Lisa McCracken is the new head of research and analytics for the National Investment Center for Seniors Housing & Care and most recently served as director of senior living research and development for the investment bank Ziegler. She first met her future husband at a LeadingAge conference in New Orleans. She and Jim, a former long-term care ombudsman for the state of New Jersey, and president and CEO of Leading– Age New Jersey & Delaware since 2018, eventually married on the Turks and Caicos Islands. 

Travel has been a passion for the pair, who count Costa Rica among their favorites. 

“I think it causes you to be more curious, more open and understanding of different people, and just generally more aware of the world of possibilities out there,” said Lisa McCracken, who also instilled a love of travel in her son, Brady.

She grew up in the small river-adjacent town of Wrightsville, PA, where her parents still live. With one older brother and one younger, McCracken was often pulled into pickup games of baseball or football. 

While studying clinical psychology, she envisioned her career trajectory involving a “Dr.” in front of her name, and standing at the front of a lecture hall, educating and informing, 

“I actually feel like I’m doing that now,” she said of the insights she’s offering the senior living sector. 

LeadingAge CEO Katie Smith Sloan said she and her organization are among those benefiting from McCracken’s expertise.

“Lisa has deep knowledge, high energy and tremendous warmth. Her work with Ziegler on behalf of the nonprofit sector has been outstanding,” Sloan said.

Former Ziegler colleague Kat Dymond, vice president and marketing events manager, calls McCracken’s work “transformational” in generating actionable insights from data, including the annual LZ 200 list that provides critical benchmarks on growth market trends in the senior living and care sector. 

McCracken’s introduction to the senior living and housing industry came while she was a therapist for a mental health services provider in Pennsylvania. When she was looking for a career change, Holleran, a research firm that studies senior living resident engagement and satisfaction, came calling. 

“My eyes opened up to this whole world,” McCracken said.

Her role as a research analyst has taken her to countless senior living communities across the country to meet with leadership teams. She embraced the frequent-flyer lifestyle. The travel was vital to McCracken’s sense-making and for providing an on-the-ground view that offers insight numbers alone might not.

“I’ve slept in many a retirement community, in the guest room, and you learn a lot that way,” she explained.

Her happy place, though, is anywhere and anytime that she, Jim and Brady — now a senior at High Point University in North Carolina — are together. “I savor those moments.”

McCracken’s resume

 1996 Earns BA in psychology from Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania

1998 Earns MA in clinical psychology from West Chester University; Works as a therapist for Community Services Group

2000 Joins Holleran as research analyst, eventually
moving up to company president

2010 Starts 8-year term as board member for CHI St. Joseph Children’s Health 

2013 Joins Ziegler, a specialty investment bank, where she rises to senior vice president and
director of senior living research and development

October 2023 Joins NIC as head of research and analytics

For 22 years, Gloria Lopez led a team of nurses as a clinical manager overseeing some of central California’s most fragile patients.

At Sierra View Medical Center’s Distinct Part Skilled Nursing Facility, the 35-bed subacute facility in Porterville, CA, is often home to those dependent on ventilator care or in need of around-the-clock respiratory care.

It’s where Lopez, a registered nurse, felt rewarded to satisfy the needs of residents each day, finding solace in caring for those who may have not had family comforting them in their last moments. 

There were also the victorious moments when a patient was taken off a ventilator and began breathing on their own, able to go home. 

An “Unsung Hero” category winner in the 2023 McKnight’s Pinnacle Awards, Lopez began her career with the then-42-year-old Sierra View Medical Center in November 2000. 

The nurse manager announced her retirement in late 2022 from Sierra View, which announced plans to open a new 29,470-square-foot skilled nursing facility with 44 beds.

The McKnight’s Pinnacle Awards program is jointly administered by McKnight’s Long-Term Care News, McKnight’s Senior Living and McKnight’s Home Care. Honorees were recognized March 7 at a gala banquet and awards ceremony in Chicago. The program’s Platinum sponsor was MatrixCare. Omnicare was a Silver sponsor, and additional sponsors included Pinnacle Quality Insight, HealthDirect and Sentrics.

It was 1983 when Yvonne Eaddy joined VNS Health (then known as The Visiting Nurse Service of New York) as a public health nurse visiting the homes of both the elderly and children in need of a lifeline.

Forty years later, she oversees more than 300 clinicians and 35 clinical support team members to coordinate the day-to-day care delivered to patients across Brooklyn and Staten Island, as well as the regional budget that governs them. In addition, Eaddy manages VNS Health’s Maternity-Newborn Pediatrics Program in Brooklyn, which provides care and support for children with complex medical conditions. She also is the program leader for home care behavioral health services.

