Senior Living & Wellness: Part 1

FOX Vice President of Senior Living Partnerships Jason Hazel, PT, DPT, looks at the business relationships between senior living communities and rehabilitation providers. To him, three factors can make these relationships more power than just a community and its vendor. He looks at how they can be a true, collaborative partnership.

Transcript

Hi, I’m Jason Hazel, Doctor of Physical Therapy and Vice President of Senior Living Partnerships with FOX Rehabilitation.

And today, I wanted to take a few minutes to start a two-part video series that we’re going to be doing about senior living and our ability as a practice to partner with senior living communities that we’re fortunate enough to serve, and some of the things that drive our success collaboratively in those environments.

So the focus of today’s conversation is going to be our core services: the crux of what we do from a PT, OT, and speech-language pathology perspective. And then, the second part of the series is really going to dive off into functional wellness, how we define that, and how we help partners maintain that for their residents.

So, how do we do that?

Our core is made up of really six big principles – with two of those six that I’m really going to touch on and focus on today. So number one: constant, consistent communication – sitting down and having interdisciplinary, collaborative communication with the clinical teams on-site within our partner communities that we’re fortunate enough to serve. And the key with that interdisciplinary communication is it gives you another set of clinical eyes and ears to help identify potential issues coming down the pipe from a functional perspective for your residents.

We aim to be a partner, not just a vendor within the communities that we’re fortunate enough to serve and want to be able to proactively identify things that are going on from a medical and functional wellness perspective, and then also communicate back to our partner communities when issues pop up or let folks know about how the progression of services is going.

That communication then prompts, in many instances, the activation of skilled therapy services through an order from a referring physician, physician’s assistant, or nurse practitioner. And that’s really where we get the ball rolling and what it is that we do because we spend a significant amount of time with our physical, occupational, and speech therapists on how to properly dose and intervene with the older adult when it comes to each one’s scope of practice — be it physical, occupational, or speech therapies.

And, that dosage follows the literature. And, the literature shows us the outcomes, the results, and the effects that we can get with an older adult from a functional perspective are the same, if not better, than a younger adult. Again, if dosed properly.

And, that dosage is driven for us by the most cutting-edge research and literature that’s out there. And, we spend an extensive amount of time teaching and training our clinicians out in the field on that proper and most effective method of dosage.

Last but not least: What does it lead to?

And hot off the presses here from our business intelligence tools that we’ve built for our partner communities, I’ve got some of our outcomes.

You know: The key driver here is to keep your residents aging in place, functionally well, and staying in your community for as long as we possibly can. And several key tests from the physical therapy realm in particular that I pulled today are the timed up and go — a great measure to assess functional independence, gait speed, balance.

We’re showing with our patients from the start of care to end of care a 33 percent improvement.

A chair rise test: That’s the simple test of standing and sitting to assess and lower extremity strength which is a predictor for fall risk. We’re showing a 34 percent improvement within the patients that we serve in senior living.

And last but not least the Berg Balance Scale which is a 14-point test that measures someone’s balance, as the name of the test would tell you. And, we’re showing it 31 percent improvement with the patients within senior living that we serve.

All of those total up to fewer falls, fewer hospitalizations, longer length of stay, and, ultimately, functional wellness. So again, two-part series we want to talk about: The core: We’re exorbitantly proud of.

Our outcomes are great.

We want senior living owner and operators to know out there that there are partners out there with solutions and these skilled therapies interventions can significantly improve the independence and functional wellness of the residents within the communities that we partner with.

And so in our next video series, what I want to talk about extensively is: How do we keep that functional wellness that we’ve started the ball rolling on, what are some solutions for some of our senior living partners.

The big key that we want to stress in both parts of this video series is this: We want to be your partner. We don’t want to be a vendor.

We want to serve your community and serve the residents within it. You don’t have to do this alone. There are solutions out there for the older adults living within your communities and there, are good partners out there.

So, if you have questions, if you want to know about who we are and what we do as a practice, we’ve set up an e-mail address. It’s slc@foxrehab.org. We look forward to talking to you and hope we can partner in the future.

Thank you.