Despite freezing admissions for a short time at the onset of the pandemic, Guardian Healthcare’s hospital referrals have bounced back since that time – which may be something of an anomaly in the skilled nursing space.
The Brockway, Pa.-based provider with roughly 50 SNFs spread throughout Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio has seen a significant and sustained increase in referral volume, with some of its facilities receiving four to five times pre-COVID referrals.
Overall the company has seen about a 125% increase in referrals since the start of the pandemic with some facilities reporting up to a 400% increase in referrals, according to Adam Tobbbe, vice president of Guardian Care Connect at Guardian Healthcare.
“I think the demand is absolutely still out there, we’ve just made it very difficult as an industry to partner with our referring sources,” he told Skilled Nursing News. “It’s been difficult to attribute it to one thing other than the immediate impact that we saw when we just buried our heads and focused on referral management and making it the best possible process.”
Growing its patient mix has also been integral to Guardian’s recovery.
“We’ve nearly doubled our-short-term, short stay patients,” Tobbe explained. “We were predominantly a long stay company but since April 2021, we’ve really focused on taking on more complex patients.”
In order to move to higher acuity patients, Guardian pushed for additional educational training for its clinical staff to better support the needs of its patient population.
“We’ve had to open our eyes to patients we didn’t think we could take before so we’ve had to adjust our training and education to be able to support that,” Tobbe said. “With Pennsylvania being a managed care state it’s made it very easy to go back to our partners and make sure that we’re supporting as we should be.”
Guardian Healthcare saw its referrals drop about 40% immediately after COVID-19 first struck and they stayed down until June 2020.
By the time July hit, Guardian had returned to pre-COVID numbers, according to Tobbe.
“In December 2020, we saw a very large spike and increased our volume about 40% between November and December 2020,” he said. “Since then, we’ve been on the upward trajectory.”
Through a new referral management platform, Guardian Care Connect, Tobbe said the company dramatically decreased its response time and focused on data-based communications with its referral sources to ensure quick and accurate decisions were being made on every referral.
In conversations with its referral partners, it’s become clear that the company’s response time has been integral to its success.
“Our referring partners basically said you respond quickly to every referral we send you if you can take it or not and it lets us know if we need to go hunt something else down so we’ve almost become the default provider of choice because they know they can get an answer from us very, very quickly,” Tobbe explained.
Like many other operators in the space right now, staffing shortages have hurt Guardian’s recovery somewhat.
“We haven’t avoided those problems,” Tobbe said. “We do have sites that are running below what they could and we have some sites that receive three to four referrals per bed that we can’t take because of staffing.”
With Guardian Care Connect, however, Tobbe is able to easily place patients where they need to be placed.
“We’ve got this centralized mentality to say if a patient gets referred to a certain facility and that facility can’t accommodate, we have a network behind the scene where we can see if we can place that patient elsewhere,” he said.
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