Jim’s Notebook: AI and the Future of Home-Based Care with New Day CEO Kathy Poland
Today, I am grateful for air-conditioning, ice and chocolate. Chicago is scorching hot this week with temperatures expected to rise beyond 100 degrees. Not everyone has the privilege of taking shelter and relief from the heat, and I am thankful for the opportunities that I have.
The chocolate thing is largely irrelevant to the temperature; I just happen to be eating some at the moment even though it’s the early morning.
While I’m starting a new day here with a sweet treat, I’m also reflecting on New Day Healthcare. I recently enjoyed a conversation with Kathy Poland, the newly appointed CEO of the home health and hospice provider. She succeeded prior CEO G. Scott Herman who sadly passed away about four months ago. Since then, Kathy has served as the company’s interim leader.
I published the interview on Hospice News last Friday. However, due to the length of the piece, some material didn’t make it into that version. To my chagrin and that of my fellow journalists, most readers only peruse about 20% to 28% of words on the page when it comes to web-based content, according to research by the Nielson Norman Group. So we tend to try to keep things on the shorter side when possible.
I wanted to share the rest of the interview here, including Kathy’s thoughts about New Day’s home health business, the growing role of AI and what would make her feel like a success one year into her tenure as New Day’s top executive.
Here are the excerpts:
What are your growth plans for home-based care service lines in the next two years?
On home health, we’re in three states, and we’re caring for over 4,000 in those three states on our home health side. Medicare Advantage is obviously a big part of that, a large part of our population is Medicare Advantage. We have lots of contracts with Medicare Advantage payers. When I say lots, it’s an excess of 30 plus, where we are partnered with these managed care payers.
So you’ve got to be able to go in and talk to these referral sources, these hospital systems in acute settings, and say that we’re ready to not only take all of your managed care payers or Medicare Advantage payers, but we’re definitely here to take care of the ones that are your traditionals.
You have to have enough people to take care of the patients. It’s one thing to get the referral; it’s another thing to actually have caregivers, to have nurses, to have therapists to actually care for the patients.
So, the other part of the puzzle is you’ve got to have a culture and a recruiting system in place where you can attract people and retain people, and we excel. We retain most of our clinicians. We have a very low turnover rate.
Are there any AI use cases that you think are overhyped currently from your perspective?
There’s actually everything that we’re looking at right now, not overhyped. I think the word AI might be thrown around a little bit too much, and sometimes people will say, well, “I use AI.”
Well, then you have to ask for more clarifying questions: What does that mean? Does that mean using ChatGPT, or does that mean you’re using some technology that’s really impacting the patient care and the ability to go see more patients, or the ability to see improved outcomes?
What does it really mean? Because AI, the term is used a lot until you ask the clarifying question. Otherwise, you really can’t understand exactly what it means for your business.
Now looking into the future, if we were to have this conversation say a year from now, what accomplishments would make you feel like you’ve had success?
Well, step one is that the team remains intact. We have an amazing team that we’ve built, and we need that team to remain intact, and everyone to understand that we’re marching in the same direction.
Scott was a big personality. Scott was a big part of our culture. Scott, if you knew him, he could light up a room, he can make everyone laugh in some crazy ways, and he learned how to make people feel really comfortable bringing out the tough stuff, because humor was something he excelled at.
When you lose someone like Scott, [when] we all work together for decades and you lose someone, there’s an uneasiness at first. What does this mean? What does it mean for our company? What does it mean for our team? What did we all work together for all these years? What about everything we built?
So, keeping us intact is super important. We’re in a good spot, and then now is just building on that momentum [from everything that we have done together], keeping Scott top of mind, keeping the legacy top of mind, celebrating the wins. Then, overall, it’s about taking good care of patients. Are outcomes exceptional? They remain exceptional. Are we taking care of more that need our help? Are caregivers staying here with us? Are people staying here with us? And are we performing as expected? All those things are constant.
Those are the plates, and they’re always spinning. If all those things happen over the next 12 months, then it’s been a good year.
That’s it for today. I hope you’re all staying cool and comfortable. Try having some chocolate, but don’t let it melt.