Prior to Amerita, Jim held senior leadership positions with several national specialty infusion and home health organizations including Apria Healthcare, Gentiva Health Services and Coram Specialty Infusion Services. Jim holds a B.S. degree in Marketing from Northern Illinois University.
What is your vision for the Jet Health platform?
I’d like Jet Health to become a company that makes a difference in the home health marketplace. In my eyes, that means that we need to have sufficient scale. We need a strong service culture that values the customer experience. Jet has to be able to attract experienced clinicians in the marketplaces in which we compete in order to provide outstanding care to our patients. We need a culture and an environment that attracts those people and gives them reasons to want to stay. Our system and information platform must provide data to our customers on outcomes, patient satisfaction, and cost of careas well as management tools to help run the business efficiently and challenge the status quo. We, of course, need to do all those things in a fully compliant manner. If we focus on these success factors, I believe we can make a difference in the lives of our patients and that Jet Health can become one of the top home health companies in America.
What attracted you to the home health industry after your experience building a home infusion platform at Amerita?
When I left Amerita last year, I knew I wanted to build a new business. I had three criteria I looked to satisfy in the new venture: it needed to be in the healthcare service field, allow me to leverage the relationship capital and experience I had built in specialty infusion, and alignwith current healthcare trends (including improved outcomes, reduced cost, and increased access). The home health industry fits each of those criteria and it’s a market I know well from my days at Gentiva Health Services.
I expect that leveraging the lessons learned building Amerita will help make better acquisition decisions, direct our growth initiatives to deliver expected results, better leverage our balance sheet to more efficiently deploy capital, and help us forge important strategic partnerships with new key referral sources. I also have the opportunity with Jet Health to work again with Tom Flynn, a Managing Partner with SV Life Sciences, who backed me previously at Amerita.
What challenges do home health providers face in today’s market?
I believe running a compliant operation and caregiver recruitment / retention are the two big challenges for home health providers today. CMS has built a new payment model that penalizes poor service providers while rewarding those that provide excellent care and outcomes. Additionally, CMS will begin to implement a prior authorization process later this year that will tighten control on the flow of in-eligible patients. Successful providers need to stay current with CMS policy changes and tightly manage their operations from intake to reimbursement in order to maximize their reimbursement opportunities. On the recruiting front, caregivers are our product. Successful companies need to have multi-tiered strategies to recruit talent to provide quality patient care in order to respond to the growing need for clinical caregivers as the population continues to age and more healthcare services are provided outside the hospital.
Various health settings are increasingly look to incorporate technology to enhance value and improve the patient experience. What role do you see technology playing for Jet Health?
We see several opportunities for technology to enable the home health to improve the patient’s experience. We have embraced telemedicine-enabled patient care for frequent hospital re-admission diagnoses to reduce hospital re-admissions and serves as a potential application to improve deployment of services to our caregiver network.
What occupies your time outside of the office?
When I’m not working, I spend time with my family and often lose graciously at golf to my wife Janet. I am a novice “birder” and also enjoy cycling the coastline of southern California.