StoneGate Senior Care: Building a Strategy
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Written by Meghan Flynn   
Monday, 01 June 2009
StoneGate Senior Care: Building a Strategy
This senior care company is building new skilled nursing facilities to meet the changing needs of an aging population.


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John Taylor stumbled upon, rather than chose, elder care management as a career when a development project he had invested in didn’t meet its budget goals. The project was a skilled nursing facility in Texas, and Taylor was designated by his partners to get the project back on track. After his success there, he launched Torchmark Healthcare, which built, owned, and operated assisted living facilities in the Southeastern US during the 1990s wave of investment in that industry.

“After that, I founded StoneGate Senior Care to build and manage skilled nursing facilities because, while brand new assisted living and independent living facilities were popping up all over the place, the industry was largely ignoring the skilled nursing sector; I saw that as an opportunity,” said Taylor, president and CEO of the Lewisville, Texas-based company.

StoneGate Senior Care: Building a Strategy
John Taylor, founder, president, and CEO
Taylor’s experience with real estate and development colors his management style at StoneGate: its focus is building the next generation of skilled nursing facilities that allow for more wholesome and creative care.

Of the 32 facilities the company owns and operates in Texas, Missouri, and Oklahoma, 22 of them were new builds. Taylor said most skilled nursing facilities were built in the 1960s and 1970s and cannot provide the types and level of service modern patients demand. Through a combination of modern design and innovative services, Taylor aims to be the provider of choice for the aging baby boomer population.

“As each generation enters old age, expectations change,” he said. “Providers like us need to continue to tailor our services to our patients and stay in tune with what their children, who will be our patients eventually, demand. If we do, then they will choose us for their care when they need it.”

That attitude has resulted in a comprehensive approach to skilled nursing care at StoneGate properties, and Taylor credited the company’s growth to it, too.

Like many senior care facilities, patients at StoneGate properties have become huge fans of the Nintendo Wii video game system, but Taylor said his teams take the popular activity a step further than other providers. StoneGate rehabilitation programs include several games, which are beneficial for certain programs and are more fun for the patients while they recover.

StoneGate also centers its approach on wellness, incorporating spa and spiritual activies into the typical list older institutions once had. Taylor acknowledged that not everyone engages in the activities a facility provides no matter how comprehensive, just like not everyone showed up on Bingo night. But instead of sticking with the tried-and-true, StoneGate staff starts a patient’s stay with group sessions to discern what his or her individual goals are and how the group can reach all of them.

“We do offer personalized programs for residents willing to pay a little more, and we think that will become more popular and more feasible as more baby boomers come to these facilities,” Taylor explained. “But for right now, it helps to know which person in a group of 10 or 15 is looking to play tennis with his friends when he goes home and which just wants to be able to get in and out of her car herself.”

The reach of StoneGate’s philosophy is growing in spite of a national credit crisis. In Oklahoma, the company recently finished construction on one property and is finalizing financing for two more. It has its fourth location under construction in Missouri and has three properties in the early stages of development in Texas: two in the Dallas-Fort Worth market and one in the Houston market.

Part of the solution
Obviously, the company favors projects it can start from the ground up over renovations; Taylor explained older buildings are often impossible to convert to meet current trends in skilled nursing care.

And as the company grows, it is beginning to diversify to better meet the needs of the local healthcare system. From the beginning, StoneGate has focused on the otherwise-neglected skilled nursing sector of the industry, but depending on specific markets, the company will add either memory care or assisted living facilities, or both, to a project. Having more than one in the same facility creates an attractive continuum of care and gives the company flexibility in what product it can offer that will be most successful.

Three of the properties StoneGate has open now include an assisted living component, and two have memory care capabilities. One of StoneGate’s upcoming projects in the Dallas-Fort Worth market will have all three.

All of these service lines benefit from the company’s modern and wellness-oriented approach, and soon, all StoneGate properties will have electronic charting in addition to consolidated internal systems. Taylor said the company plans to be completely electronic well before the federal mandate of 2014 as the company improves its capabilities to handle higher acuity patients.

“Skilled nursing facilities will be an important part of improving healthcare in this country because they are lower cost per day and allow older patients more time to heal fully before losing that continuous care,” Taylor said. “Many hospitals are looking for ways to reduce their re-hospitalization figures, and skilled nursing facilities are a great partner in that.

As more and more older patients with greater requirements for care strain the system, skilled nursing facilities that are willing to take on higher acuity patients will be asked to do so. Luckily for all those baby boomers, Taylor and his team are here to help.
 
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