Two years after assuming management of The Willows at Springhurst, formerly named Springhurst Pines Senior Living, Kentucky-based Trilogy Health Services says it has turned a deficiency-riddled campus into a stellar community.
The skilled nursing part of the Louisville, KY, facility had been designated by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services as a special focus facility due to a history of noncompliance with quality of care and safety requirements over a three-year period before Trilogy assumed management. Now, following three successful state surveys with the CMS Division of Health Care, the special focus facility designation officially has been lifted.
When Trilogy took over management in July 2019, it needed to focus on clearing the 10 immediate jeopardies the campus had received, Melissa Larmour, division vice president for the south Kentucky division within Trilogy, told the McKnight’s Business Daily. “Immediate jeopardy” means a situation in which the facility’s noncompliance with one or more requirements of participation has caused, or is likely to cause, serious injury, harm, impairment or death to a resident.
To work on this priority, Larmour said, assistant vice presidents from the medical team and other members of the clinical support team reviewed previous audits, looked at how previous policies and procedure and had implemented and daily operations within the campus.
“They focused on those things from July 2019 to November 2019, and they pretty much were in the building constantly. That was their main focus for several months,” Larmour said.
At the same time, she said, Trilogy also was “taking a deep dive into the current clinical operations of the campus and implementing our Trilogy programs that we know work,” Larmour said. “Obviously, that meant quite a bit of training and education as well as monitoring to ensure that what we were training on was being implemented.”
The transition amounted to “almost a complete system overhaul,” she added.
Trilogy implemented programs and technology used at other properties, including a different electronic medical records system and a tracking system via which certified nursing assistants can electronically document resident care.
Assessing staff competencies to determine which skills need to be improved was an important step to improving standards, Larmour said. “That was certainly a top priority for our clinical team and operations team, to really look at those skills and where did we need to improve,” she said.
The organization did not use any outside staffing agencies, Larmour said, adding that the company does not use such staff in any of its communities.
