Long-time hospice CEO Cheryl Hamilton Fried has taken the helm at Kirva Hospice, a new, standalone nonprofit established by the public service organizations Jewish Family Services and Beth Shalom.

Kirva serves the Richmond, Virginia, region with plans to expand into contiguous markets. Its patient census is now in the 30s. About 16% of their patients are of the Jewish faith.

Hamilton Fried comes to Kirva in a time of change for the hospice space at large, and now is charged with helping the organization prepare for an uncertain future. Hospice News spoke with Hamilton Fried about her plans to expand Kirva Hospice and where she expects the industry to go in the coming years.

So Kirva is a newer hospice organization. How did they come into being?

It really was an assessment of the two community-based organizations [Jewish Family Services and Beth Shalom], that felt there was a need for more not-for-profits, faith-based services in the community to tie in with what their other providers have done.

I’ve always strived to be a very good provider of quality care, and there’s nothing that concerns me about the way this organization was operating. They’re very much committed to supporting the local community.

What are your top priorities as you take the helm at Kirva?

Developing culture, that’s always been big for me. I’ve done that everywhere I’ve gone.

Developing people, so I’ve already tapped a couple of managers to elevate to directors, as we are growing our census pretty rapidly and really identifying areas that are unmet in the community. That’s what Kirva and Jewish Family Services want to do, is look at where the gaps are in senior care. 

Kirvai is their first venture rolling into a new product line, but the intention is to make sure that seniors are covered from the time of chronic illness and throughout by a system that doesn’t provide fragmentation.

What are some of the top strategies you plan to use to pursue growth?

I just brought on some additional liaisons. I’m going to be engaging in a two-prong approach, because marketing communications is very important. It’s difficult to measure the return on investment from a patient census standpoint, but it’s very important for reputation, being able to recruit quality staff and making sure that there’s brand awareness. But I am engaging with sales consultants, bringing on additional liaisons, and we really need to be going to the referral source.

There’s a lot changing in the hospice industry. We have payment models that are changing. We have widespread technology adoption and lots more. How are you preparing for that future at Kirva hospice?

First off, it’s developing a good, solid foundation that is scalable. We are not interested to just stay as a sole provider in this area. We want to be able to embrace and be ready for change. So we’re looking at programs like community-based palliative care and primary care services and some other things that make us unique.

We have a rabbi and a non-Jewish chaplain for the patient population. That’s quite a blessing that speaks to the fact that we want to meet the needs of the community that other providers are not meeting, and so preparing for that.

Technology is a big learning curve for our staff right now, and so really getting hold of that. I’m changing some vendors, making sure there’s good interoperability.

We’ve got good staff orientation support in place, and that’s one of the opportunities that I’ve seen coming here, really investing in the staff and training. I feel like that’s been my sweet spot throughout my career, a staff development culture. If you invest in your staff, your quality of care will just come. There’s certainly things that you need to measure in the organization, but staff is number one.

What are the biggest opportunities that you see as you look ahead?

The biggest opportunity is culture and standardization, and I would add education and orientation to that, just making sure there’s consistency. Because it’s not just about quality of life for the staff, and which I think that improves tremendously, but it’s for the end use. If we don’t have qualified staff, engaged staff, people that have the resources and tools that they need to do their jobs, then we don’t have people to deliver quality care.

That’s my number one focus here is to make sure that I’m building a foundation that can support the growth. My job is to make sure that we’ve got the foundation that can support that growth in the field, and adoption of technology,

There’s so much more [technology] out there right now, coming at everybody so quickly, and our responsibility as leaders is to ensure that that technology adoption is tolerable, is doable, that we’re providing the right resources and the right tools to make sure that our staff can keep up and that we’re finding the best ways to care for the patient population.