The Future Leaders Awards program is brought to you in partnership with PointClickCare. The program is designed to recognize up-and-coming industry members who are shaping the next decade of senior housing, skilled nursing, home health and hospice care. To see this year’s future leaders, visit https://futureleaders.agingmedia.com/.
Kelly Stanley, senior director of clinical transformation at the Nashville, Tennessee-based Medalogix, has been named a 2021 Future Leader by Home Health Care News.
To become a Future Leader, an individual is nominated by their peers. The candidate must be a high-performing employee who is 40-years-old or younger, a passionate worker who knows how to put vision into action, and an advocate for seniors, and the committed professionals who ensure their well-being.
Stanley sat down with HHCN to talk about staffing concerns, the home health industry’s evolution and the future of in-home care.
HHCN: What drew you to this industry?
Stanley: Growing up, the one thing I knew with absolute certainty was that I would never go into anything health care-related.
But during college, I was pursuing a business degree in marketing, and I took a job caring for a woman with early-onset Alzheimer’s. She had this extraordinary daughter and son in law who took care of her at home, and hired students to supplement that one-to-one care for her around the clock. That was kind of it for me. I fell in love with patient care, and I started volunteering at a rural clinic. I more or less told myself that I’d use that business degree for a couple of years, and if I still felt that strongly about nursing, I would go back to school. And that’s what I did.
Eventually, I sort of stumbled into home health, and that just felt like home for me. And now, I’m as surprised as anyone that I’ve landed in the tech space of health care. But I had this really great opportunity to support the people who were doing the hands-on work of caring for patients in a really different way, and I took it.
What’s your biggest lesson learned since starting to work in this industry?
You will never be on the wrong side of a situation if you begin and end the conversation by asking, “How will this impact the patient?” And this is actually every bit as true now that I’m working for a data analytics company as it was when I was hands on at the bedside. Certainly, there will always be difficult business decisions to be made. And you have to keep the lights on.
But if in any situation, the answer to that question isn’t palatable, you must stop and regroup. Our industry is built on the trust of these people, these patients, and I think the consequences of forgetting that are ultimately insurmountable.
If you could change one thing with an eye toward the future of home-based care, what would it be?
I would love to see a greater focus on staff retention. Well beyond health care, just as a larger sort of society, we were super ill-equipped to deal with a pandemic. So this is no slight to the industry.
But I think COVID really just magnified an existing issue, which is that this business is built on people taking care of people. It’s very intense work that nurses, therapists, aides and operators do on a daily basis, and it goes so much deeper than the medical care that they provide. I think that most people who embrace this kind of work already feel an extraordinary sense of accountability. That can just become really heavy, even in the best of times.
Some of this is specific to the pandemic, of course, but some of it I honestly believe is just an accumulation of stress that was probably building long before COVID. So I hope to see just an intentional effort to really understand what it will take to keep the people – who came to this work because they love it – from leaving.
In a word, how would you describe the future of home-based care?
I think it’s “promising.”
I believe that we are getting closer to truly putting the things in place that we need to in order to care for more and more patients at home. And I think we’re really getting more intentional about making that a reality. It’s felt like a very distant goal for a long time, and I suppose it’s starting to feel more tangible now.
If you could give advice to yourself looking back to your first day in the industry, what would it be and why?
Hire and surround yourself with people who are smarter than you. Seek out people who intimidate you and learn everything you can from them. Don’t let your ego get in the way.
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