I recently had the opportunity to chat with Jeffrey P. Freimark, President/CEO of Miami Jewish Health Systems about why they use Aegis Therapy Services, a Senior Housing Forum Partner, and the conversation quickly moved into the area of core competencies. 

Miami Jewish Health Systems

The Miami Jewish Health Systems (MJHS) provides a broad array of services in the Miami-Dade and Broward County area of Florida. They operate the largest skilled nursing facility in Florida, provide independent living, assisted living and memory care. They serve about 12,500 individuals, most of whom live at home. They are a big PACE provider (Program of All-inclusive Care for the Elderly, a case management and services program primarily designed for fragile low-income elders) in their market area.

Core Competencies

The idea behind core competencies is that every organization has a set of core competencies that set them apart from the competition, in essence, “the secret sauce”. This set of knowledge, skills, passions and talents should be exploited to extract maximum value in growing and operating the organization.

Beyond core competencies, there are other things that need to be done to make a business successful, but are not within the core competencies of the organization. For these areas, using external resources provides the following advantages:

  1. External resources allows the organization to stay focused on what they are very best at.
  2. An organization can leverage the core competencies of complementary organizations to expand their services and expertise.

In the senior living arena, this is most often seen in the areas of therapy services, maintenance, housekeeping, food service, technology support and transportation.

Therapy Competencies

I asked Jeffrey how they came to use Aegis Therapies and he described how as a philosophy, MJHS has the overarching goal of enriching the lives of each resident each day of their lives. In order to do this, it was really important to figure out the things they were extremely good at and put maximum effort into those areas. 

Prior to Jeffrey taking over the reins at MJHS, rehabilitation therapy had been provided by in-house staff. They were doing a good job, but the program was not as strong as they wanted it to be. Not the fault of the existing staff but rather just not part of the organization’s core competencies. 

MJHS contracted with Aegis Therapies because providing long-term care therapy was their core competency. In practical terms it meant the following:

  • The ability to provide consistent high quality therapy services 7 days per week
  • Access to the newest programs and thinking in all therapy disciplines
  • The ability to hire and retain quality therapy staff
  • Access to technology that results in better outcomes
  • The ability to work with the organization team in a seamless integrated fashion

Finally I asked Jeffrey about the cost of using an external resource. He said they were convinced that using the expertise (core competencies) of Aegis produces a lower “all-in” cost than doing it themselves, with the added benefit of having access to the best thinking across 1,000 therapy operations.

What are your core competencies?  What things do you outsource?

Steve Moran