By Kimberly Marselas in McKnights Long-Term Care News
… The complicated interplay between payers, regulators and patients makes skilled nursing innovation and investment challenging, Irving Stackpole, president Stackpole & Associates said during a webinar last week. “The usual hydraulics, the usual dimensions of supply and demand, even in service-based economic environments, are twisted and changed in long-term care,” he said.
“The built infrastructure, this is where we can really see the segmentation because the built infrastructure serving individuals who are market-rate consumers of assisted living, for example, is quite different from the built environment for people who are far more dependent and are in lower socio-economic strata.”
Those newer shinier buildings, financed by developers and operators who can (and have) raised their rates, may be more appealing to status-conscious adult children who are trying to place their parents. But Stackpole said it’s important that facilities hampered by aging infrastructure not give up their market share. Instead, Stackpole said, they need to sink what resources they can into innovations that catch the eye of referral partners.
“You are not constrained by your physical environment,” he said. “You’re constrained by the history, by the legacy of always doing the same thing over and over again.” …