Many nursing home operators understand how essential forging hospital partnerships can be to the success of their business, but exactly what that looks like — and how to get started – can be tricky to navigate.

Hospitals and SNFs operate in largely different worlds with different payment models, policies and regulations.

A partnership has to be more than just a place for the hospital to send their patients and a way to fill nursing home beds, according to Stephanie Chedid, president and CEO of Luther Manor.

“Don’t bring your business model to your hospital partner. Talk about your capabilities,” Chedid said during a presentation at the LTC 100 Conference held this week.

Chedid has built a relationship with Wisconsin-based Froedtert Health System over the last 15 months, creating a 12-bed “intermediate unit” in the single-site nursing home staffed by Luther Manor and Froedtert employees.

Luther Manor is a single-site, full continuum of care facility that includes 99 skilled nursing beds and 45 short-stay acute beds.

The unit provides the rehabilitation, clinical, complex social services and financial counseling support needed to transition a resident to their final level of cre.

And it’s paid off so far. Since getting off the ground in February 2021, the intermediate unit has accepted 193 referrals at a 48% acceptance rate. Luther Manor’s intermediate unit also opened up an acute bed 631 times for a five-day stay during this timeframe.

The patient population ranges anywhere from 35 years old to 80+.

Ultimately the partnership has also offered a better understanding of the work both hospitals and SNFs do, and how they can be better aligned going forward.

“The thing that’s really important is to understand each other’s world because that’s how you’ll solve problems together,” Diane Ehn, Froedtert’s vice president of post-acute care.

When the collaboration was first presented, the plan was to develop its own special unit in a separate wing with its own entrance, Chedid said. The COVID-19 pandemic changed a lot of those plans, but ultimately for the better.

The staff comprises a Froedtert doctor and nurse practitioner that supports the skilled nursing staff, a psychiatrist and wound care physicians, nurses CNAs, social workers, financial counselors and therapy, among other roles.

“We have a much broader staff that is skilled and dealing with high acuity patients. It enables us to rotate workload for our nurses so one group doesn’t always have … the hardest assignments, and we have redundancies but it also has enabled us to recruit some remarkable talent,” Chedid said during the session.

This staffing makeup has offered Luther Manor opportunities to be a more attractive employer on the recruitment side given its newly developed complex clinical capabilities.

“We’ve really created a pretty compelling career ladder and opportunity set for our staff that has really been fantastic here,” she said.

But that has required significant training, something Chedid said was crucial when it came to being able to provide the care Froedtert needed when it came to the types of referrals being sent.

“We said, ‘look if you want us to take X, Y and Z type of patient, we need you to train our staff.’ We have a medical director and NP from their system that’s also on our campus daily, and that makes a big difference as well,” she added.

The ways in which Froedtert and Luther Manor have been able to collaborate and work together on a regular basis through this unit has created an integrated care model.

“It’s not a system by which the hospital sends the patient to the SNF to lose them and says, Good luck to you,” Ehn said.

Turning the traditional idea of a SNF-hospital relationship on its head in a lot of ways is exactly why this program has had success, according to Chedid.

“Don’t let the hospitals or a payer dictate your business model. Own it and show up with your capabilities, and you can create things like this as long as there’s mutual respect there and willingness,” she said.

Froedtert Health System, Luther Manor

When Jordyn's not covering the latest skilled nursing news, she's likely catching a Cubs game at Wrigley Field, cheering on the Iowa Hawkeyes or watching Gilmore Girls all the way through for the millionth time. Previously, she covered the legal beat for various publications.

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