Legislative Visits Foster Greater Understanding

Joliet, Bourbonnais, and West Chicago hosted key state representatives, giving insightful tours of our unique services.

“More than opportunities to display our facilities – these were crucial opportunities to highlight the meaningful work we do and the challenges we face to help ensure that our voices are heard and patient needs are at the forefront of legislative discussions." ~Sabrena McCarley, Director of Clinical Reimbursement

Joliet Terrace welcomed Senator Rachel Ventura, a Joliet native and representative for Illinois’ 43rd Senate District. Her visit provided a valuable opportunity to discuss our services and advocate for the needs of our patients.

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Bourbonnais Terrace hosted District State Representative Jackie Haas from the 79th House District. This visit was instrumental in addressing our centers' challenges and fostering a deeper understanding of our commitment to patient care.

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West Chicago Terrace hosted Senator Karina Villa, a West Chicago native, and Representative Maura Hirschauer, a 103rd General Assembly of Illinois member, for a tour showcasing the unique services offered to patients. Both senators are strong advocates for the community and mental health services. This visit provided an excellent opportunity to discuss challenges and successes and engage in a lively conversation to benefit community members.

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Eagle Scout’s Generous Gift Brightens The Terrace

Eagle Scout John Gorsica recently donated two hand-crafted raised planter boxes and an outdoor bench to the Terrace Nursing Home. John financed and made these items as part of his summer Eagle Scout project from Troop 303 in Grayslake.

The planters and bench are a wonderful gift for everyone at The Terrace who will enjoy the beauty of the outdoors and John's hard work!

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Based on input from and questionnaires completed by our team members, our centers are now officially certified as Great Places to Work!

An official certification process that gathers from people who work at our centers revealed that our company-wide employee trust index level rose over prior years by 26.4%, and our response rate surged by 63.8%! In fact, the following communities boast a trust index of over 65%:

• Bourbonnais Terrace
• Crestwood Terrace
• Frankfort Terrace
• The Terrace
• West Chicago Terrace

Special shout out to Joliet Terrace for their astounding 98% participation rate! Well done, and thank you to everyone who helps make our centers Great Places to Work!

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Transitional Care Management Director of Clinical Reimbursement Sabrina McCarley, MBA-SL, OTR/L, CLIPP, RAC-CT, QCP, FAOTA, offers her expertise in the following article from McKnight's Long-Term Care News. Audits of skilled nursing providers are likely to increase this year, with a growing number of federal and state recovery audits adding to specialized compliance reviews announced last year. In 2023, regulators instituted audits of facilities using potentially inappropriate diagnoses of schizophrenia, as well as a new, five-claim audit of every US nursing home that was specifically meant to root out improper payments. Now, routine audits run by the federal Medicare Fee for Service Recovery Audit Program and states looking to ensure payment accuracy through the Medicaid program are roaring back to life. “While RAC audits practically halted during the COVID-19 pandemic, activity has picked up substantially following the end of the public health emergency,” attorney Amy Fouts wrote in BakerHostetler’s Healthcare Industry 2023 Year in Review published Thursday. While some of the Recovery Audit Contractor activity is moving toward outpatient services, she warned inpatient providers such as skilled nursing operators to stay vigilant for more scrutiny. So, too, does Sabrena McCarley, director of clinical Reimbursement for Transitional Care Management. While she won’t go so far as to call any 2023 increases in RAC activity an “explosion,” she said her company and others who provide billing and compliance support to nursing homes are seeing “an increase in audits of everything.” “The floodgates, essentially, have opened,” said McCarley, secretary of the National Association of Rehabilitation Providers and Agencies. “When you just talk about the RAC audit, people think, ‘Oh I’m totally excepted. I don’t take Medicare. I’m never going to see an audit.’ … They kind of get in this trap. They’re in a bubble, and then they don’t know what to do when their bubble bursts.”

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Transitional Care Management’s new Administrator in Training program (AIT) provides hands-on, specialized learning and mentoring opportunities.

The nine 2023/2024 participants were invited to expand their horizons (and their career options) with Transitional Care University’s inaugural four-module, 460-hour administrative learning opportunity. They will gain practical career-advancing knowledge and experience in Long-Term Care, Skilled Nursing, Memory Care, and Behavioral Health. Transitional Care University AIT grads earn:

• Supplemental, fast-track specialized training that is an ideal “next step” for professionals on an administrative career path
• A certificate of course completion
• Skills to further enhance career progression
• Administrator in Training title
• Opportunity for growth within the organization.

In addition, this program meets supplemental criteria for LNHA exam (dependent on individual licensure criteria) and helps prepare candidates to take licensure exams. The program will run annually with next class starting Fall of 2024. Talk to your administrator or contact Contact Terri Galloway, Director of Talent Acquisition, at TGalloway@tc-mgmt.com for more information.

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Transitional Care-managed communities are setting new industry standards!

Terrace Care communities’ new Life Sills program, which features 10 key modules for teaching key skill sets for building competencies in daily routines that are needed to live more independently, earned the 2023 National Association of Rehab Providers and Agencies (NARA) Impact Award. “The purpose of the NARA Impact Award is to recognize excellence in the creation of a program that demonstrates a positive clinical impact, exemplifies a new dimension of performance, and can be easily replicated or adapted,” says Linda Riccio, OT/L, Vice President of Therapy Services (pictured left). “Our new Life Skills program does exactly that!” Linda collaborated with a team of Terrace Care and Transitional Care experts, including Michelle Stuercke, Chief Clinical Officer and Najat Williams and Yomi Adebogun, Behavioral Program Specialists, to develop and launch the program. “The Terrace Care Life Skills program is a market differentiator for our communities,” says Charles Ross, Chief Strategy Officer. “It helps us improve census, impress referral sources, reduce re-hospitalization, and improve length of stay.” Denise Norman, President of Transitional Care Management (pictured lower left) adds,“Most importantly, our award-winning Life Skills program offers staff, residents, and guests a new toolbox of resources to help them better meet mental health and discharge preparation needs. It is a WIN/WIN for all!”  

