Tag Archive for: Anne Tumlinson

ATI Advisory Launches New State Resource Center

ATI Advisory has launched a new State Resource Center which supports states in their efforts across Medicaid, Medicare, long-term services and supports (LTSS), behavioral health, and health-related social needs (HRSN).

“I am grateful to the talented team at ATI that makes this possible,” said ATI Advisory CEO, and Nexus Fellow, Anne Tumlinson, in a LinkedIn post announcing the new center.

Current resources include: tips sheets focusing on Medicare-Medicaid Plan (MMPT) transitions, key programs serving dual eligible individuals, and state approaches to increased home and community-based service (HCBS) provider capacity.

ATI Advisory will continue to add tools, data, and tip sheets to the State Resource Center in the coming months.

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NIC spring conference 2023 - Partnering for the Future

Nexus Insights Convene for the NIC Spring Conference

Nexus Insights will be joining senior housing and aging service leaders in San Diego on March 1st for the National Investment Center for Seniors Housing & Care (NIC) Spring Conference. Conference sessions will discuss new opportunities that provide better outcomes of care for older adults through more effective integration of healthcare services and senior housing. Anyone in healthcare or senior housing looking to connect, develop long-range strategic partnerships, and innovate new models of care and housing on behalf of older adults should plan to attend.

“Integrating healthcare services with housing is mission critical for a new generation of senior living,” said Anne Tumlinson, founder and CEO of ATI Advisory, and a Nexus Fellow. “It means better care and quality of life for residents, and rewards operators and investors for addressing healthcare spending.”

Several Nexus Fellows are attending the conference including Bob Kramer, Anne Tumlinson, and Sarah Thomas. Nexus friend and alumna, Kelsey Mellard of Sitka, is speaking on one panel and interviewing Dr. Sachin Jain at the Friday morning keynote session.

Want to attend? Visit springconference.nic.org for more information. Already going and want to meet? Ping us or reach out directly to our Fellows.

Nexus Picks

Sessions you won’t want to miss at the 2023 NIC Spring Conference:

Emerging Value Based Care Opportunities for Seniors Housing & LTC Operators
Wednesday, March 1, 2023 | 4:30pm
Speakers:
Anne Tumlinson, Founder & CEO, ATI Advisory
Grant Severson, Vice President, Optum Senior Community Care
James Lydiard, Chief Strategy Officer, HarmonyCares
Brian Cloch, CEO, Cloch Management
Chris Dawe, Acting President, Curana Health Medical Group
Laurie Schultz, Principal & Co-Founder, Avenue

Taking Your Show on The Road: Bridging Care Gaps by Extending Services Into the Community
Thursday, March 2, 2023 | 1:00pm
Speakers:
Kelsey Mellard, CEO, Sitka
Michael Kurliand, Clinical Quality and Integration, MedWand
Peter Longo, Principal & Managing Partner, Cantex

The Trends and Opportunities in Medicare all Types of Operators Should Be Tracking
Friday, March 2, 2023 | 8:30am
Speakers:
Kurt Read, Partner, RSF Partners
Kelsey Mellard, CEO, Sitka
Dr. Sachin H. Jain, MD, MBA, FACP, President & CEO, SCAN Group and Health Plan

 

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Critical Resource for Older adults

Caregiving Navigation Hubs: A Critical Resource for Older Adults and their Families

Coordinating caregiving for aging loved ones is a complicated and frustrating task for families. And the problem is growing.

According to a recent article in Next Avenue, “It generally starts with a crisis: Your parent shows signs of dementia…or is about to be discharged from a serious hospital stay…or requires help with daily activities of living. What do you do? Where do you turn? It’s the little-discussed part of long-term care that leaves many of the nation’s 22 million family caregivers for older loved ones bereft and befuddled.”

“We’re failing tens of thousands of older adults and their families,” said Bob Kramer, Founder and Fellow of Nexus Insights.

Nexus Insights is a think tank advancing the well-being of older adults through innovative models of housing, community and healthcare.

