Senior living communities and a resident’s home – for years, operators have viewed the two things as separate concepts. Not anymore.
Senior living operators including Bloomfield, New Jersey-based Juniper Communities and its are on the leading edge of a movement to make senior living services more “place agnostic” with access to services resembling that of Amazon, a marketplace where users can shop for many different things in one place.
“In other words, providing our services not only to our residents in our communities but elsewhere,” Juniper Founder & CEO Lynne Katzmann said during a recent webinar hosted by Senior Housing News and other WTWH Media publications. “Another way of looking at it would be simply to say we’re separating the real estate from the services.”
Katzmann and Juniper are not only seeking to provide multiple service lines, the company is looking to completely rethink care and how and where it is delivered. All of these efforts are coming together under the lens of integration wherein multiple departments from dining to activities collaborate to improve operations.
“Without integration, you don’t have quality as defined by the payer, by the consumer or the provider,” Katzmann said. “Integration is also key if you want to ultimately personalize care and service, and I think that’s critically important as we move forward, particularly in senior living.”
Building a more place-agnostic senior living model
Juniper has worked for years to try and give residents more access to the care services they need. The operator is among the founding members of the Perennial Consortium, which advocates for value-based care plans and helps other operators set up their own plans. Because of the operator’s involvement in value-based care arrangements, Juniper’s leaders are keenly aware of what it takes to integrate care and service between senior living and providers who work within communities to help residents.
Among Juniper’s tools for resident wellbeing is “Connect4Life” which brings on-site primary care, therapy, pharmacy and labs alongside medical concierges to deliver care. The company also in 2022 launched Catalyst, a program that delivers lifestyle concierge services to members focusing on health and wellness.
Using that approach, Juniper can keep departments from operating in silos and more effectively navigate resident care in all parts of the community.
“It’s the departments that used to be known as food and beverage, housekeeping, transport, activities and wellness. Those are now all coming together, we integrate them internally so that they can serve our residents in an integrated continuum,” Katzmann said.
Now is the time for operators to begin incorporating the practices to prepare for the wave of baby boomers that is on their doorstep. Juniper is also looking at ways it can further extend its offerings due to the infrastructure it has built up so far.
The company is integrating the current services it provides and working with other providers, ideally to create an “integrated ecosystem of care and service around an individual.” New tech and partnerships will enable operators to give residents more of what they want.
Juniper is in the early stages of working with a partner to provide more services to residents under the GUIDE program, which strengthens care coordination and care management for residents living with dementia.
While Katzmann sees GUIDE as an extension of its existing offerings, it may not work for operators who have not already invested in building out their service offerings.
“I think once you have to go out into the community. I think it is very difficult to add the staff necessary to make those services viable,” she said.
Katzmann describes Juniper’s care coordination efforts as “conducting the orchestra,” and to keep up has expanded to having access to home care, transportation, fitness coaching and more for them to maintain wellness. The practice allows Juniper to expand its services into the home market.
“By conducting and acknowledging that we are providing services and doing so not only for the people that live with us, we’re able to tap a larger market, the home market,” Katzmann said. “We believe that will enable us to expand the base of people from whom we can collect fees for providing packages of services, and that will be able to create a marketplace similar to what Amazon does.”
She added: “It opens up a pipeline for people living in our buildings. It reduces things like marketing and sales costs. And we think it’s the future.”
Pushing for better reimbursement
Juniper is also among the operators on the forefront of pushing for additional reimbursement for services that are already standard, particularly from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
“The reality of our situation is that we’ve been providing many of these services on an indirect basis over an extended period of time,” Katzmann said. “What we are trying to do is acknowledge what we already do and then find payment sources in terms of the care services that we provide.”
Because of its work with the Perennial Consortium, the organization has managed to redefine what “yields health” for older adults due to the number of residents who come into care with chronic illnesses. To help offset the costs, Juniper established a health plan for residents that includes medication management, nutrition and social engagement.
As a result, Juniper receives payments for the care coordination it provides and a budgetable fee each month for every member who is part of the health plan and helping keep them out of the hospital.
“We’re also paid for more services than we were when we first started,” Katzmann said.
Operators aren’t the only ones able to get additional benefits from CMS’ actions. Around two years ago, residents were able to receive rent subsidies through Medicare Advantage to afford safe housing, which a lack of access to is now defined as a social detriment of health. As such, senior housing costs go directly to the member rather than the community.
“They get the offset, and it’s an incentive for being in an environment where care and service can be coordinated and where the economies of scale can be realized,” Katzmann said.
The post How Integrated Services Helps Juniper Communities Provide More ‘Place Agnostic’ Services appeared first on Senior Housing News.
Source: For the full article please visit Senior Housing News
Be First to Comment