She was elected an “Unsung Hero” category winner in the 2023 McKnight’s Pinnacle Awards program.

In her current role as vice president of regional patient care services for VNS Health since 2001, Eaddy arrived with decades of experience. It ranged from field visits to nurse management, Medicare billing and request processing, and ensuring high-quality and cost-effective patient services were delivered to residents of Manhattan. 

For two years, beginning in 1998, she led the agency’s transformation from delivering care with discipline-specific teams to interdisciplinary ones.

Her talent for transformation was also behind a more recent endeavor: launching the company’s Nurse Residency Program in March 2020 to introduce newly graduated nurses to home care and pair them with RN preceptor mentors. The goal has been to give them time to transition from the classroom to home care visits, going from novice to expert, under the tutelage of experienced nurses.

A 1977 graduate of the Hunter College School of Nursing, she earned a master’s degree in nursing from Chamberlain University in 2017. She also won VNS Health’s Leadership 2000 Award and was a finalist in the New York Times’ Tribute to Nurses.

The McKnight’s Pinnacle Awards program is jointly administered by McKnight’s Long-Term Care News, McKnight’s Senior Living and McKnight’s Home Care. Honorees were recognized March 7 at a gala banquet and awards ceremony in Chicago. The program’s Platinum sponsor was MatrixCare. Omnicare was a Silver sponsor, and additional sponsors included Pinnacle Quality Insight, HealthDirect and Sentrics.

Every day, Barry “BC” Carr and his Ignite Medical Resorts are dedicated to “extinguishing the stereotype” by reinventing the short-term rehabilitation industry.

Gone are the stark, semi-private rooms and outsourced therapy. Instead, Carr and his co-founder and business partner, Tim Fields, have created luxury hotel-like experiences for their residents while providing rapid rehabilitation with in-house therapists. 

The pair have adopted the motto, “Vision without

execution is hallucination.” Clearly, neither is hallucinating.

In less than five years, Ignite Medical Resorts has expanded to 18 locations in Illinois, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas and Wisconsin. The company has received broad attention for its creative business model and aggressive growth, especially with it occurring during harrowing pandemic years.

At the same time, Carr launched the nonprofit Ignite the Way Foundation, providing financial resources to employees struggling with problems such as cancer, domestic abuse, house fires, tornadoes and more.

Judges named Carr an “Unsung Hero” category winner in the 2023 McKnight’s Pinnacle Awards.

The University of Michigan alum began his healthcare career in 1987 as a nursing home administrator for NuCare Services. Eventually, he became the president of the company.

While with NuCare, he bought Forest VIlla Nursing and Rehab in Niles, IL, in 2001. Later, he rebranded it to Avanti Wellness & Rehabilitation Center. In 2012, he left NuCare to focus on running the Avanti community independently with his son, Jared, before the pair joined Ignite.

The McKnight’s Pinnacle Awards program is jointly administered by McKnight’s Long-Term Care News, McKnight’s Senior Living and McKnight’s Home Care. Honorees were recognized March 7 at a gala banquet and awards ceremony in Chicago. The program’s Platinum sponsor was MatrixCare. Omnicare was a Silver sponsor, and additional sponsors included Pinnacle Quality Insight, HealthDirect and Sentrics.

“Sometimes when you’re the social worker, you’re the social worker for your residents, but you’re also the social worker for the families, for partners in care in our local communities and also your care team members,” Campbell says.

It’s a field with an impact that might be limited only by one’s imagination, as Campbell repeatedly has proven. In 2022, she sought out and won a federal grant to bring virtual reality glasses to a Majestic Care community in Indiana. There, residents can virtually immerse themselves in world travel, pet interactions, experiences in nature and the arts, games and music — all while increasing cognitive stimulation and engagement and decreasing loneliness and anxiety. She hopes to expand the program companywide.

It is for efforts such as this one that Katie Campbell was elected an “Unsung Hero” category award winner in the 2023 McKnight’s Pinnacle Awards.

She started her professional career in 2000 as a certified nursing assistant, eventually joining the Hospice Group in Indianapolis, where she held multiple roles coordinating social work, community outreach and bereavement.

An executive director at Magnolia Health Systems, CommuniCare Health Services and Compassus, she joined Majestic Care in May 2020 and now manages social services at 45 locations.

She got her actual start in long-term care years earlier. Campbell fondly remembers that as a young girl, her mother would take her to a memory care unit where she worked, often handing her a radio. “They would love to dance,” her mother would tell her.

Campbell earned an undergraduate degree in social work and sociology from Ball State University in Muncie, IN, where she now is a member of the community advisory board for the school’s social work department.