In early 2022, Nexus Insights brought together long-term care providers, caregiver advocates, tech-driven startups and policy experts in its first ‘Nexus Voices’ salon to discuss how to help older adults and their caregivers better navigate the complex and fragmented array of long-term care and aging services. The result was a report released in September 2022, “Where Am I, Where Do I Go: The Missing Entry Point to Long-Term Care Solutions for Older Adults and Their Caregivers.

This report was the subject of the Next Avenue article, written by Richard Eisenberg.

Eisenberg spoke to several of the report’s authors, including Anne Tumlinson, CEO of ATI Advisory and a Nexus Fellow. “The primary challenge that most of my peers and friends and family were experiencing was entering into that phase of their lives when they were suddenly thrust into family caregiving roles and feeling like there’s no place to go,” Tumlinson said. “In the best-case scenario they’re getting a hospital discharge planner handing them a long list of organizations who are like, ‘Good luck. Here you go.'”

Caroline Pearson, another report author concurred. Pearson, formerly the Senior VP of Health Care Strategy at NORC at the University of Chicago, and now the Executive Director for The Peterson Center on Healthcare, and a Nexus Fellow. “Unfortunately, most people find themselves in these urgent scenarios that are sort of a call for help unexpectedly,” she said.

In fact, Nexus recently partnered with NORC to conduct a survey on this issue. The survey showed that 1 in 4 older adults needed long-term care services for themselves or a loved one in just the previous 12 months. It also echoed the report’s assertion that caregivers experience frustration and anxiety during the process.

The Nexus Voices report offers a powerful solution, according to the article, “A national, independent, trusted hub system of caregiving navigators who would be accessible to everyone and serve as a central doorway to long-term care services and supports.”

“For every single family to be creating a long-term care service delivery system is very inefficient from a societal standpoint and an economy standpoint,” said Tumlinson.

The solution would have to be national in scope. “There was broad-based agreement [among the salon participants] that creating the kind of awareness to make these hubs as visible as your local drugstore or post office was going to take a national effort, and a level of funding that was probably going to have to be federally driven,” said Kramer.

According to the article, a local example of such a hub was launched earlier this year in Ohio. The NaviGuide program, created by United Church Homes in Ohio, offers these types of services to its 166 clients. The program was inspired by a family crisis for its creator Terry Spitznagel, senior executive vice president and chief growth officer for United Church Homes. Spitnagel said, “I’ve been in senior services for three decades, but I just fell apart trying to help my father navigate the aging journey. I couldn’t manage it.”

The article sees the NaviGuide program as a positive step in the right direction. “If programs like United Church Homes’ NaviGuide are proven financially viable or federal or state governments earmark money for caregiving navigators, you may start seeing these experts pop up around the country.”

In fact, other recent reports echo the Nexus recommendations.

“There are real opportunities to move forward on this,” said Kramer. “But it’s going to take keeping the issue in the limelight and building momentum and seizing opportunities.”

And, the article suggests, “It may also require more people finding themselves thrust into becoming family caregivers or needing to coordinate care.”

Said Tumlinson: “You have to go through it and then be stunned. Then you say, ‘Why is this not being fixed? How is this possible?'”

Read the article at Next Avenue.

Read the Nexus Report
Read the Nexus Survey

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Long-Term Care & Post-Acute Care

Navigating the Maze of Long-Term & Post-Acute Care: A Report by Nexus Insights

When an older adult experiences a crisis that requires post-acute or long-term care services and supports, they and their caregivers must make critical decisions, fast. What awaits them, however, is a maze of dead ends and poor information that stand in the way of getting the help they need.

“Older adults and their families enter a maze of twists and turns, dead ends, and wrong way streets when a life crisis forces them to consider their care options. Critical decisions about long-term care must be made quickly, with scarce information or resources, let alone supportive guidance to assist them in their time of crisis.” – Bob Kramer, founder of Nexus Insights

In February 2022, Nexus Insights hosted their inaugural ‘Nexus Voices’ session with 18 leading experts in the fields of aging policy, long-term care, senior housing and caregiver advocacy to talk through and tackle this issue.

