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/.

Logan Hoover, vice president of policy and government relations for the National Alliance for Care at Home, has been named a 2024 Future Leader by Hospice News.

The Alliance is the combined organization formed by the merger of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization (NHPCO) and the National Association for Home Care & Hospice (NAHC).

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.

Hoover recently shared details about his career trajectory with Hospice News about the ways the industry, and related public policy, is evolving.

What drew you to the hospice space?

Before coming to NHPCO, I worked on Capitol Hill. My former boss, Rep.Tom Reed [R-New York], served on the Ways and Means Committee and was active in the health space. He had a very personal connection to hospice.

By virtue of that, your boss’s priorities become your priority. So that’s where I really started to learn the policies of hospice and palliative care through his work in that space, and his interest in that space. That’s where I developed my expertise.

Since you started working in hospice, what’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned?

The biggest lesson that I’ve learned is really to continue to learn,to really be as inquisitive as possible. I think the moment that you start to think, “All right, I’ve got a handle on this material,” then you learn that there’s 10 times as much out there.

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

People need to have a better understanding of hospice outside of the hospice space. Too often we’re sort of put in this other box that’s out there and not really incorporated into the full field of health care, and I’m including palliative in that as well.

I think if we did a better job explaining ourselves and involving ourselves in the larger health community, that would be a really positive thing for our providers.

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

I think there’s a lot that’s going to be the same, both good and bad. Program Integrity is still going to be an issue.

We’re starting to see the impact of [the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS)] efforts there. It’s slow. Everything that’s involved in CMS, or really the federal government, broadly, those are always going to be slow efforts. As much as we want immediate change, it’s slow. So I think we’re going to start to see some momentum, build some positive outcomes from our involvement there over the last three years.

I’m ever the optimist. I’m hopeful we’re going to begin to turn the corner on this issue, because we need to focus on bigger things. The more that we’re focusing on program integrity, that takes away our ability to focus on making the benefit better, from a perspective of improving access, improving care delivery. By making some progress on program integrity, we’re able to then shift our focus onto those issues and facing workforce issues.

Moving a little bit more upstream with regards to palliative care, I think that’s going to be a big shift. To kind of go back to my earlier comments about better integration into the full health space, I think through this new [National Alliance for Care at Home], we’re going to really build out that care at home space and bring all of those entities kind of further into the fold of health care. It’ll be interesting to see how that develops.

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

Optimistic. There are a lot of people that are a little negative right now, but I’m going to be the optimist for the [Medicare Hospice] Benefit and for the future.

There’s so much potential to improve access, to expand it to a larger population, improve awareness about the benefits of palliative care as well. There’s so much more room to grow there and really ensure that people know that they have a choice, know that they have the option for this type of health care and be able to make that kind of informed decision.

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

My advice would be: Look for partnership opportunities. We’ve seen the benefits of collaboration and working together that we can’t be kind of pushing something alone.

Whether it’s trying to fix some of the program integrity issues or otherwise — if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together. That’s really what we need to be thinking about — how we build a bigger coalition, a bigger tent. That’s really how we’re going to achieve success.

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