Welcome everyone to the Becker's Healthcare podcast series. I'm Mariah Muhammad, writer and moderator with Becker's Healthcare, and I'm thrilled to have with me today Chris Wassel, president of marketing and strategic partnerships at Advantage Healthcare. Chris, welcome to the podcast. We're very excited to have you, join us yet again. To get us started, would you mind please introducing yourself and telling us a bit about your background and or, organization? Yeah. Sure. Glad to be here. So, yes, again, my name is Chris Wassel. I'm the president of marketing and strategic partnerships for Vantage Healthcare. Vantage is the largest physician practice of its type in New England, providing services to skilled nursing facilities and assisted living communities. My background, I have over twenty years experience in health care operations, development, value based payment consulting and network development, and technology development as well. Prior to Vantage, I was co managing partner for post acute care planning services. It was an organization that provided post acute care management and consulting services to ACOs seeking to build and operate post acute care provider networks. And I was also a cofounder of Accounticare, an information technology company that provides systems and services to physician practices and various organizations participating in value based payment arrangements around the care of older adult, patient populations. Wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing that background with us. So, Chris, so what are some of the biggest issues you're following in health care, for 2025? Yeah. So 2025 is a busy year for us, I'm sure, for a lot of other organizations. But at Vantage, we're launching several initiatives this year, and there's really four initiatives that we're working on that are major undertakings for us this year. So the first is, we're participating in a new MSSP ACO, sound physicians ACO, and that ACO so we're expanding our patient population that we're covering. We in the past, we participated in an ACO that covered our skilled nursing facility patient population and now we've added our assisted living population to that. So we have well over 4,000 patients in the ACO. So that's a big undertaking. Secondly, we are preparing for CMS' new model rollout, which is the team episode model. In our market, most of the hospitals in the markets that we serve will be mandated to participate. And so given we have an extensive network across New England, we're very well positioned to help those hospitals, manage those episodes as patients mile the hospital on the post acute care side. So we're targeting those hospitals to work with them in the coming year on that initiative and also working with other network partners, home care agencies and rehab groups and such. And then there's a couple of other CMS programs that we're starting this year, one being the CMS Guide program, which is focused on dementia patients and in our case, dementia patients that reside at home in assisted living communities. So we have a partner that we're launching that with, so that's exciting as well. And then lastly, CMS in the last year announced the new advanced primary care management program, which and, kind of replaces chronic care management, which we have launched on a limited basis. And so we're going to launch that this year as well in both the skilled nursing facility and assisted living environment. So with all that going on, I think for us, with any of these initiatives, but with so many going on this year, I'd say our number one challenge is, with all these programs is collaboration with our skilled nursing facility and assisted living partners and home care groups and rehab groups, trying to bring all those stakeholders together, bring them up to speed, bring them on board, and develop and integrate with them. So it's a pretty major undertaking. So I think I feel really I think we feel very comfortable managing these different programs. But again, I think the probably the thing that we are most concerned about is making sure that all of the rest of key players and stakeholders that we're able to get them on board and all working, you know, together towards the same same goal. So it's a it's a pretty, you know, major challenge for us, but I'm I'm sure we'll we'll get there. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. Thank you so much for giving us that that background. Is there anything that you're, seeing in the news or anything that you're doing at Advantage Healthcare, that's making you a little bit excited for this year or anything that's making you nervous? Yeah. I'd say so, you know, for this this year, we're we're excited about the greater acceptance and interest in seeing in the senior living space around value based care and CMS programs. In the past, a lot of the most part, the ACOs have focused on patients in the community, not in long term care. A lot of the programs, whether you talk about chronic care management and so forth, were developed for ambulatory care and patients, again, in the community. But now we're launching those programs in skilled nursing and assisted living. So we're excited about that. But that being said, there are a few things that do make us nervous. And so stability with CMS is important in the short term. If there are any changes to these programs, the time and effort that we are investing will be at risk. So again, we're investing our time and resources in multiple programs and there's obviously with potential changes at CMS and then obviously, there's a lot going on politically and so forth where we have some concerns. So hopefully, things, in the short term will remain stable and then we'll continue to move forward as we invest our time and effort into launching these programs. So but it makes us nervous. In the long term, we hope that CMS can begin to move from voluntary and pilots to mandatory programs and models that are in place for the long term. We feel that there have been enough there's been enough experimentation around various value based payment initiatives and it's really time to settle permanently on payment models that will be that will operate under going forward, so make the full shift from fee for service to value based payment. These models have been different models have been tried out and piloted and such now for almost fifteen years. And so again, the stability is important. Some of these models are put in place and they run for five years and then they sunset and it would be from our perspective, it would be good to settle in on certain models and make that ship. So it's a little concerning that so it's unclear when that's going to happen. So that makes us us a little bit nervous too because it just you just get concerned around further changes in the future. Again, I think all us and organizations in this space are looking for as much stability as possible. So we know what the rules are that we're operating under, so that all the work that we're putting into this really has you know, we're able to run for the long term. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Thank you for sharing that. And, Chris, before I let you go, the last thing I want to ask you is, in your opinion, what would the most effective health care leaders need in order to be successful in the next two to three years, do you think? Yeah. I think I think the the thing that will impact all of us the the most, and what I think healthcare leaders really need to focus their attention on is this time into understanding how AI will impact their organizations and how the right strategy they can gain a competitive advantage and avoid falling behind. I think this is moving pretty fast. I think there may be some folks out there that underestimate how this is going to impact things and may fall behind. And so I think health care leaders really need to get on board now, invest more time in research and looking at this and how it's going to impact their organization and again, how as an organization we can, really use this to gain a competitive edge. So I think that by far is the number one thing that is out there that we need to pay attention to. Yeah. Definitely. I definitely agree there, and thank you so much for those final thoughts. It's definitely been very informative. So, again, I wanna thank you so much for coming back on Becker's HealthCare. And I look forward to connecting with you again soon. Alright. Thank you. Thank you.