The Future Leaders Awards program is brought to you in partnership with Homecare Homebase. The program is designed to recognize up-and-coming industry members who are shaping the next decade of home health, hospice care, senior housing, skilled nursing and behavioral health. To see this year’s Future Leaders, visit https://futureleaders.agingmedia.com/.

Taylor Forsythe, senior vice president of strategy and performance management at Traditions Health, has been named a 2024 Future Leader by Hospice 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, and the committed professionals who ensure their well-being.

Forsythe recently shared details about his career trajectory with Hospice News about the ways the industry is evolving due to technology trends and a focus on value-based care delivery alongside rising demand.

What drew you to work in the hospice industry?

I’ll start with health care. So what attracted me to health care, going back to my college days, was that it’s an industry that I knew needed a lot of attention. It had tons of complicated problems that I think would keep me busy for my whole life.

Hospice specifically attracted me, and I came into the hospice space just a couple of years ago. It’s really young relative to some of the other service lines. It is on the cusp of some regulatory changes with [the value-based insurance design model], and really the payer mix right now. Now, hospice is more than 90% Medicare fee-for-service, but all that’s subject to change here in the future.

So I thought it would be really compelling to get into space and start to navigate Traditions through some of these changes that are ahead of us.

What would you say is the biggest lesson that you’ve learned since you’ve started working in hospice?

The biggest lesson so far is to not really put any bias of my experience to the side. It’s not just for hospice, but probably transcends any space. I got in and started to think about how I might implement changes strategically and what those avenues might be for the organization.

I learned to listen twice as much and really stay attentive to that and make sure that those strategic initiatives that we are going to be pursuing are really simple and directional and instructional for people.

What I’ve learned at Traditions, is that hospice is still really working to develop and mature. For example, just across the industry, you have a lot of operators that may have been great individual contributors as nurses, but they get into management roles and don’t necessarily have the business acumen and so forth to carry out some of these initiatives.

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

The payer shifts are going to be challenging for us. I don’t think that’s a problematic thing, because I think a lot of regulatory changes like that can be very beneficial, especially for the patient, which is what matters the most.

I think it’s actively changing. And again, I go back to that maturity thing. As you know, leaders are rising up within the space and helping bring others along. People have their eyes on the right things and are ensuring that everybody’s book of business is healthy, compliant and doing the right thing by the patients and families. That’s really the biggest thing, developing that muscle for the industry.

Looking ahead to 2025, what do you foresee being different about the hospice industry?

You’re going to see turnover continuing to be something that the hospice industry faces, but possibly even grow. I’m just thinking about the nursing shortage that we see just across across sectors. That’s something that we struggle with, and something that we’re trying to solve for as well.

That gap gets a little bit bigger and bigger for us in terms of bringing on nurses that are well educated and want to do the hospice thing, because it’s not for everyone.

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

The future of hospice, I would say, is exciting. This is a space that it’s young, and there’s a lot of changes that are coming. There’s a lot of leaders that are coming into the space that are really excited to move the industry forward in the right way. And there’s a lot still yet to come in terms of what hospice has to hurdle. But for now, “exciting” is the word I would give you.

That’s not to say it doesn’t come with its challenges. We talked a little bit about staffing, and that’s something that everybody faces. There’s certainly payer mix shifts that will come with challenges.

If you could look back to your first day of working in hospice and give yourself any piece of advice, what would it be and why?

I would say, surrounding myself with the senior team and learning about Traditions as we sat at that point in time in terms of what our balance sheet looked like, what we’re looking like relative to our competitors.

I wish I had that first week to dig in probably six layers into the organization and have a conversation with an aide, for example. It probably could have helped me if I had had those conversations with some of our workers there at the front lines, that really kind of helped me understand where folks are coming from a lot quicker.