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By Alex Spanko | July 27, 2020 Developing new post-acute and long-term care infrastructure during normal times isn’t always easy — in fact, for one Illinois company, the phased opening of three new skilled nursing facilities this year represented the culmination of more than five years of work. But as COVID-19 continues to reveal the fatal shortcomings of outdated nursing home design, calls for newer facilities with private rooms and a higher level of care have already grown louder, and the team at Innovative Health believes they’ve made the right bet on what seniors and hospital partners will want in a post-pandemic world. “Time will tell our success, but I think the model is so different that people are really willing to give us an opportunity to show them how different it is,” Innovative Health chief strategy officer Charles Ross told SNN. The company is two-thirds of the way through opening a trio of new skilled nursing facilities in the western Chicago suburbs of Mundelein, Lisle, and Aurora, Ill., all branded under the Thrive name. The former two are currently open and operational, with the third set to open later this year. The Mundelein project, Thrive of Lake County, replaced a county-run facility that Innovative Health initially applied to take over on an interim basis around six years ago. The other two, Thrive of Lisle and Thrive of Fox Valley, represent completely new developments, with a total price tag of about $80 million for all three. Thrive of Lake County’s status as a replacement for an existing nursing home helped to ease the project through Illinois’s certificate of need (CON) process; like many other states, Illinois limits the number of skilled nursing beds that can legally operate in an attempt to prevent oversaturation and, in theory, maintain a high standard of quality.

“Essentially, we were de-bedding the market by 39 beds, so the CON board obviously understood what we were trying to accomplish,” Innovative Health principal owner Brad Haber said. That doesn’t mean the road was easy: Even with that advantage, it took the the Innovative Health team a year to secure the CON approval on the replacement building, while facing challenges on the CONs for the remaining two facilities. The Lisle facility also saw delays with receiving formal certification for Medicare and Medicaid residents from the state of Illinois, despite serving residents covered under private insurance plans, according to Brian Cloch, principal of Innovative Health partner Transitional Care Management. Thrive’s experience is indicative of the inherent challenges in designing and building new skilled nursing inventory in many markets. Aside from CON rules, which often do not allow the creation of new nursing home beds without contraction somewhere else, investors aren’t always willing to place a bet on new construction in a space perceived as particularly susceptible to abrupt changes in government reimbursements. Some companies have seen preliminary success with the high-end “medical resort” model, with real estate investment trusts (REITs) and other investors putting up tens of millions to construct luxurious properties that cater to younger seniors who want a hotel-like experience while recovering from surgeries and other acute events. But on the whole, investment in new nursing homes has been limited, contributing to a landscape where operators in the space generally have the oldest physical plants in the greater senior care spectrum. The average nursing home still features shared rooms and narrow corridors that consumers and their families don’t prefer — and which serve as particularly virulent breeding grounds for COVID-19. In Massachusetts, for instance, state health officials have noted that rules requiring new nursing facilities to have single-occupancy rooms have been on the books since the early 2000s — but because so many older facilities were grandfathered in through waivers, a lack of substantial new construction means that the state still has a primarily old stock of nursing home real estate. The pandemic has thus brought nursing home design into the greater public consciousness, with the Green House model of small-home design emerging as a particular area of focus for big-picture thinkers in long-term care. But Thrive’s strategy of lower bed counts and ground-up design could also position the buildings for life amid a pandemic with no end in sight. “What makes us different is that we have made the commitment to the design of the building and to the care delivery model,” Cloch said. The Thrive buildings have all the trappings of the higher-end medical resorts that have spurred investor excitement, such as a kitchen with a professional pizza oven and lobbies that look more like boutique hotels than nursing homes. But the luxury design touches belie a wider strategy. The Mundelein campus, for instance, features three separate buildings for each of its main care models — short-term rehab, long-term care, and skilled memory care — connected in the center by a shared kitchen. Each of the buildings has its own separate entrance, dining area, therapy gym, and other amenities, according to Cloch. Unlike some other new developments, the Thrive facility in Mundelein also accepts Medicaid, allowing residents to remain at the facility long-term if they end up needing more than the 100 days of Medicare-covered post-acute care, Cloch noted. The other two properties, which will both feature 60 beds and serve only post-acute residents, were designed with the potential for reconfiguration in mind, Ross aid. “The way the different centers are designed if we should ever need to separate suites because of COVID or clinical programming or really any other reason … we’ve got multiple units that can be closed off and work independently from each other,” Ross said. “So it gives us a lot of flexibility.” The Thrive team has focused on showing the buildings’ worth to hospital partners, which have been forced to reconsider their own post-acute strategies amid a sharp drop in elective surgeries and patient concern about going to an institutional setting after witnessing tens of thousands of COVID-19 deaths in American nursing homes. While Ross acknowledged that health systems in Thrive’s markets have accelerated their push to send more people directly home, he noted that they still recognize the need for institutional care for some portion of the population — and that providing something different, with private rooms and bathroom facilities, can help set operators apart. “They’re still finding there’s a core population that just isn’t going to do well at home, and it’s going to need transitional care, and need our products,” Ross said. READ ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED STORY HERE    

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