Staff development, technology adoption and steady organic growth are top priorities for Family Hospice CEO Charles Hall as he takes the helm at that organization.

Prior to joining Family Hospice, Hall most recently served as chief operating officer at Rezolut LLC, where he led a high-growth health care platform, spearheading initiatives that enhanced efficiency, profitability and patient care.

Hall graduated with honors from the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York, with a Bachelor of Science in Organizational Leadership and Systems Engineering.

Family Hospice was founded by Jack Draughon and Mark Kimsey three years ago. The company currently serves about 700 patients throughout most of Georgia with some locations in South Carolina.

Hospice News caught up with Hall to talk about his plans for Family Hospice and the major headwinds and opportunities facing the industry.

Could you tell me more about your background and how you came to be at Family Hospice?

I started life in the military, went to West Point and was a U.S. Army officer. That career was cut short with an injury that forced me out of service, and I really had no other plans other than being in the military for a career. So as things just worked out, my wife and I moved back home to Georgia, where we’re both from, and I ended up in Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) and medical sales, something I never really thought about doing until I was offered an opportunity.

I fell in love with medicine, health care — the science, and then also the people behind it. So that’s kind of what started the journey here. After a long stretch in pharmaceutical sales, I got involved with post-acute services through experience with Amedysis (Nasdaq: AMED), both in home health and hospice, and then worked with Brookdale Senior Living’s (NYSE: BKD) health care services in a national role there.

I spent the last five-and-a-half years in diagnostic imaging, part of a national company. I enjoyed that opportunity to learn a new part of medicine that I hadn’t been involved in. But I started really having a yearning to get back to the thing that had been most enjoyable in my career so far in that that was when I worked in hospice.

Part of what I lost when I left the military was that intense sense of teamwork and just collaboration and drive around a common mission, very much integral to service in the military. The only time I really felt it since then was in hospice, where it’s very easy for everyone to rally around serving patients and families at a really important time.

My father had been in hospice. He passed away a year-and-a-half ago, and my mom is now in hospice. So when the opportunity came along to come back to serving people in my community and kind of radiating out from there, I jumped at the opportunity. The founding principles of Family Hospice really resonated with me also, so it was a great fit.

Can you tell me about your top what your top priorities are as you come into this new role?

It’s a return to hospice for me. So I’m in week two, and it’s kind of a reorientation. The idea that keeps driving me is just the notion that my job is to take care of people who take care of people. I think it aligns with the culture and one of the founding principles of Family Hospice is that, for leadership, management and everyone on the team, our real priority is taking care of the people who take care of people. Sometimes that’s a family member. Sometimes it’s a partner in the medical community, and most often it’s the people on our team.

So my priority first is to figure out how we continue to extend the culture, the very strong team orientation and patient and family orientation. We are still a young company, as we grow and add scale to make sure we don’t lose that focus.

The second part is around business development. As a startup, a lot of what you do is continue to develop those partnerships in the communities you serve where you can be of value. So those are probably the two first things, making sure we have the people, processes and structures in place to continue to support the team, and secondly, to make sure we have the business development and community education resources to focus on building our presence.

Could you talk about your plans for growth this year and how you plan to get there?

This year is going to be focused on organic growth. We have a very broad coverage area with high-quality service. Now it’s continuing to build through our community education, those referral sources, partnerships and community awareness that continue to add to our company. That’s going to be the bulk of it probably for the next year.

We’re still a company that is open to expanding our coverage area opportunistically, but it’s a family-owned business, so our impetus for growth is going to be a little bit different than a lot of what you see in this space today. We don’t have shareholders or a fund to answer to. Our responsibility is really to the patients we can serve and employees on the team.

In years to come, do you foresee acquisitions, or do you think you’ll maintain that focus on organic growth?

I would expect acquisitions. It will be adding things that tuck in and that makes sense with the footprint we’re building, and where we think we have a strong value proposition to be able to serve patients in a way that’s needed.

What do you say are the most significant headwinds facing hospices right now?

I’ve thought about this a lot in the last few months. A lot of the headwinds are also opportunities. It remains to be seen if they’re going to be something that we face, or something that helps drive us a little bit. The main headwind is staffing, making sure we have the clinical personnel we need to continue to provide the highest level of care. That’s probably going to be the most important headwind.

It also can be an advantage. When Mark and Jack founded this company, they said, “We are first going to be an employer of choice. We want to be able to identify, hire, retain, forever, the best caregivers, nurses, clinical staff in any market.” So that headwind can be a competitive advantage for us if we execute on the vision, which is being the place where everybody wants to work and nobody ever wants to leave.

So that’s one. I also think about uncertainty around reimbursement in the future. We’re not 100% sure. No one [knows] what Medicare reimbursement or cuts could look like in the future. There’s some uncertainty there. I think about the impact of value-based initiatives and commercial payer involvement in hospice. That’s another headwind. I think hospice reimbursement was much more predictable 10 years ago than it is today.

The third one that always lives in hospice is just community education. So I would love to talk to you again one day and say that we as an industry have really cured any of the misconceptions that are out there about hospice and some of the psychological, social barriers that make it less accessible for some people. But those remain today.

Is there a particular lesson you learned, perhaps during your military experience, that will inform your approach to leading a hospice?

I think one of the first lessons I learned as a young lieutenant — I was assigned to a Patriot missile battery that was about to deploy to Southwest Asia — and I’d never been trained on the system. So for me as a leader, even though I had the authority to lead the unit, I knew I had to depend on the expertise of the people who were already there who knew how to operate that system. There were things I knew how to do I’d been trained to do as a leader, but there were a lot of things for which I had to depend on them.

I had to empower them to be decision makers, and I had to get the best of each of their experiences, or we couldn’t be effective. That was a really formative experience. Part of my leadership style is that I want people who are experts to be empowered. I don’t know everything about hospice. Hopefully, what I’ve learned over the years is how to create an environment where people who are experts can show up and be the best version of themselves professionally and also continue to grow.

That’s a big part of it. The second part of it is, I have a heart for people. This company has a heart for people. My priority is to take care of people who take care of people. That truly is going to inform how I spend my time each day and also what we should expect of each other.