An Occupational Therapist assistant by trade, Kacie Pritt, Regional Director of Development of HCF Management and BTG Ambassador, shares first-hand tactics and strategies for building occupancy in skilled nursing facilities.
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Lucas McCurdy, @SeniorLivingFan Owner, The Bridge Group Construction; Senior Living Construction Renovation, CapEx, and Reposition.
Joshua Crisp, Founder and CEO, Solinity; Senior Living Development, Management, Marketing and Consulting.
have different metrics that they have to meet too. And if they know that you're going to be a partner with them and help them to meet their goals, that has been one thing that has been very helpful. Welcome to season seven of Bridge the Gap, a podcast dedicated to informing, educating, and influencing the future of housing and services for seniors. Powered by sponsors AccuShilt, Align, Nick MapVision, ProCare HR, Sage, Hamilton Captel, Service Master, the Bridge Group Construction and Salinity, and produced by Salinity Marketing. Welcome to Bridge the Gap podcast, the senior living podcast. I'm Josh, your host on this wonderful Monday morning, and we have an awesome guest in store for you today. We have Casey Prit, the regional director of business development at HCF management. Welcome to the show. Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. Well, it is so good to be with you for our audience that may not know. You are also a 2024 Bridge the Gap ambassador. How has that been for you? It's been so fun. I've got to connect with a lot of new people and brainstorm with people that I wouldn't have met without joining. I feel like there's been a lot of education and collaboration that's come from it. And I love being a part of it. So as the regional director of business development, unpack a little for us what you do, what your job consists of, and a little bit about your background, Casey. So I'll start with, I'm an occupational therapist assistant by trade. I started as a therapist 14 years ago now, and then I went to be a director of rehab, went to be a liaison, and now I'm here in this role. HCF, we have seven nursing homes in Pennsylvania, and then I have one home house brand. And my job is sales, business development, anything that has to do is going out into the community marketing, and I do oversee a sales team of five business development reps as well. No spare time at all. It sounds like you are very, very busy. We were talking a little bit before the show. You've had some amazing success in your time at HCF and brought to the table a lot of strengths and strategies that have helped you boost census. And particularly over the last year and a half or so, when much of the industry is still recovering and census is on the rise, but I believe I heard you say a 26% jump in census. Is that correct? That's correct. Yeah. Well, congratulations. That is a huge improvement. So that alone gives us a lot to talk about because I know as a network, one of the things that we love to do is share success stories, share things that are working so that our industry can improve and have ideas share together. So unpack that a little bit for us. What has been working over the last year and a half for you? Yeah, I think that the biggest thing would be just the alignment between sales and operation. So Joe Weeks, who is the regional director of operations for Pennsylvania, he I often refer to him as my work wife. He has been my right hand man since day one. We've kind of looked at the region at a very strategic approach. When we first started, we saw, okay, where are buildings at right now? What's going on internally externally? How are the referrals coming in? Are we responding appropriately to those referrals? And just stay curious with the teams to try to identify opportunities and really get an understanding of what was going on. With that, we looked at like Joe would take the internal team. So he would make sure that they understood why it was important for sales and operations to work together. How both of us played a part in the bigger vision? We needed to align. We needed to collaborate. We needed to know, okay, you know, what is their staffing? What are they able to accommodate? Those back to the basic approaches, I guess now like you wouldn't really think about those basic things, but just going back to that and looking and seeing, okay, how are we actually functioning? Are we working as a team or not? And with that, the teamwork part of it, like making sure that the buildings have an investment in the sales team and the sales team has an investment in the building staff, that each department is working in unity and not as their own silos. Well, that makes a lot of sense. So bridging the gap between the sales teams and operational teams, I would imagine what you all have uncovered over the last year and a half. It's been a lot of different things. Can you give us some examples that may provide some insight that maybe common things that we're not thinking about because we think, oh, that's too simple and too basic, that should maybe be happening. But if we don't focus on it, those basics can slip through the cracks. I think the first thing is just open communication. If you do not communicate thoroughly and effectively direct to one another, usually there's gaps and people tend to fill those gaps with their own thoughts, which we saw a lot of. So that would be one example. I think that the second example would be say we had somebody that needed a bariatric transportation from the hospital to the nursing home or maybe had multiple appointments. There was a lot of facilities that were saying, oh, well, our transportation service cannot accommodate that here locally. And I'm like, okay, staying curious. When did you receive that