This article is sponsored by CHAP. In this Voices interview, Home Health Care News sits down with Nathan DeGodt, President & CEO of CHAP, to learn how his organization is redefining the gold standard of home-based care. He explains how CHAP is helping providers achieve and maintain that level of care quality while driving growth through some of the most adverse circumstances the industry has seen. He also discusses how CHAP is making itself more accessible to its partners as it shapes the future of accreditation.
Home Health Care News: What career experiences do you most draw from in your role today?
Nathan DeGodt: I was fortunate to get into health care out of college and work my way up to sales leadership early in my career. But I was always generally 20 years younger than my counterparts. That dynamic, along with two strong mentors, shaped my work ethic and helped me understand the importance of putting myself into environments where I was never the smartest person at the table. I did a lot of strategy-building and very little fluff, which allowed me to develop a variety of skill sets ranging from consulting and supplies to end-of-life care. All of those experiences led me to where I am today.
CHAP has been a major player in accreditation since 1965. But for those who don’t know, what is CHAP, and what impact are customers seeing from partnering with you?
CHAP stands for Community Health Accreditation Partner. We’re one of the very few accrediting bodies that have been given authority by CMS to essentially act as the governing and oversight body of post-acute providers. That means providers have an option, in most cases, to either be accredited by an accrediting body or have oversight by the state agency.
We have to show up every day to ensure that our value proposition aligns with the provider. We’re the guardrails of safety, patient care and quality outcomes, making sure that providers are delivering the gold standard of service. CHAP has been doing this since 1965. It’s something on which we’ve focused efforts in terms of our commitment to quality, our commitment to patient outcomes and our commitment to patient safety, and that’s where we put ourselves in the space.
How did you manage to drive growth for CHAP during the COVID pandemic?
I moved to D.C. and started with CHAP literally one month before COVID became “COVID,” leaving my family behind in Nashville, Tennessee to unknowingly take on what would become one of the greatest challenges in my career so far. It was a difficult adjustment, and during my first month, I went to a meeting with a prominent home health and hospice provider where the CEO said, “We’ve been customers of yours for nine years and I still can’t quite figure out your value proposition. Can you explain that to me?”
I said, “With all due respect, I can’t at this point, but I’ll defer to my coworker.” The answer given was focused on CHAP, the process, and accreditation – but not the customer and their goals. Having been with the organization for just a short period of time, the train ride back to D.C. after that meeting really sparked my vision for the organization. It changed how I looked at our value proposition, which ultimately led to a massive internal shift of job responsibilities and scope. It also allowed me to go outside of the organization and start bringing in people who I trusted.
We built a strong team of leaders to drive the customer experience and technological prowess of the organization, and revitalize the culture. I surrounded myself with people who are much smarter than me in different areas of the business, and we stepped up to the plate. We wanted to emerge during the pandemic while our competition shrunk into the shadows.
I can tell you that throughout the last couple of years, in particular that first year of COVID, people were hungry for our expertise and knowledge. That led not only to quality outcomes, but also to a higher level of sophistication and trust with our providers. It truly accelerated us.
What steps have you taken recently to make the CHAP team more accessible to its partners, and what is driving this approach?
With a continual focus on quality, we had to ramp up recruiting and staff to accommodate the ability to output to the highest of standards. Additionally, we’ve added resources at a time when most organizations are pulling back — not only for our senior leaders, but also for those who interact with our customers on a daily basis. We’ve said, “Okay, this may be a financial hit short-term, but the most important thing in the long-term is that relationship.”
It has taken a seismic shift to make us more accessible, but our inbound and outbound calls have increased substantially, and we’ve monitored and managed the changes within regulation, reimbursement and oversight as well. I can honestly say that the P in CHAP (Partner) drives us every single day.
We’re a human business. We don’t sell products. We don’t have anything to put on a shelf. We know that every day, we’re going to have an interaction that will ripple and impact those we serve. We get feedback from customers across the country who are thanking us for what we do — even though our work can sometimes be perceived as punitive.
