Healthcare, Senior Living, Economics
There is a common business axiom, one I have used/repeated many times over: “You can’t save yourself to a profit(able business)”. In health care and in senior living/senior housing, challenges abound and almost daily, new ones arrive. Staffing is incredibly challenging, supply costs are rising, inflationary pressures have increased utility costs, investment portfolios are beat-up … Read more
A number of years ago, post-acute/senior living analysts, etc. started warning of a coming paradigm shift for skilled nursing and home health. I started writing and advising about this shift well over a decade ago. The signs were obvious. Rapid expenditure growth as a percentage of Medicare/Medicaid outlays. MedPac warnings to Congress of rising profit margins in … Read more
Now that the real estate dynamics have shifted on-balance to par or better (majority of markets can liquidate inventory at stable or rising prices with constant or modestly increasing demand), the outlook for Seniors Housing (IL, AL and CCRC) is less murky. The recessionary of the last 7 to 8 years has lifted. What is visible, while still … Read more
In my consulting career, I’ve done a fair amount of feasibility work (market, economic, etc.). Similarly, I’ve done a fair amount of similar analyses, primarily related to M&A activity and/or where financing is involved (debt covenant reviews, etc.). Heck, I’ve even done some bankruptcy related work! I’m also queried fairly often about feasibility, demand, market … Read more
Over the years I have written about the changing landscape in post-acute care, principally due to the health policy ground swell resultant from the ACA (other reasons too but the ACA concretized them all, more or less). Boiled down, the fundamental driver of change is “pay for performance”; the notion that payment will migrate toward value … Read more
With the hospice market (in most areas) fairly well saturated and the core (source) demand from traditional referral sources “flat”, growing census is a challenge for agencies. Some agencies have experienced referral growth but alas, length of stay has shortened. Others have experienced erosion as, while improper, the “skilled to death phenomenon” erodes days and … Read more
As regular readers know, I speak at a number of conferences annually. Additionally, I work with financiers and investors in the space literally daily. In all my journeys and conversations, I am still faced with some major myth “debunking” about the nature of the seniors housing and healthcare demand, current. The major myth: Baby-boomers are either … Read more
One of the top questions I’m asked by clients, readers, students, and interested parties everywhere is how can my organization excel in a competitive environment. In other words, how can I build my organization’s value proposition such that the organization becomes the provider of choice in the market? My answer is always thematically the same: … Read more
Earlier this spring (a couple, three moths ago), I spoke at a marketing/P.R. conference and when my session was over, I sat and visited with a number of the attendees. My presentation was about value propositions and marketing; how to align your organization’s core economic value components within a marketplace, within a customer segment. Within … Read more
Using characterizations, 2013 was a year of gradual ascent for the industry but not necessarily, uniformly so. After a series of years preceding classified as industry malaise, occupancy began to trend forward and absorption rates stabilize. Industry wide, overall occupancy is hovering around 90% for CCRCs though again, this number is broadly misleading. Non-profit CCRCs, the … Read more