information last? And it typically was like five years ago or prior to COVID that they were told that and things changed. So they just really being curious. And when you're being told, no, we can't or what those barriers are trying to dig in more to that to find out is this really right now happening? Or is this just something that somebody was told a while ago or was free COVID policy? And now it's not. Another thing too is the insurance payers. So during COVID, there was some things that changed and to be financially stable, they put things in place that made sense with insurance companies. You know, read looking at your contracts, are things up to date? Are we able to financially accommodate these patients now or not? Open communication. I think everyone would agree that's listening is huge importance. But sometimes it can kind of get lost if you don't have systems and processes and some formality to kind of force that to happen. Have you noticed anything that you're doing in particular that has established that as a regular way of doing business that you could share with the audience? Yeah, I think that there's two things with that. And the first thing would be just coming to the conversation as you're curious. You're not trying to judge anything that's that's being said, as well as support. Like you're there to support them. You're there to help them obtain their goals. And you can only do that if you know truly what's going on. So creating that culture within those internal teams. So, you know, the internal building itself and then also like the sales team at the building level, making sure that they have that communication as well. They're there to support one another. And then I think that the second thing with that don't minimize something. If you see that it is a potential barrier, make sure that you're talking about or if it's really hard for you to work through one thing, it shouldn't be that hard. We should be able to work through our processes very seamlessly. So if there's anything that's kind of holding that up, making sure that you're checking in on it, our teams meet daily. Like our sales team talks with our administrators every single day. And then we also have a weekly meeting that's focused around specific sales tactics and where we should be going, as well as the quarterly strategic planning. We have them do that together because it's their goals. It's their plan. You know, they both need to be invested and working together to get to the bigger vision. So, Casey, playing devil's advocate, I'm sitting here trying to think of how some of our listeners may be thinking, "Okay, I understand a weekly meeting, but daily, how can we possibly have a daily meeting?" Well, it seems like that has been one of the secret ingredients in having this open but consistent and frequent communication. So, how is the format of that? Is that more of a stand-up meeting? Is this more of, you know, a roundtable? How do you make that happen on a daily basis? So, some of the facilities start by in the morning. They just real quick, this is my bed availability. I have this many discharges. What do you have going on? It's not so much like a meeting where we have an agenda and we have to sit down and go over all of these. It's just a real quick touch point. Hey, what's going on? What do you have? That type of a thing. And then as we have admissions that are coming throughout the day or the week, we accept, we let them know, hey, yes, like this person's coming. You have no more female beds left. Okay, great. You know, and we just make sure that we communicate that to everybody on the sales team. I'm curious if Census has been a challenge, as I've heard from many operators, oftentimes, you know, we want to increase our Census and then we have staffing limitations. Have you all experienced in this explosive growth in raising your Census any challenges related to staffing and how are you accommodating that? Yes, there has been challenges and we still have it. Like I said, I had those seven SNF buildings and then I also have a home health branch and our home health branch we seem to have a little bit more of a harder time with staffing versus our buildings. And it's just been just don't stop hiring. That's kind of how we approached it. So just because your Census is down doesn't mean you stop recurting efforts and all that. So you got to be ready for it. So what are some other ways that you have been able to deeply increase your Census? I mean, 26 percent over the course of a year. So that's significant. I think also just communication with the hospitals or with your referral sources, making sure that that is also open and transparent. You hear a lot whenever you're in the hospitals and talking with, you know, the director of operations for discharge planning or whatever. I've heard multiple times that timely feedback or timely answers or timely responses is not a thing with skilled nursing facilities. It's a barrier that they frequently have. So finding out what is the best way to respond to those referrals and what is their expectation on a time limit? What goals do they have understanding kind of where their goals are? You just touched on a huge point, which is the communication with your referral sources and those can be various different types of referral sources. Those can also be various different personalities and work settings. I have heard oftentimes from sales teams that are out in the field or those that are communicating with different referrals and discharge planners, caseworkers and things like that, that it's oftentimes difficult to even get in touch with those and get a minute or get 30 seconds or two minutes to kind of update. So what are some tricks that you all have used that have been effective? Some methodologies to keep that open