Trusting employees, giving leaders tools and autonomy, and focusing on core values have set Cascadia Healthcare apart, two of the company’s top executives said Monday.
The company is celebrating two of its Idaho facilities becoming the sole winners this year of the Gold – Excellence in Quality award in the American Health Care Association/National Center for Assisted Living program.
“One of the things we do as an organization is we’re a very field-driven company,” Cascadia CEO Owen Hammond told McKnight’s Long-Term Care News in an interview. “We don’t have institutionalized metrics — we do best practices. And we hire leaders in our organization to run each of our facilities as if they were their own.”
The facility heads are CEOs who partner with CNOs — chief nursing officers — to develop a business and customer environment that is collaborative and empowering. Facility leads have access to an internal dashboard that provides robust, analytical data that includes quality indicators such as UTIs, pressure ulcers, restraints, and behavioral changes in their own buildings and reports on neighboring facilities so that teams can reach through building walls to learn from each other and implement successful strategies.
“We empower them to work together and take what’s working at your facility and use that as inspiration for someone,” Steve LaForte, Cascadia’s director of corporate affairs and general counsel, told McKnight’s Monday.
The two facilities that earned Gold are Aspen Park of Cascadia, in Moscow, ID, and Lewiston Transitional Care in Lewiston, ID. The company also had a 2022 Gold winner.
Cascadia has 46 locations with 51 facilities total. They comprise 46 SNFs and five assisted- and independent living facilities in six states: Arizona, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington.
It has used its local leadership model to grow quickly over the last several years, most recently picking up 10 facilities being shed by the Evangelical Good Samaritan Society as it downsizes.
The CEOs at each 2023 winning facility worked in the buildings prior to Cascadia acquiring them in 2017. The two executives complimented the building leaders for creating environments that are true to their communities.
“We’ve been at this for a number of years, and one of the things we’ve found is that healthcare and post-acute care are local,” LaForte said, discussing the importance of empowering leaders who come from the communities they serve.
The company focuses on three, equal core values: clinical, cultural and financial. Facility leaders are empowered to make their own decisions and path for reaching company metrics and goals instead of a more traditional corporate approach that Hammond derided as “cramming it down” operations.
“We put our trust out there first,” he said. “We hire amazing people. We call them CEOs and CNOs because that’s the type of leader we want.”
As a business, Cascadia operates on the idea that hiring the best will provide the best results, Hammond and LaForte said. They acknowledge that there are “bad actors” in the industry and also that the sector’s perception, particularly among the general public, is one of, “Those are places where old people go to die.”
Their pushback to that perception is their people.
“We truly believe that employees come first,” Hammond said. “If we attract the very best employees who have empathy and truly care for [residents and patients] … your quality will rise.”
The Gold, Silver and Bronze awards are annual honors bestowed by the industry’s largest, national advocacy group. AHCA/NCAL announced earlier this year that 399 providers achieved the Bronze ± Commitment to Quality award and 72 earned the Silver — Achievement in Quality award.