In 2019, she was awarded the ATHENA Young Professional Award by Women in Business Unlimited in Muncie.

Doing well by doing good has certainly proven true for Lynne Katzmann.

In 1988, at the age of 32 and with a PhD in health policy from the London School of Economics, Katzmann started Juniper Communities in Bloomfield, NJ. Begun as a way to invest in undervalued skilled nursing facilities and improve them, the company since has grown to develop and manage senior living communities. 

There are now 24 of them — traversing New Jersey, Texas, Pennsylvania and Colorado.

Her company remains the only woman-founded, owned and led firm among the top 40 national assisted living companies.

A pioneer and visionary who also contributes to multiple boards, Katzmann has been relentless in her drive to improve the lived experience for the aging, including creating new financial models to support the industry. 

In 2020, she led the effort to form an operator-owned Medicare Advantage network called the Perennial Consortium, offering Perennial Advantage.

Another innovation, Connect4Life, was developed at Juniper and licensed to AllyAlign Health. Integrating primary care onsite, encouraging the use of data and electronic health records to drive care, and dedicating a coordinator to be the bridge between the senior living resident and the providers are all pillars of the program, which ultimately aims to improve outcomes and save money.

Before founding Juniper, Katzmann held positions at HealthChoice Inc. and Metrocare Inc. Later, she was vice president of JMK Associates Inc. from 1986 to 1987.

In 2019, she was the first recipient of the McKnight’s Women of Distinction Lifetime Achievement Award. She followed that up the next year with induction into the American Senior Housing Association’s Senior Living Hall of Fame.

The McKnight’s Pinnacle Awards program is jointly administered by McKnight’s Long-Term Care News, McKnight’s Senior Living and McKnight’s Home Care. Honorees were recognized March 7 at a gala banquet and awards ceremony in Chicago. The program’s Platinum sponsor was MatrixCare. Omnicare was a Silver sponsor, and additional sponsors included Pinnacle Quality Insight, HealthDirect and Sentrics.

With more than 30 years in the industry, Laurence C. “Larry” Gumina has experience leading it all.

Whether at the helm of senior living communities, skilled nursing facilities, hospitals, home health and hospice services, or affordable senior housing, the president and CEO of Ohio Living has sought innovative solutions to challenges.

Now, insurer can be added to the list. Gumina teamed up with three other operators and a risk management company to offer Perennial Advantage, which began coverage in 2021. The operator-owned Medicare Advantage network is a way for operators to capture more of the federal dollars typically flowing to private insurers for the care provided at residential communities.

Gumina also has created new business lines for Ohio Living, including Harvest Grove Pharmacy and Curana Health medical group. For all these reasons, and more, Gumina was named a “Thought Leader” category winner by judges in the 2023 McKnight’s Pinnacle Awards competition.

He had just graduated college when he arrived at Bayshore Health Care Center in New Jersey in 1989 as the assistant administrator of operations. He would spend the next 22 years ascending the ranks in the Garden State, holding senior leadership positions at Bayshore Community Health Services, Riverview Medical Center and Springpoint Senior Living before joining Ohio Living (formerly Ohio Presbyterian Retirement Services) in 2011.

One of Gumina’s noted achievements is rebranding and uniting the company’s governance under the Ohio Living umbrella, which includes Ohio Living Communities, Ohio Living Home Health & Hospice and the Ohio Living Foundation.

The holder of a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Bryant University and a master’s degree in healthcare administration from Fairleigh Dickinson University, Gumina is on the LeadingAge national board of directors and was given LeadingAge Ohio’s Visionary Leader Award in 2021.

The McKnight’s Pinnacle Awards program is jointly administered by McKnight’s Long-Term Care News, McKnight’s Senior Living and McKnight’s Home Care. Honorees were recognized March 7 at a gala banquet and awards ceremony in Chicago. The program’s Platinum sponsor was MatrixCare. Omnicare was a Silver sponsor, and additional sponsors included Pinnacle Quality Insight, HealthDirect and Sentrics.

Michelle Cone wasn’t interested in developing new services for homebound patients of HomeWell Franchising simply for the sake of developing new services.

Leveraging data and proven processes that she had learned during more than two decades of experience in the post-acute care industry, she created new specialty care programs, including Go-HomeWell Post-Medical Care, SureStep Fall Prevention, a life enrichment activities program, and hospice and dementia supports. 

She also ensured the company could deliver more personalized care, dedicating an expert care manager to develop an individual care plan for each client and his for her family.

Such dedication and innovation are key  ingredients that helped elevate her into a “Thought Leadership” honor in the 2023 McKnight’s Pinnacle Awards.

