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For Aging Adults, a Complete Care Package
CEO Spero describes the 'iceberg' that is Masonicare
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Business New Haven
9/29/2003
By: BNH
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In 1871, when the city of Chicago was struggling to rebuild from the ashes of the Great Fire, Connecticut Freemasons rallied to the aid of their Chicago brethren with a $332 donation. When that sum was repaid, the Connecticut group elected to use the money as the basis of a charitable fund. That fund eventually purchased that 88-acre Wallingford homestead that today is the campus of Masonicare.
Barry M. Spero has been president and CEO of Masonicare since 1995. A health-care administrator his entire career, Spero today oversees the largest not-for-profit organization in Connecticut caring for older adults. With 3,200 full- and part-time employees statewide, Masonicare operates statewide through six affiliates: home health-care provider Connecticut VNA, Ashlar Village and Ashlar of Newtown, skilled nursing facilities for the frail elderly, the 548-bed Masonic Geriatric Healthcare Center, Masonic Management Services and the Masonic Charity Foundation of Connecticut, the name under which the organization was originally chartered in 1889 as the charitable arm of the Grand Lodge of Connecticut AF & AM.
Masonicare is one of the largest organizations in this part of the state, but probably not everyone knows exactly what you do.
Masonicare is the state’s largest provider of health care to seniors. We also have the largest home health-care company in the state, the Connecticut VNA. Most of these services — nursing homes and retirement communities — are [aimed at] older individuals by and large — age 55 and over in the case of our retirement communities. Our rehabilitation services serve all ages. We do provide pediatric [services] through our home health-care company.
From your perspective, what are the principal issues for baby boomers caring for their increasingly dependent parents?
We’re going to see an explosion of the baby boomers in another ten or 15 years. What we are seeing now, building up to that, is baby boomers’ concern about their parents, wanting either assisted-living type of care, some independent living. They want their [parents] not to have to worry about taking care of a home, or shoveling snow, or maintaining the yard….[The continuum typically] is independent to assisted to nursing home [care]. They are the ones who in many cases are out ‘shopping’ for [care options]. Baby boomers typically go in and acquire a lot of information and make decisions based on all the facts that they can gather. So what we’re seeing is the pressure of wanting to get Mon and Dad into a facility that is high-quality and high-care. The other [market] segment is [aging adults who] want to stay at home. More and more people are looking to stay at home as opposed to coming into a facility, be it assisted living or a nursing home. So we’re seeing an ever-increasing demand on our home health services.
Is the assisted-living industry in Connecticut overbuilt – that is, has supply outpaced demand for assisted-living facilities?
Pretty much. What we find is that those organizations that offer a continuum of care are at full capacity. Our assisted-living [facilities] are full. We [feature] what is known as a ‘continuum of care.’ A patient can come into Ashlar Village — which is our retirement community — move from there to the assisted living, and from there to a nursing home, or into our acute medical hospital [on Masonicare’s Wallingford campus] or our behavioral-health center — basically without leaving the campus. From our standpoint, having that continuum of care, we are [at] full [capacity]. A lot of freestanding assisted-living facilities are the ones that are having most of the problems [filling capacity].
At what point typically does a patient need to transition from assisted living to a nursing home setting?
It will vary from patient to patient a little bit. But by and large, if an individual patient needs assistance with daily living — if we can provide, for example, a bath and some help with medications — that’s assisted living. But if a [patient] needs to be physically transferred — moved from a bed to a wheelchair to the toilet to the dining room — and also needs help with medication on a continual basis, that’s where that [threshold is crossed] and you move that person over to nursing-home care.
The CEO of a public company has a very clear mission: to maximize shareholder value. Your job is different. How do you measure the output of your job performance as CEO of a non-profit?
Good question. You measure it based on the quality of the service that you bring, and the satisfaction of the residents and their families. We’re a big operation — we’re about a $145 million-a-year business with 2,500 employees. And we’re like an iceberg — you only see a portion of [the entire organization]. My job is judged on the quality of the services that we give, the satisfaction of the employees and the satisfaction of the patients. We have to run it like a business, but any [profit] dollars that may be made are just plowed right back into the quality of the services that we deliver.
What would you like people in the business community to know about Masonicare that they might not know now?
Number one, that the services we provide [encompass] a full range of programs. One of the things that many businesses don’t realize is that they have adult children who are coming to work and worrying about their parents. Programs such as our geriatric-assessment program, whereby an individual comes in and is assessed not just from a medical standpoint, but from a social standpoint, from [the perspective of] an occupational therapist. Is the person taking the right medications is one [factor]. Is the person really able to function in [his or her] own home independently? And if not independently, how can they stay in the home as independently as possible? Our Connecticut VNA has a memory-loss program that will help people in their home.
More generally, Masonicare is a resource that businesses can use to assist them in easing the burden of their adult-children or even their senior employees and their spouses.
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