We are the cops who come in and say, “You need to put a plan of correction together and do this differently,” but our customers are grateful for what we do because of the way we do it. That’s the relationship we build because again, nothing is more important to us than that patient experience throughout end-of-life. Anything less than 100% is unacceptable.
What is your vision for accreditation and what does that mean for providers?
My vision for accreditation is, again, partnerships. It’s not just a one-time relationship, because accreditation occurs every three years. When I started, a provider could get accredited in a week, then there wouldn’t be much of a relationship until after that three-year period when they were up for renewal. We wanted to completely turn that upside down and say, “We’re not just going to accredit you, we’re also going to provide more educational resources,” which we offer through a new division called the Center for Excellence.
We now give certification courses to administrators and health care sales leaders. We created six new disease certification courses. We created a CHAP Certified and a CHAP Verified program, neither of which were in existence 18 months ago. That goes to show that not only did we sign that contract for accreditation, but we also locked onto our partners moving forward to make sure their clinicians are trained the way they see fit. We’ve done that over the last 18 months, and I see it from a visionary perspective.
One of my favorite authors, Simon Sinek, has written some great leadership books like, Leaders Eat Last. In that book, he made a comment that really stuck with me stating, “Everybody’s title with an organization is pretty self-explanatory except for the CEO.”
Chief Financial Officer — you obviously know what they’re in control of. Chief Business Development Officer — you know what they’re in control of. But Chief Executive Officer is this gray area that nobody really understands, although everybody appreciates and respects the title.
He said, “If we were to ever change that CEO title, it should be the Chief Vision Officer,” and I feel that encapsulates it best. I get to work on the long-term plan of where the organization gets to go, but I surround myself with people much smarter than I am to execute that vision.
Down the road, we have significant headwinds coming at us from a provider perspective, with a looming reduction in reimbursement and consolidation that will continue to occur rapidly over the next three to five years. But we have to be better partners to CHAP customers, and in spite of those headwinds, I have no doubt we’ll do that incredibly well. We’re poised to do so based on the organization’s trajectory over the last few years.
How are you approaching recruitment and retention today, and what differentiates CHAP in the job market?
We’re approaching recruitment and retention very proactively. Prior to me joining, there was a more reactive approach. We have very long-tenured employees — some much longer than anywhere else I’ve been associated with. We had to be more proactive with our recruiting efforts, seeking those who put impact and purpose, first.
We’re a subset of a subset of a subset within the nursing space. Our requirements for site visitors are very stringent, but staff shortages have made everybody’s ability to recruit and retain top talent much harder than it was in the past. Nurses are retiring earlier, and many are leaving health care altogether. Trying to find somebody who meets our requirements has been much more challenging under these circumstances.
We started hiring and retaining incredible, well-known, well-respected leaders within the space. We created new positions, such as a national medical director, which CHAP has never had in the past. We started doing podcasts. We started doing round tables. We started doing much more speaking at NHPCO and NAHC — things of that nature. We wanted to be the face out there as opposed to waiting behind the door for people to come to us. The exciting thing is that we’re now having tremendous talent call and ask what job openings are on the horizon, whereas in the past, it felt like we were trying to knock on their doors.
We recently received a grant from The John A. Hartford Foundation to do initiatives such as the forums and age-friendly care at home, and there have been many other exciting opportunities to mold our recruitment strategy. That is the heartbeat of the organization because again, we can sit here with our corporate office employees but, if our employees in the field aren’t excited about what we do and they’re not staying with us, then obviously it’s not going to serve us well.
Finish this sentence: “The top strategy that care providers should employ in 2022 to best prepare for 2023 is…?”
Plan ahead.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
CHAP is an independent, non-profit crediting organization for home and community-based healthcare. To learn more about how they are empowering providers across the continuum, visit https://chapinc.org.
The Voices Series is a sponsored content program featuring leading executives discussing trends, topics and more shaping their industry in a question-and-answer format. For more information on Voices, please contact [email protected].