Via Christi Senior Services: Mission and Value
Long Term Care
Written by Amanda Gaines   
Thursday, 01 November 2007
rp Via Christi Senior Services: Mission and Value - Health Executive - RedCoat Publishing
Bob Harvey combines centuries of tradition with innovation in senior care to keep his organization competitive.
Bob Harvey, CEO of Via Christi Senior Services, recognizes the senior care industry is changing. When he came to the Kansas-based organization, the primary model of senior care was long-term care, one of the most difficult and least profitable models of care in the industry. To maintain VCSS’s traditional service offerings while integrating customer demands, he developed new product lines that bring the organization into the lives of seniors earlier and subsidize the care provided on its nursing home side.

Via Christi Senior Services: Mission and Value - Health Executive - RedCoat Publishing
Bob Harvey, CEO
“As we move up the value chain to the well-elder demographic, we can develop products that are private-pay based and not dependent on Medicare and Medicaid for reimbursement,” he said. “We still need to participate in Medicare and Medicaid programs because they are the closest to our mission, but for that piece of our business to survive we needed to begin developing other product lines.”

Throughout the course of his career at VCSS, Harvey has remained true to and merged together his original missions: to innovate the organization while sticking close to the values developed by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Wichita and the Sisters of the Sorrowful Mother of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma for hundreds of years. “The mission of the Sisters is to meet the needs of seniors across the continuum of care,” he said. “We want to partner that history with the needs of the new generation of seniors.”

Transforming senior care
To start, in 2005,VCSS became the first PACE (program of all-inclusive care for the elderly) site in Kansas. PACE programs focus on providing care for seniors in their homes and at a clinical site. As a PACE site, VCSS provides access to primary care, therapy, specialist services, socialization, and meals, as well as transportation to and from patients’ homes.

Nearly four years after starting the program, VCSS’s PACE site outgrew its space. Consequently, when parent company Via Christi closed a nearby hospital and approached Harvey about moving his corporate staff in, he saw a bigger picture that included more than additional office space.

“The vacant hospital had about 200,000 square feet of space and, at the time, our PACE program was in a leased strip mall on the east side of Wichita,” Harvey said. “We’ve now dedicated 36,000 square feet to that program, as well as moving our corporate offices there, which took another roughly 10,000 square feet.”

The West River Plaza site, when completed early this fall, will provide the PACE program with a 24-bed, private-room nursing home; 10,000 square feet for VCSS’s employee access program; and space for Sedwick County’s Agency on Aging, which provides resource services for seniors. The site will also include a pharmacy for seniors.

“It’s turned out to be a good strategy for what to do with a hospital when you close it. Right now we’re cash flowing and will probably begin to turn a margin within the next six to nine months.”

Full circle
Today, Harvey still faces a changing industry that is now focused on the baby boomer generation. The boomers, as he calls them, want a new model of care. But, says Harvey, there are two parts to the boomer group.

“One division of the boomers has the means and can afford to pay privately for new models of care,” he said. “Then there are the boomers who don’t have those means, and those seniors will need to embrace the models that are reimbursed through traditional government arms, such as Medicare and Medicaid.”

Recently, he read an article that said the average boomer has $100,000 in savings, which he estimates will only pay for about 18 months in a nursing home. “They may think they’re prepared financially, but unless they’re carrying long-term care insurance, they’re not. We are prepared to add onto our services for the wealthier boomer group, but we won’t leave behind the traditional models of care we’ve always provided.”

Those new services almost come full circle to the ones Harvey has been developing, but his vision reaches further than it did in the past with services that incorporate technology allowing seniors to stay in their homes longer. He has also researched home agencies with assisted living services and a long-term care insurance product similar to the CCRC model.

“We’re now looking at those as our introduction to new senior groups while attaching them to their home environment,” he said. “It moves us farther up that value chain with the customer by establishing relationships earlier so when they need healthcare services, we will be the first organization they consider.”

Move it forward
While balancing the budget and innovating the organization’s service lines are two of Harvey’s main focuses, maintaining a culture inherent to Via Christi and the sponsoring Sisters’ code of ethics is never far behind. VCSS has implemented a 3-M (mission, ministry, and mentoring) program to cultivate leadership at all levels in the organization, and he has built the Sisters’ charisms into all aspects of the organization.

“Community is one of the Sisters’ charisms,” he said. “It’s recognizing that all stakeholders who come in contact with Via Christi have value. We’ve designed many of our buildings to reflect that value.”

Via Christi has won state awards for the innovative designs of its senior communities. Each apartment in a VCSS community has a preview window looking out from an apartment into a household. From the household there is a preview of the next level of community, the neighborhood, which combines two households of approximately 15 people. From there, a preview window looks out onto the town, which is a larger common area where resident meetings are held.

“The idea is to draw people into community, and that’s a lot of what has driven our building design. It’s just one example of how we’ve taken the values from the Sisters’ centuries-old culture and made it relevant today.”
 
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