The Outcome: A Nexus Voices Report

The result is the recently published report, “Where Am I, Where Do I Go: The Missing Entry Point to Long-Term Care Solutions for Older Adults and Their Caregivers”. This comprehensive and actionable report highlights the lack of infrastructure to help guide older adults and their families to long-term care services. The report proposes “Navigation Hubs” to help families understand their long-term care needs and select the best options for them. These hubs would serve as central doorways to existing supports and services—whether it’s home-based care, transportation or meal services, senior housing or nursing home care. The hubs would have a national presence but a hyper localized focus with counselors, or navigators, who understand the resources available in their communities and how to help older adults and their families access them.

“The factors that shape care decisions vary from family to family, but all families need an easy-to-use, accessible hub of information that clearly communicates the options that are available to them in their community,” said Anne Tumlinson, CEO of ATI Advisory and a contributor to the report. “With a growing number of older adults needing care, we have to act now to build the care infrastructure families need.”

Discussion participants outlined four primary responsibilities of the Navigation Hubs. They are:

  • Discover & Assess the long-term care needs of older adults, their families, and caregivers.
  • Educate older adults, their families and caregivers on the housing and caregiving support available to them as well as funding sources.
  • Select & Connect older adults with the best long-term care setting, supports, and services that meet their needs.
  • Reevaluate the needs of older adults as their health and financial statuses change.

“You can’t solve a problem until you’ve identified it and defined it,” said Kramer.

“Then you’ve got to define what are the key components of any solution. And we’ve laid that out with the navigation hubs and their four functions. And then we asked what we could learn from the failures and the successes of programs to date, to create our criteria. Finally, the path forward must be a joint effort involving both the public and private sectors. We demonstrated that there are aspects of differing programs from government-funded resource centers to tech-enabled employer options to private-pay models that could be incorporated into this solution.”

An Urgent Problem

In its conclusions, the report urges quick and decisive action to build navigation services for older adults that put families in the center. The family in crisis needs help now and cannot wait for lawmakers and government agencies to overhaul the long-term care infrastructure. This requires a national commitment to increased funding and an openness to reimagine existing solutions. Existing public, private-pay and employer-based programs could work together to make these hubs a reality by combining their infrastructure, experience and delivery models.

The Nexus Voices Participants

Nexus Insights Host Committee

  • David Grabowski, PhD, professor, Harvard Medical School, fellow, Nexus Insights
  • Bob Kramer, founder & fellow, Nexus Insights, co-founder, former CEO & strategic advisor, National Investment Center for Seniors Housing & Care (NIC)
  • Caroline Pearson, senior vice president, health care strategy, NORC at the University of Chicago, fellow, Nexus Insights
  • Sarah Thomas, CEO, Delight by Design/MezTal, fellow, Nexus Insights
  • Anne Tumlinson, CEO, ATI Advisory, fellow, Nexus Insights

Discussion Participants

  • Gretchen E. Alkema, PhD, former vice president, policy and communications, The SCAN Foundation
  • Alice Bonner, PhD, senior advisor for aging, IHI, and adjunct faculty, Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing
  • Ryan Frederick, founder & CEO, Smart Living 360, fellow, Nexus Insights (facilitator)
  • Lindsay Jurist-Rosner, CEO, Wellthy
  • Ruth Katz, senior vice president for policy, LeadingAge
  • Sean Kelly, president & CEO, The Kendal Corporation
  • Suzanne Kunkel, PhD, executive director, Scripps Gerontology Center, Miami University
  • Katy Lanz, chief strategy officer, Personal Care Medical Associates
  • Brian Petranick, group president, Neighborly
  • Cheryl L. Phillips, M.D., president and CEO, Special Needs Plan Alliance
  • Paul Saucier, director, Office of Aging & Disability Services, Maine Department of Health and Human Services
  • John Schall, CEO, Caregiver Action Network
  • Bill Thomas, chief independence officer, Lifespark, fellow, Nexus Insights

Read the Long-Term Care Access Report

Read the full report
Read the executive summary
Read the press release

About Nexus Insights

Nexus Insights is a think tank advancing the well-being of older adults through innovative models of housing, community and healthcare. We are a diverse group of thought leaders and stakeholders in aging and healthcare. Our goal is to spark change by sharing innovation across traditional silos, convening leaders from differing perspectives and bringing positive, life-affirming ideas into the public domain.

