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/.

Traci Saput, senior manager of hospice operations for Kaiser Permanente, 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.

Saput recently shared details about her career trajectory with Hospice News about the ways the industry is evolving.

What drew you to work in the hospice space?

I didn’t initially start in hospice. I went to [the University of California Davis] for my undergrad, and I was going down the psychology pathway, but my sister was in school to become a nurse. She just had a lot of passion for the health care field and got me introduced into that world.

I started volunteering, and I decided to pivot and get my Master’s in Health Administration. Immediately following graduation, I knew I wanted to work for Kaiser Permanente. I wasn’t exactly sure what area I wanted to be in, but I was really drawn towards strategy and decision support, helping them make business decisions.

I got into that area within the southern California region, and I was working in that job for about six years. I had a colleague that left my department and went into the care at home space within hospice. And before that, I had never really thought about getting into hospice. I didn’t realize that we were really, within Kaiser, starting to develop that and really grow in that area. She really enlightened me.

She called me up one day and said, “Hey, we have an opening, and I think you might be a good fit for it. Are you interested in working in the space?” At that point, I started to do research, and realized that that’s the future of health care. Hearing personal stories and starting to get more information behind it, it just seemed like such an inspiring space to work in and very different from the hospital setting. So I decided to take the leap.

I’ve now been within the Kaiser Permanente hospice space for two years, and I definitely see it being my long term career.

What would you say is the biggest lesson you’ve learned since starting to work in hospice?

Working in hospice in such a different area than other health care spaces, just because you’re managing folks that are terminally ill and and you have family members that you’re interacting with more regularly.

The biggest lesson is just making sure that you’re always catering to your members and your clientele and just giving them all the support that they need. It’s more personal. You get to know the folks because you’re with them for sometimes months. You’re dealing with people in the hardest point of their lives, and you need to stay focused on helping them the best you can.

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

There’s a lot of fraud and a lot of abuse that we see within the hospice space. So I think moving forward, if there was one thing that I could influence or change, it would be making sure that there’s the right regulations and control in place so that that does not happen.

It’s just such a disservice to the hospice benefit and the great services that are provided by all those wonderful providers.

What do you foresee as being different about the hospice industry looking ahead to 2025?

I see a lot of attention now on that fraud and abuse, which I am happy to see. I think that there’s going to be a lot more regulations and controls put in place moving forward. I’m also interested to see where that takes us, because it’s already a very regulated space. It can be very difficult to navigate, especially for smaller organizations.

I work for Kaiser Permanente, so we’re quite large. We have a lot of resources. But those that don’t might find it difficult to keep up with all maintaining all those regulations that are necessary, but can be challenging.

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

It’s going to grow. It’s going to grow substantially over the next decade and more, because of our aging populations. It’s going to become even more important and more of a focus within the health care industry.

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

I would do a little bit more research, and I would gain more knowledge on the regulations that are part of it. When I came into it, I knew about them, but I didn’t know them in depth. You learn them as you go working in the industry, but I think if I would have done a little bit more homework on that. It might have made my life a little bit easier.

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