Future Leader: Jonah Blumenthal, TypoDuctions and DRIFT Chief Marketing Officer

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 https://futureleaders.agingmedia.com/.

Jonah Blumenthal, Chief Marketing Officer of TypoDuctions and DRIFT, has been named a 2021 Future Leader by Skilled Nursing News.

To become a Future Leader, an individual is nominated by their peers. The candidate must be a high-performing employee who is 40-years-old or younger, a passionate worker who knows how to put vision into action and an advocate for seniors.

Blumenthal spoke with Skilled Nursing News to talk about his career trajectory and the ways the industry is evolving due to market and regulatory forces and the COVID-19 pandemic.

SNN: Can you tell me a little bit about yourself and what drew you to this industry?

Jonah: My partner was actually in this industry, he worked in contracts for a large group, and he had a passion for video editing and I at the time had nothing to do with health care. This was about seven years ago. He came to me and was like I have this idea: there’s no creativity in health care and there’s a need for it.

At that time nobody thought that social media, online reputation and things like that were important in this industry, and we saw that not only was it important, but how much more important it will become as time went on. We started this full service digital marketing agency first really just focused on social media and video.

We then grew to include websites and website updates and check-in kiosks and it rolled into doing everything from an online standpoint for health care.

What’s the innovation that you’re most proud of?

One of the innovations I’m most proud of is bringing that creativity to health care. We’ve done music videos at facilities and we’ve done scripted stories. The New Jersey Health Care Association kicks off their conference every year with one of our fun videos. The point that they are trying to get across is that health care doesn’t have to be boring.

We want to make it so [nursing homes] are not just the place to go because you have to go somewhere, but it’s the next chapter in senior care.

The other one with DRIFT, our sister company, was that as the pandemic was starting we saw the need for staff. While everyone was focused on different things, nobody was focused on how bad the staffing crisis was and how much worse it was going to get. We created a product to help try and solve the staffing crisis that we are currently in that is unfortunately getting worse by the day.

What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned since starting to work in this industry?

This industry is really an industry based on people and care.

[Operators] are putting more of a focus on the care going into their buildings that they are currently offering, which is ultimately helping the bottom line.

If you could change one thing with an eye towards the future of skilled nursing, what would it be?

I think it would be related to technology.

Within health care [technology] is underutilized.

Over the last couple of years we’ve seen the boom of PointClickCare and OnShift and our companies that people are paying more attention to. [Technology] is more important than ever before, but there’s still this notion that we run a facility the same way that we’ve always run a facility, which I think is not taking advantage of the different solutions and options out there and it’s a mistake.

What do you foresee as being different about the skilled nursing industry looking ahead to 2022 and beyond?

Well I think this year we went through a major paradigm shift where the industry is never going to be the same. One of the things that we do a lot of is video production, and people have been constantly asking me over the last year that they need a video because they can’t even get people into their facility for tours, but they really don’t want people to wear masks [in the video].

My response is that it is the new normal.

We’ve pushed to make website updates an effective means of communication [for COVID-19 case numbers]. I don’t foresee that going away.

I think that’s going to be something that for the next few years will be a regular thing, reporting more effectively to families and having it more easily accessible will be something that will continue for the foreseeable future.

In a word, how would you describe the future of skilled nursing?

Robust.

I think that the industry is going to continue to grow and on top of that I think that there’s going to be a stronger emphasis on the types of facilities out there. They’re not just going to be buildings anymore that were built to hold people. I’ve seen more luxury places pop up and I’m seeing more places that have that hotel feel and that difference is needed.

What quality must all future leaders possess, you think?

Foresight.

I think that foresight is one of those qualities that has to be embodied by a future leader because we’re always looking towards the future. There was this old school method for years that “this is the way things have always been done.”

We have to get out of that mind frame and look three, four, five, 10 years ahead and say what’s going to be important here so I have longevity.

To learn more about the Future Leaders program, visit https://futureleaders.agingmedia.com/.

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