Proof the approach is working can be found in HomeWell’s 88% growth over the last three years, a period during which the company has expanded into more than 25 new states.

Cone joined HomeWell in 2016 as the company’s vice president of operations before becoming senior vice president of training and brand programs in 2020. Before HomeWell, Cone held a variety of positions, including director of outpatient admissions at Wichita Valley Rehabilitation Hospital, senior sales executive for Kindred at Home, and home health administrator for Angels Care Home Health.

A licensed home health administrator, Cone has paved the way for continued development into new programs using research to ensure more seniors and homebound individuals receive the help they need to live happier and healthier lives.

A graduate of West Texas A&M University in 1995, she also is a member of the board of advisors for Careswitch, a free home care agency management software program.

The McKnight’s Pinnacle Awards program is jointly administered by McKnight’s Long-Term Care News, McKnight’s Senior Living and McKnight’s Home Care. Honorees were recognized March 7 at a gala banquet and awards ceremony in Chicago. The program’s Platinum sponsor was MatrixCare. Omnicare was a Silver sponsor, and additional sponsors included Pinnacle Quality Insight, HealthDirect and Sentrics.

For more than 30 years, Chris Belford has worked to ensure that senior living communities are on solid financial footing, with quality care for each resident driving his decision-making. After an early career in the lodging industry at Hyatt Hotels, he brought a hospitality mindset to healthcare in 1991.

Strategic and innovative, Belford’s keen eye for perfecting operations, launching new business developments and identifying merger and acquisition candidates is always backed up by a commitment to quality customer service for residents, their families and company employees.

He was recognized in the inaugural McKnight’s Pinnacle Awards with “Thought Leader” category honors.

JEA Senior Living of Vancouver, WA, hired Belford to be its president and CEO in November 2020, when it had 57 senior communities. It has since grown to 80 communities and undergone a rebranding to become Sinceri Senior Living. And it has expanded beyond memory care to include assisted living and independent living.

Before Sinceri, Belford oversaw all senior housing, skilled nursing and hospital properties for American Healthcare Investors, part of an $8 billion portfolio of assets under management that included 140 communities across the US and in the United Kingdom.

He also formerly held executive or senior leadership positions at Emeritus Senior Living and Brookdale Senior Living. He started his healthcare career in 1991 with ERA Care Inc. and worked for BPM Assisted Living (now Regent Assisted Living) from 1996 to 2001.

A graduate of Washington State University, Belford also completed post-graduate studies at Seattle University and earned an MBA from the University of Phoenix. In addition, he currently serves on the executive board of the American Seniors Housing Association.

The McKnight’s Pinnacle Awards program is jointly administered by McKnight’s Long-Term Care News, McKnight’s Senior Living and McKnight’s Home Care. Honorees were recognized March 7 at a gala banquet and awards ceremony in Chicago. The program’s Platinum sponsor was MatrixCare. Omnicare was a Silver sponsor, and additional sponsors included Pinnacle Quality Insight, HealthDirect and Sentrics.

Betsy Mullen has spent four decades elevating the lives of residents of Chelsea Jewish Lifecare communities in Massachusetts.

A nurse who had early ambitions to be a nun growing up in the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston, Mullen joined Chelsea Jewish Lifecare in 1982 as its director of nursing. At the time, it was still a single nursing home. Forty years later, CJL has seven communities and Mullen has held the title of executive director at its skilled nursing facilities and assisted living communities, executive vice president of clinical operations and chief clinical officer.

Now, as chief operating officer of the affiliated Legacy Lifecare, she oversees day-to-day operations of CJL.

“Betsy’s deep commitment to skilled nursing, her extensive knowledge of the nonprofit world and her passion for her work are incredibly inspiring,” said Adam Berman, president and CEO of Legacy Lifecare.

Described by others as a compassionate and dedicated leader who lives the virtues she espouses, Mullen has been committed to making innovative changes to improve residents’ lives. Her early efforts included “gentle awakenings,” which meant residents would wake in the morning when they wanted and order their choice of breakfast.

She also fostered the addition of an on-site European day spa and started a vacation program for residents to go places such as Cape Cod, Atlantic City and Disney World. 

Mullen proudly says she lives by the words of poet Maya Angelou: “I did then what I knew best. When I knew better, I did better.”

The McKnight’s Pinnacle Awards program is jointly administered by McKnight’s Long-Term Care News, McKnight’s Senior Living and McKnight’s Home Care. Honorees were recognized March 7 at a gala banquet and awards ceremony in Chicago. The program’s Platinum sponsor was MatrixCare. Omnicare was a Silver sponsor, and additional sponsors included Pinnacle Quality Insight, HealthDirect and Sentrics.