John O’Connor, editorial director Remember the familiar old weigh stations along the aging care progression? A patient’s path toward increasing dependence typically looked something like this: First, some assistance at home, then maybe senior living, followed by a trip to the hospital for illness or accident repair, and finally post-acute care and possibly hospice. This traditional pathway faces disruption by what would have been an unlikely suspect until recently: hospitals. Increasingly, these players are embracing a new way to grow their business. The strategy is known as hospital-at-home ..read more

The 2024 AHCA/NCAL Quality Summit will take place Monday through Wednesday in San Antonio, giving providers innovative ideas, strategies and inspiration to ensure high-quality care. Programming and educational sessions are aligned with the seven categories of the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence: leadership, strategy, customers, measurement and analysis, workforce, operations, and results.  The Baldrige framework serves as the cornerstone for AHCA/NCAL’s National Quality Award program, which has helped long-term care and assisted living communities deliver better care for mor ..read more

How’s this for a truly perplexing recipe? Nursing homes are closing, access to care for seniors and adults with disabilities is being restricted, Medicaid reimbursement can’t keep pace with the true cost of care, and fewer and fewer workers are available for staffing the plethora of jobs available throughout the long-term care continuum. Yet regulators in Washington, D.C., think the perfect addition to this already-blistering five-alarm chili is an unfunded, one-size-fits-all staffing mandate. No matter how it might be garnished and presented, there’s nothing that will help providers and resi ..read more

It’s true that it’s more important how you finish a race than how you start it. But if the opening sprint of a new public player in the long-term care sector is any indication, it’s going to be a leader to watch for quite a while. The PACS Group held the company’s first-ever earnings call Tuesday and company leaders gave fans plenty to smile about. Fresh off an eye-popping $423 million initial public offering, the provider giant plowed ahead with the call sooner than some had expected. The public airing was in addition to some other very public appearances during which the company’s top execs ..read more

When I was still a prepubescent boy with many questions, never once did my father take me aside and explain how smiles are made. As a result, I’ve always been a terrible smiler, simply because I never learned how to do it properly.  That’s why, to this day, whenever a camera turns my direction, I instinctively tilt my head and raise my eyebrows in an alert but inscrutable expression, eyes wide, lips pressed tightly shut, until the threat recedes. The author pauses to demonstrate his time-honored smile replacement technique. I’ve honed this technique for decades, thousands of times. It’s ..read more

It seems as though we read about another healthcare organization falling victim to a cyber attack every week. It doesn’t matter if you’re an urban, rural, large or small healthcare entity or if you’re a nursing home or a hospital. In the world of cybersecurity, you are a target. The latest research suggests that protected health information (PHI) sells for an average of $250 per record and can reach up to $1000 per record. We’ve now progressed from the “it won’t happen to us” approach to the reality of “when it happens to us.” This may have nursing homes wondering if they have taken the neces ..read more

According to Wikipedia, “Bigfoot, also commonly referred to as Sasquatch, is a large and hairy human-like mythical creature alleged by some to inhabit forests in North America, particularly in the Pacific Northwest.”  Other sources say that those who claim to have seen Bigfoot describe everything from a large, upright ape to an actual hairy human, sometimes standing over eight feet tall and depicted as powerfully built.  I have always been fascinated and a bit annoyed at the possibility of Bigfoot. Fascinated because, who doesn’t want Sasquatch to be real, a bit annoyed because I ju ..read more

In this episode, Bharat Monteiro, GM, Senior Living & Long-Term Care at MatrixCare, teams up with Chris Pugliese, Director of Interoperability at MatrixCare, to uncover the pressing challenges and promising opportunities in achieving seamless transitions within long-term care. Join them as they provide actionable insights and strategies to empower providers in navigating the complex landscape of interoperability, driving tangible improvements in resident care and outcomes ..read more

Photo credit: Studio Romantic/Shutterstock This article is sponsored by Otsuka America Pharmaceutical, Inc. In long-term care environments, it’s not uncommon for site staff including nurses, administrators, physical therapists, physicians and others to work closely with patients living with various neurological conditions. Along with this comes the potentially complex task of both recognizing and appropriately diagnosing health conditions that may present similarly but require different care. Of note, one neurological condition that is often mistaken for depression is Pseudobulbar Affect (PBA ..read more

A study published in the April issue of the Journal of the American Medical Directors Association provides some guidance about how much recreational TV watching and screen time is detrimental to mental and physical health among middle-aged and older adults. Given the many hours of time spent in front of the TV for older adults in long-term care settings, the findings from this study are particularly relevant. Basically, the amount of time spent watching TV increases the risk of having dementia, a stroke or Parkinson’s disease.  The objective of the study, “Associations between recreation ..read more