The long-term care industry today is much more attuned to people wanting to age in place and receive medical services in their homes versus moving to a communal residential setting, according to Howard Braxton, the recently retired senior vice president of marketing, sales and communications for The Kendal Corp
Braxton, who worked in the senior living and care industry for 44 years, spoke Thursday during a virtual roundtable hosted by senior living marketing group Varsity.
Home care always has been a competitor with senior living and care, he said. The challenge now, he added, is in helping older adults understand the benefits of moving to a community or facility.
Braxton noted that 50 or 60 years ago, physicians routinely made house calls, and the trend is coming back in some areas. Physician groups now are visiting people in their homes, which can present a marketing challenge for senior living and care settings such as continuing care retirement / life plan communities, he said.
“The other challenge, which really hasn’t changed very much in my time in the industry, is providing certain levels of care and community services, and even lifestyle, if you will, in our communities,” Braxton said.
Members of sales and marketing teams must consider the lifestyle and amenities that older adults are looking for in a given area, Braxton said. For example, staff members need to know whether prospective residents are looking for a 3,000-square-foot unit in a CCRC or a 1,200-square-foot unit in assisted living. Sales and marketing professionals also must consider whether prospective residents of their community would want a pickleball court, tennis court, putting green or nine-hole or 18-hole golf course.
Providers can balance trying to meet residents’ every desire on campus with considering using services that already might exist elsewhere in the greater community, Braxton said. Doing so can be a way to “ratchet back” infrastructure costs, he said.
“When you start talking about the actual pieces of the puzzle that come together, if you’re looking at the full continuum as an infrastructure, [for] a lot of the companies who have gotten out of the skilled nursing world and don’t provide a full continuum under that one umbrella, that’s a challenge,” Braxton said.
Reimbursement, where applicable, also remains a challenge for providers, he said.
And advances in technology for sales and marketing are among the other big changes senior living and care providers have faced in recent decades, Braxton said.
One thing that is different now, he said, is that one “can’t just walk into a hospital as a pseudo social worker marketing representative and ask the nurse at the nursing station to see the chart of the person who’s being referred to your community.”
Forty years ago, before passage of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, no one blinked an eye at granting such a request, he said. The federal privacy law was passed in 1996.
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