chain of communication. It just starts with the first conversation, the first time that you do talk with them is letting them know like we're a partner and be a partner. Figure out what that looks like for them and what's best for you, but remembering that they need you just as much as you need them. They have different expectations to meet as far as length of stays and how to get people out timely, especially if they're an observation level versus an inpatient. There's all of those different things. So they have different metrics that they have to meet too. And if they know that you're going to be a partner with them and help them to meet their goals, that has been one thing that has been very helpful. So I think what I'm summarizing here and you say is help your referral partners win. And because if you can help them win, they have more incentive to obviously be sending those referrals to you. And you're right, they've all got different metrics that they're being incentivized, so to speak, to do, that their performance is based on. And I imagine those can all be a little bit different as well, depending on the referral source and the unique situation. So I would imagine it takes some time just in diligence for you to know every single one of your referral partners and what they need specifically from you. That's a really big important job for a sales team and even keeping track of that specifically for you as a regional, you know, I know many of our listeners are in regional positions like yourself where a lot of communities, a lot of different types of staffing situations, a lot of different acuity that they deal with and a lot of different referral partners. How are you keeping up with that as a regional? How do you keep all your teams in line and know the different referral partners in all the different markets? I think that there has been a few times where I've been thrown into the fire for say and had to run the referrals and had to talk with, you know, working at that level when I was hiring and that made me see like, okay, so this is how things are functioning. And that was step one. Step two was now whenever I'm training my new sales rep, making sure that they understand and are introduced and we have the same vision as far as how I would like that to go or what we need to do or what the hospital would like to see happen. And then I have weekly meetings with my teams just to make sure that things are going the way that they should. And then I also have monthly and quarterly meetings with hospital executives just to make sure that at a higher level, I'm a partner and they're my partner. So it's the same thing. Do you have any, I would say like strategy behind specific time that your team spends, whether it's internal communication with operations versus a certain percentage of their time is selling, so to speak, communicating with those referral sources. Are there certain ratios that you're shooting for when you're kind of allocating your team's time accordingly? No. So with that, I think how we have approached it in Pennsylvania has been, okay, this is our goal. We do what we need to do to get to that goal, whether that is we're spending three hours there to help them out, you know, whatever referral partner that might be, or we only have to spend 15 minutes and we're good to go and on to the next. So I think that as far as like a per, you know, it takes us this long, or I don't have any set out expectations like that. I mean, if there's people that are listening to this that do have anything like that, that they would like to share back to me, I definitely would be open for that collaboration, just because I'm still kind of trying to figure out what is the best process. But right now that is what we are doing and that is what's working for us. I want to start rounding out the show here, talking about a couple of things. So you've obviously been very successful in your career. You've created a network for yourself. You've gotten very involved. You're now on our podcast talking about success tips for other professionals and sharing that wealth of knowledge. So for the young new leader that is out there listening, that's trying to learn and trying to determine how to establish their own network and get their foot in the door and really be successful, what are some maybe takeaways that you would give them if they don't hear anything else from the show? The biggest thing for me has been just to go for it. Don't let any sort of preconceived thoughts or fears hold you back. If you have questions, ask if you're trying to get a hold of somebody or connect with somebody new, maybe ask people that you already have connections with, "Hey, this is my idea. Can you help me get there?" And just start connecting with people. I think not limiting ourselves is the biggest opportunity there. Great words. Go for it and don't limit yourself on this Monday. Casey, thank you so much for joining us on this episode. It's been a pleasure having you. Thank you for being an ambassador to our industry and serving on the Ambassador team for Bridge the Gap. I appreciate all the work you do and all the ambassadors. It's almost that time of year you'll be seeing our Ambassador applications pop up on social and we hope that you'll take an opportunity to do that. Casey, thank you for joining us. We are going to connect our audience to you in our show notes and then on our website btgvoiced.com for all of our listeners. You can also view us on a variety of different channels and see Casey and connect with her. Thank you all for listening to another great episode of Bridge the Gap. Thanks for listening to Bridge the Gap podcast with Josh and Lucas. Connect with the BTG Network team and use your voice to influence the industry by connecting with us at btgvoiced.com.
