. Cause you're gonna fall short. We're dealing with people and nobody's perfect. But if you have your pulse on both of those audiences, your your your probability of success is far greater.