80 Business View - December 2015
HEALTHCARE
care population, much like the old chronic care hospi-
tals used to be,” he explains, “and as we have an aging
population, we have more chronic-care diseases. So the
acuity is much, much higher. You may have an admitting
diagnosis of one disease, but you may have co-morbidity
of five or six more chronic diseases that we have to care
for.”
Over his 40-plus years in the medical field, Richardson
has also seen a marked change in the age of long-term
care patients. “When I first started, the initial population
of admittance, at that time, was around 67 to 70, or 72
years of age. Now we’re seeing that admittance at some-
where around 82 to 85, or 87 years of age.” And because
their advanced ages predispose them to a higher poten-
tial for more acute medical conditions, these patients
generally require a higher level of care.
Another significant change in the industry, according to
Richardson, has been the decreasing amount of time
residents are remaining in long-term care facilities. “Fifty
percent of our admissions are going home within 30 to
40 days of their admission – we call those short stays. In
the old days if you got admitted to a nursing home, you
very seldom went home.” He attributes this shift to bet-
ter medical and rehabilitative care for things like strokes,
giving its victims better prognoses and more-improved
chances for returning back to their jobs, homes, and
communities. Also, improved home-health services over
the past several years have made staying at home lon-
ger, a more viable option. “The way we look at nursing
homes is changing,” says Richardson. “We go there for
rehabilitation, stay there a short period of time, then we
go back to our homes, to continue our rehabilitation with
home healthcare.”
These two important transformations – shorter stays and
higher acuity– have driven CCI’s management to adapt.
Dealing with short stays, Richardson believes, is defi-
nitely an operational and labor-intensive challenge. “It