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Long Term Care Staffing Shortages

The Solution for Long-Term Care Staffing Shortages? Innovative Immigration Policies

Who will care for aging baby boomers? This was the question posed to an expert panel at an event that explored the links between immigration policy and long-term care policy. The online event was hosted by the Center on Children and Families of the Brookings Institute. It brought together leading researchers to present their findings on the role of immigration in caregiving, and to discuss the country’s caregiving needs, and policies to help address them.

Highlights of the discussion included:

  • The link between increased immigration and the increased support available for aging in place.
  • Economic benefits to family caregivers from larger labor pools supported by increased immigration.
  • Improved quality of care that results from a larger labor force and increased immigrant labor.

Anne Tumlinson, CEO of ATI Advisory and a Nexus Fellow, was on hand to provide her analysis of the policy landscape. She pointed to the severe economic impacts experienced by families and family caregivers that results from the lack of a national long-term care system in the United States.

Other challenges raised during the forum include the persistently low wages in the caregiving industry, enormous gaps in Medicare coverage for needed services for older adults, confusing variation by state of the types of services covered by Medicaid, and the difficulties that arise in addressing changing labor needs caused by inflexibility in employment-based channels for legal migration.

Possible solutions proposed included:

  • Addressing the inflexibility in the employment-based channels for legal immigration, to help address shortages and changing caregiving labor needs.
  • Creation of a national long-term care system to serve American families equitably and prevent financial hardships for families caring for loved ones.
  • Reallocating resources to address the persistent low wages in the caregiving industry, and to help create incentives for caregivers to remain in the field.

Read more at Brookings.
View the full discussion.

 

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Investing in HCBS

U.S. Senate’s Special Committee on Aging Addresses the Need for Investing in Home and Community-Based Services (HCBS)

Nexus Fellow and ATI Advisory CEO, Anne Tumlinson, was invited to testify at the Senate’s Special Committee Hearing titled “An Economy That Cares: The Importance of Home-Based Services”. Tumlinson advised that in order to reduce reliance on skilled nursing care, more money needed to be invested in Home and Community-Based Services.

“HCBS makes it possible for many individuals with LTSS needs to remain where they want to be, which is in their home. But unfortunately our home care system and its infrastructure are vastly underdeveloped and under-resourced to meet the growing need for services…If we don’t invest in them, American families are going to face very serious economic challenges, possibly even more than they are today,” said Tumlinson.

Read more at McKnight’s Long-Term Care News.
Watch the full hearing on the U.S. Senate website.

 

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people holding hands

Medicare Advantage Hospice Carve-in Will Bring Challenges

According to Anne Tumlinson, Nexus Fellow and CEO of ATI Advisory, moving hospice benefits to more value-based payment models comes with some challenges and some growth opportunities for providers. Her remarks appear in a Hospice News article titled MA Hospice Carve-In Doubles in Size for 2022.

Beginning in 2021, a number of Medicare Advantage plans began participating in a CMS experiment to provide hospice benefits to their members who elected to receive them. Typically, a MA member who elects to receive hospice benefits does so through traditional Medicare, not through their MA plan. Now in 2022 the number of MA plans participating in the program will double, going from 53 plans to 115. The experiment to allow MA payers to provide hospice benefits is slated to run for four years. Participation is voluntary for both payers and providers.

