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/.
Cachet Colvard, head of strategic partnerships at Guaranteed 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.
Colvard recently shared details about her career trajectory with Hospice News about the ways the industry is evolving due to regulation and reimbursement alongside innovations in care delivery.
What drew you to the hospice industry?
I went to high school with Guaranteed Health’s CEO and Founder Jessica McGlory. She called me with this amazing idea for Guaranteed and asked me to come join her in building the company. Without hearing about her father’s passing and why she was starting it, and without even having my own personal experience in hospice, I probably would not have ventured into this industry directly.
My journey into hospice care was pretty much an evolution from my earlier focus on curative care and health system operations. I trained at Cleveland Clinic. I’ve always cared about value, access and quality. This industry introduced me to those concepts in the context of end-of-life care. The impact that it can have on not just the patients and their families, but also on those of us working in it — that definitely stood out to me.
[It’s] knowing that for my family and the Black community there’s a lot of disparities in hospice care. But when we talk about the end of life and death, the conversations are very different. There’s many opportunities in this space. So it produced the real life opportunity to not only have an impact on those we serve, but also on my community, my family at home and being able to change the way we’ve dealt with death together. I feel that in itself has made me a better person.
What’s your biggest lesson learned since starting to work in this industry?
Not everyone has dedicated time to thinking about what their death looks like or put words to the vision of what they want their death to be. I think everyone at least wants it to be comfortable and a smooth process.
This is a lesson that only dawned on me years after my grandfather’s death. My family hadn’t let me know he was really sick upon his request. Once I found out, I was angry. But I got a clear vision of what death should be, even though his vision was different from my own. My focus was on preventing death, seeking cancer treatments and continuing to fight. It was a full circle moment to focus on the things he wanted and loved doing together and not waste valuable time.
The experience really highlighted the danger of assuming that there’s one right way to die. It’s a valuable reminder for anyone working in health care to really check our biases and listen to patients and family members. Everyone deserves to die how they wish, and that is pretty much at the forefront of how care approaches and conversations around dying are going. It’s at the forefront of everything we do at Guaranteed.
If you could change one thing with an eye toward the future of hospice, what would it be?
I would like to see more personalization and creativity in death care. How do we make a space that is traditionally full of sorrow and showcase ease, innovation and celebration during the process, not only after?
Many aspects of the industry are still very burdensome and feel rushed. I would love to see us get to a point where the care is smooth and the experience is a journey of life — especially for caregivers and the bereaved. They often bear a significant emotional and physical burden, and enhancing their experience could also have so many positive impacts that we may not even be thinking about yet. We all should be asking those questions of what personalized care means.
How does creativity and uniqueness fit in this space? That doesn’t always naturally come up, and that’s a lot of the reason why Guaranteed was started. We’re trying to bring a renewed focus on death, dying and grief. We hear a lot now about [providers] being patient-centered or family-centered, but not as creative. With patients in the driver’s seat for them to determine their own experience, we’re just a vehicle that helps get them there. We’re trying to build the future now with those things in mind.
What do you foresee as being different about the hospice industry looking ahead to 2025?
I see much more collaboration and a clear focus on value and outcomes. As patient care and payment models change, there’s more constraints on upstream services. Providers that are taking care of patients upstream and seeing an increasing need for integrated care. We’re hearing a lot about that need as well among partnerships with hospitals, primary care providers, health plans and other specialists. These partnerships are going to become more crucial in providing that seamless experience.
With the focus on value, we’ve seen so much policy and regulation in this space, but it’s also in terms of cost savings from the financial aspect to the health care system. We can expect continued evolution of the regulatory landscape, such as changes in Medicare Hospice Benefit and increased scrutiny on quality metrics and reporting. We’ve already seen those changes, and it’s only going to grow more as the next year approaches.
We’re going to see wider adoption of telehealth and AI really bringing tech-enabled care into the home. This will help enhance care delivery and improve patient outcomes. We’ve seen this shift happen in other sectors of health care. We’ve started to see it some in hospice, but I think that it’s going to continue, especially all of the conversation around AI in our society.
I think we’ll also see a larger focus on health equity. We’ve seen the inroads of that start now, and just need those to continue addressing disparities at the end of life. It’s learning more about when care is equitable and culturally appropriate. When your company is diverse, it leads to better outcomes, better performance, increased satisfaction amongst staff and those that you care for, as well as better quality of life for patients and their families.
We need to define what “health equity” means. What metrics are we going to be tracking to determine if care is equitable? What outcomes are we going to be looking for? Diversity is a word that is being thrown around a lot in an industry that hasn’t traditionally been diverse itself. So, focusing on teaching and training on equity, and then having metrics and quality tied to it, is going to be very important.
In a word, how would you describe the future of hospice?
Emerging.
The hospice field right now definitely honors the foundational principles around why it started in the first place and why we needed to care for those who are dying and have a dedicated program. It’s also starting to embrace change and innovation.
There’s new policy and cultural shifts, and greater diversification in how we do business. The perceptions are changing, and all of this is going to help take the industry to the next level. While hospice inherently deals with death, there is this sense of vitality and progress in the industry.
We’re seeing that it’s not just about providing comfort in the final days or the final weeks. It’s really about how we enhance the quality of life for patients and their families throughout the entire end-of-life journey. There is this renewed sense of focus on this space after there hasn’t traditionally been, with a lot of newness coming into the industry. As we look into the future, there’s just going to be so much more.
What quality must all Future Leaders possess?
Perseverance is really our secret sauce.
From a life and generational standpoint, there’s a large subset of people that are kind of in this sandwich generation of caring for young children and also caring for their parents. That is not easy by any means. Life is hard enough, without imagining having to provide support on both ends of the spectrum.
From a more exciting standpoint, our industry deals with life’s most challenging moments. It’s also ripe for opportunities of change and impact from future leaders. We have the opportunity to see beyond the difficulties and really envision the potential in front of us when it comes to enhancing these life experiences. If we’re unwavering in that spirit, we can really drive innovation, inspire teams and transform a lot of the barriers and obstacles that are in our way to use them as stepping stones for what’s next.
It’s not going to be easy, but we have a chance to champion what compassionate end-of-life care looks like years down the line and spark industry-wide changes that are built on what’s already been done. It’s blending that resilience and optimism to shape a brighter future for end-of-life journeys.
If you could give advice to yourself looking back to your first day in the industry, what would it be and why?
I would tell myself a number of items. Stay committed to doing what’s right, even when it’s very tough. There are going to be hard days and difficult lessons, but don’t let them discourage you or the impact that you can make in the future. The growth that I have as a person and leader is going to make all of those experiences worth it.
Trust your instincts and lean into the hard conversations. Always reflect back on why you chose this path. Keep the mission of the industry and of Guaranteed at the center of every decision that you make. You’re going to work harder than you ever have before, but it’s all going to be rewarding. You got this!
To learn more about the Future Leaders program, visit https://futureleaders.agingmedia.com/.