Are you looking for ways to grow your facility based business? Are you ready to differentiate yourself from others in your care and services in Senior Living Communities? Learn in this post how to increase the number of referrals from Senior Living Communities and truly strengthen your overall relationships. Six sure fire tactics included here.

Hello today from Cleveland, Ohio! I am just completing a growth dialogue session with a hospice I am working with. While the session covered several topics, this post will share some useful growth tactics for you to consider that deal with Senior Living Communities. Senior Living Communities are made up of Skilled Nursing Facilities (SNF), Assisted Living (AL) and Independent Living (IL) Communities. The tactics outlined here are specifically developed for SNF and can however easily be used for ALs and ILs.

During our dialogue today, we selected 7 SNFs to start where we had a census of 1 or 2 patients. Our goal by December 31, 2014 is to grow those ADCs to 3 and 4. Here are 6 tactics to help you achieve your SNF goals.

Establish a SNF Advisory Board – The Professional Advisory Board (PAB) tactic is a simple but powerful way to get key customers around a table for dialogue. The group I was with today will invite 2 people from each of the 7 buildings they are focusing on. I will soon write a specific post on the “how to” on implementing a PAB. In the meantime, please drop me a line here if you would like additional information.

Write a monthly Case Study – A Case Study is a one page brief write up of a patient that was cared for in a SNF. The Case Study outline is as follows:

• Situation
• Diagnosis
• Presenting Issues/Challenges
• Plan of Care/Actions
• Outcomes/Results
• Observations/Implications

The objective is to use the Case Study as a teaching tool of what hospice can do. The goal is to pass out and use 50 Case Studies per SNF.

Hold IDG Meetings at a SNF – Hold an Interdisciplinary Group (IDG) meeting at a SNF as a creative way to engage a SNF in the care of their residences and along the way teach SNF staff more about hospice. The idea here is simple. Select a SNF where you have some patients and do your IDG meeting in this facility. Of course, ask the facility if you can hold the meeting there and ask them to participate in the part of the IDG that discusses their residences.

Engage Your Medical Director – In an earlier post I talked about how valuable your Medical Director can be in helping you execute strategy. The suggestion here is to ask your Medical Director to connect you with physicians who work in your targeted SNF. Ask your Medical Director to help you reach your ADC goals per SNF.

Collaborate with Home Care and Home Health Companies – Determine who the preferred Home Care and Home Health Company (s) are in the SNFs you are targeting. See if you can find a way to collaborate to bring double value to the SNF. I talked specifically about this in my October 7th post.

HHA and Nurse Service Standard Training – There are two major customer groups in SNFs. The actual patients and families we care for and the SNF staff themselves. There are some nurses and HHAs I would let take care of my loved ones!! But there would be NO WAY I would let in a facility as they have no customer and very poor communication skills. Invest in very specific customer and service standard training.

I hope these tips are helpful. Let me know how things good.

The Best