The best healthcare professionals who truly care about improving the lives of others: Best Home Healthcare Network

Historically patient safety was deemed as eliminating or minimizing medical errors at the patient’s home after hospital discharge. This means training our staff with the latest clinical education to minimize medical errors. However, today, the definition of patient safety has broadened. It is not only about minimizing preventable errors, but it also encompasses building durable care organizations that have the capacity to serve many different patients through ups and downs and difficult circumstances like the pandemic. Best Home Healthcare Network understands that it needs to go beyond clinical best practices, so it does a lot of organizational process improvements to make sure that it can adapt to different circumstances so that the company can be agile in new situations such as the pandemic.

Best Home Healthcare Network provides short-term in-home rehabilitation. Patients being discharged from the hospital, under the supervision of the patient’s Primary Care Physician, will receive skilled nursing or therapy so that the patient can become active and independent.

In conversation with Iqbal Shariff, President of Best Home Healthcare Network

Q. Where do you stand as a company in the current market landscape? And what are you doing to stay ahead of the curve?

One of the things that give us a competitive edge is that we are planning 3-5 years in advance. In the coming 3-5 years new technology or new medical advances are not so much of an issue given our strategy. We are positioning ourselves to be part of a select group of high performance partners which is the core concept of a High Performance Network (HPN). In 3-5 years from now BHHN cannot be considered HPN by itself; BHHN must be a high performance partner as part of a high performance network of partners. Where the industry is heading is not going to be enough to be a high performing contributor, or to be a high performing company. To be successful, BHHN will inevitably be part of high performing communities, which is a high performance network. Today, we are all sort of judged discreetly on the results we deliver to the patient. In the future, it is inevitable we’re going to be choosing to work as clusters voluntarily, we’re going to make voluntary business decisions, to align with clusters of high performing companies, and part of how we will be judged will be how well we do as a group which is an HPN.

Q. How do you train the caregivers and educate them about your values and system?

In-home nursing is a specialized field. It requires strong clinical and technical skills along with an abundance of caring and ethical patient advocacy .Each patient is unique and presents their own set of challenges different from hospital-based environments. At Best Home Healthcare Network, the senior, seasoned leaders mentor newer talent based on internal clinical data representative of the marketplace, shared experiences of the staff and best clinical practices for on-going training. Organizationally, we use a variety of communication tools and practices, both remotely and in-person, to make sure our core values is continuously reinforced with our staff.

Q. What would you say are the top three skills needed to be a successful CEO?

First, you need empathy for your employees and staff. You may not always be able to influence every factor that affects them, but you must be able to put yourself in their shoes and make the best decisions possible in the long-term interest of their success and wellbeing.

Second, you need strong communication skills. One of the biggest keys to this is adapting your communication style to different settings and, in many cases, different employees. Communication needs to be as effective as possible and it is not only reliant on frequency – CEOs who can adapt their styles, sometimes in ways that are not always their preference but are favored by their organization, are at a real advantage.

Finally, CEOs need to be able to formulate and drive clear vision. Great organizations need great visions. They need to be relatable and understandable by teams and individuals without being over complicated or too technical. I think this is probably the most important aspect. No one else in the organization can do it, or is expected to do it, other than the CEO. A strong vision and purpose allows people from different functional roles to come together and achieve greater outcomes. Without strength of vision, organizations tend to stay siloed and never unlock their true potential.

Q. What does the future hold for your company and its customers? Are exciting things on the way?

We are operating under the assumption that in 2 to 3 years from now, we are going to see an evolution of the relationship model of some care providers and some healthcare networks, where we are deciding to work more closely and more intimately together and we are deciding to allocate more resources to each other even though there are no regulatory requirements to do so. The key takeaway is essentially that right now in the industry, we are all incentivized to be more efficient and perform and find solutions to our own problems. I am provided with ample incentives to be the best managed home healthcare operations we can. We are motivated to put 100 percent of our effort into making our front office, back office, and talent pool as efficient as possible. At some point in time, in the next 2-3 years, you’re going to start seeing us and others at the leading edge of this that there are incentives to think about other people’s problems and when that happens that is going to be very transformative.

“Best Home Healthcare Network provides home healthcare that goes beyond what other providers offer—with passion, clarity and a focus on long-term quality of life.”