The Future Leaders Awards program is brought to you in partnership with PointClickCare. The program is designed to recognize up-and-coming industry members who are shaping the next decade of senior housing, skilled nursing, home health and hospice care. To see this year’s future leaders, visit Future Leaders online.
Leah Shlyakhov Connachan, chief revenue officer at Seattle-based clinical software company MedBridge, has been named a 2020 Future Leader by Home Health Care News parent company Aging Media Network.
Future Leaders are high-performing, passionate employees nominated by their peers. Candidates must be 40 or younger and put vision into action while also advocating for seniors and their caregivers.
Connachan recently sat down with HHCN to talk about the important role technology has to play shaping the future of the ever-evolving home health care industry.
HHCN: What drew you to this industry?
Connachan: I’ve always had a passion for health care and education, and that’s the reason I work for MedBridge.
Specifically in home health, I look at the different models of care and ways that we can provide accessible care to the most vulnerable within our communities.
That really has been at the heart of it all: making sure that what I do and what we do as a business is really improving the lives of patients.
What’s your biggest lesson learned since you started working in home health?
There’s vast diversity within the industry itself, given the different complexities within payment models, within partnerships and within ownership.
The world of home health is highly complex and is ever changing, so I feel like I’m learning every day.
The new technologies and new care models that are being tested in industry is always fascinating, so there’s never a time that I’m not learning.
If you could change one thing with an eye toward the future of home health care, what would it be?
Coming from a technology company that helps serve patients with digital care within home health, I’m always looking at continued adoption of technologies by the patient population.
In the past few years, the willingness for patients to adopt the technology has been pretty prevalent.
We’ve seen an even more drastic change in that over the course of a very short time due to the coronavirus, and we’ll continue to see that as we head into the future.
What do you foresee being different about the home health industry in 2021?
I think we’ll continue to see additional services and expanded services within the home.
I’m working with a few agencies right now that are modeling different types of care within the home. It’s really exciting to be able to bring some things that have historically been in brick-and-mortar into the home.
In a word, how would you describe the future of home health?
If I could only say one word, I’d say it’s “exciting,” but there’s many words I could use to describe the future of home health care. I think “exciting” would encapsulate them all.
There’s so much opportunity to better serve patient populations in the community and use innovative care models and care delivery systems to better engage with both patients and family members.
To learn more about the Future Leaders program, visit the Future Leaders homepage.
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