“In the short term, this growth represents primarily an opportunity for hospice providers in the markets where these plans are operating. The plans must pay Medicare rates and accept any hospice provider for a limited time,” Tumlinson told Hospice News. “The key opportunity/potential longer term threat is that the plans may move forward and establish special ‘value-based’ arrangements with a subset of the hospice market.”

Read full article

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Healthcare at Home Options for Seniors

More Healthcare at Home Options for Seniors with the Choose Home Care Act

Big news on the horizon for seniors and the aging services industry. A bill introduced last month in the United States Senate would allow for in-home care alternatives to skilled nursing facilities for rehab and post-acute services. The Choose Home Care Act, which was sponsored by Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) and Senator Todd Young (R-Ind.), has bi-partisan support.

In a recent article in Senior Housing News, Anne Tumlinson, CEO of ATI Advisory, Founder of Daughterhood, and a Nexus Fellow, weighed in on the winners and losers, should this bill become law.

It would be a big win for seniors, allowing eligible Medicare patients to receive extended post-acute care services at home, rather than in a nursing home, “without placing undue burden on families to care for them.” According to Tumlinson, “The benefits are long overdue.”

Qualified home care agencies would also benefit, according to Tumlinson, with an additional avenue for billable services. “This legislation would essentially allow home health agencies to compete with skilled nursing facilities,” she said.

According to Tumlinson, the flexibility to consumers means more overlap in the post-acute services that skilled nursing facilities and home health care agencies could offer. Skilled nursing facilities may view the Choose Home Care Act as a threat. In fact, the American Health Care Association has expressed concerns that “it would supplant existing benefits and increase out-of-pocket costs.” If the bill passes, it may provide opportunities for private pay senior living providers, Tumlinson explained. “They can entertain partnerships with qualified home health agencies. For instance, they might team up with a Medicare-certified home health provider that will receive the expanded Medicare payments to care for residents that are recently discharged from the hospital, while the senior living provider would be able to collect the private-pay rent.”

In addition to bi-partisan political support, the legislation has broad support, including AARP, home care advocacy groups, and senior housing organizations such as LeadingAge. The bill was introduced in the Senate in late summer, and has been referred to the Senate Finance Committee.

Read the full story at Senior Housing News.

Follow status of the bill.

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ATI Analysis of Medicare Population Needs and the Critical Role of LTC Pharmacy

As many as 70 percent of individuals who reach age 65 will experience severe long-term-care (LTC) needs before they die. Those needs might range from help with managing their finances or medications, to help bathing and getting dressed. Having LTC needs does not necessarily correspond to living in a long-term care facility, however. Instead, people with LTC needs may live and receive services at home or in other community-based settings.

Unfortunately for those living outside of LTC facilities, they face barriers to getting the assistance they need. A study conducted by ATI Advisory, in partnership with the Senior Care Pharmacy Coalition (SCPC), found that “state and federal policy and health plan requirements can create barriers that restrict people aging outside facility settings from accessing long-term services and supports, including LTC pharmacy.”

As a population with high prescription drug utilization, access to LTC pharmacy is especially important to Medicare beneficiaries with LTC needs. The study found, however, that despite the pivotal role that LTC pharmacies play in the care of those with LTC needs, this role is not widely understood or acknowledged by individuals, caregivers, policymakers, and payers.

Moreover, the study found that Medicare beneficiaries with LTC needs are demographically different from those without LTC needs in several important ways. The population studied was statistically “more likely to be Black or Latinx, female, dually eligible for Medicaid, clinically complex, and have higher healthcare and prescription drug utilization than beneficiaries without LTC needs.” Addressing the barriers to access to LTC services is necessary to work toward parity in access to services, coverage for services, support for caregivers, and equity in outcomes.

Read the study outcomes.

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Nexus Insights Fellows News 2021

Nexus Fellows Flash Bulletin: June 2021

The Nexus Fellows are leaders in the aging industry, helping to shape public policy and redefine aging and aging services. From books to podcasts, here’s a sample of some of the work they’ve been doing in the past month:

  • Jay Newton-Small, CEO of MemoryWell, is wrapping up a second year of their joint contest for Hilarity for Charity, Seth and Lauren Miller Rogen’s Alzheimer’s charity and Humans of Dementia Storytelling Competition. It’s a competition for high school and college students to write the best profile of someone living with Alzheimer’s. Winners will have the chance to meet Seth and Lauren Rogen during the virtual celebration. Additionally, MemoryWell has added three new members to their team.
  • Jacquelyn Kung, CEO of Senior Care Group at Activated Insights, was interviewed by Skip Lineberg, host of The Main Thing Podcast, about elder care, and her passion to improve the aging experience. “The main thing I’ve learned in my lifetime so far is that getting older is what you make of it. And I see it as full of good news. Socially, we get happier as we get older, and the research shows that.”
  • Jill Vitale-Aussem, president and CEO of Christian Living Communities, sat down with Senior Housing Investors Podcast to talk about her book, “Disrupting the Status Quo of Senior Living: A Mindshift.”
  • Sarah Thomas, CEO of Delight by Design, delivered the keynote on designing products and services for the aging population with Chief Medical Office of AARP, DR Charlotte Yeh. Additionally, she moderated two panels featuring the important work of seven agetech startups at the Rehab Tech Summit mini-Summit. Thomas was an expert judge at the AOTA 2021 Inventors Showcase, where 11 startups pitched their innovative products designed to serve people across the lifespan. The winner designed a novel gait belt that improves the safety of caregivers and residents in senior living and beyond.
  • Dr. Bill Thomas, founder of The Eden Alternative, The Green House Project, and Minka, recently traveled the country, talking with elders and their care partners in more than 125 cities. He learned about their hopes and fears, and listened to their stories. What did he discover? That people want better alternatives for senior living. “It turns out that older people pretty much want what everyone else wants: to belong to a community that includes people of all ages and remain connected to the living world,” Thomas said.
  • Nexus Founder & Fellow, and NIC Strategic Advisor, Bob Kramer, has joined the Edenbridge Health Board of Advisors to help expand access to comprehensive, integrated, community-based and person-centered care for the frail elderly through innovative applications of the PACE Program.
  • In the blog post, “Just Move It,” CEO of SmartLiving 360, Ryan Frederick talks about the importance of physical exercise for older adults. “Inactivity is the fourth leading cause of death and about 1.5 billion people in the world are inactive to the point that it risks their long-term health. At a health care conference several years ago, four recent surgeon generals were asked for one tip for successful aging. They coalesced on one word: move.”
  • Nexus Fellow Kelsey Mellard, CEO of Sitka, sat down with Sanjula Jain Jo on Her Story for a candid conversation about being a healthcare leader and her transition from the Midwest to DC to Silicon Valley, building a resilient team, and overcoming challenges.
  • Longevity economy expert, Jody Holtzman, formerly of AARP is proud to be on the advisory board of Intuition Robotics, which is mitigating loneliness among older adults with the companion robot ElliQ. “The growing mismatch between the number of people in need of caregivers and the availability of caregivers is a multifaceted challenge for individual families and society more broadly. Technology must be part of the solution. Companion robots like ElliQ and others in this space, like my friends at Joy for All/Ageless Innovation, have an important role to play.”
  • Caroline Pearson, Senior VP of Health Care Strategy at NORC at the University of Chicago, announced the release of new research from NIC and NORC that looks at the impact of the pandemic on seniors by care setting. “Mortality rates increase by complexity of care, but, in lower acuity settings such as independent living communities, they are comparable to surrounding populations.”

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Tag Archive for: Anne Tumlinson

Aging Media Continuum Conference

Aging Media Continuum Conference

The silos of the care continuum have been shattered by the pandemic. Borders between segments of the care continuum are bleeding into each other faster than ever with a greater need for care coordination.

Aging Media Network is bringing all of its verticals together for a special event, inviting C-suite executive audiences from across senior care and healthcare to learn the trends and strategies reshaping how care is delivered to older and complex populations.