Keith Perry describes how a demand for senior services has enabled this organization to push the limits of innovation.

For Sears Methodist Retirement System in Abilene, Texas, the demand for senior living is overwhelming. According to Keith Perry, president, there’s not a week that goes by he doesn’t get a call from a community without a full-service retirement community requesting his organization to build in their area.

“The number of senior living and retirement communities and assisted living units in the US needs to grow significantly in the next few years so we can meet the demand,” Perry said. Fortunately, that demand has pushed Sears Methodist to become one of the most innovative senior service organizations in the country.

Coordinated efforts
This fall, Sears Methodist will be announcing a new company that has been in development for nearly four years. The company will couple home health with community-based services, such as Meals on Wheels and home chores services, enabling seniors to receive an unprecedented level of care at a reasonable rate.

Keith Perry

In the most heavily penetrated markets where there’s an ample supply of senior housing, Sears Methodist services a little more than 10% of the population, according to Perry. That means an estimated 90% of seniors still live in their homes.

“When you look at the type of services that are available to seniors that live in their own home, it’s a hodgepodge. There’s no coordinated effort as to how to bring care together to make it an effective service mechanism for the average senior,” Perry said. “We used that weakness in the market to begin a strategic process of deciding how we can go about meeting that need, and we did it in a way that’s easy for seniors to understand, access, and implement.”

Lastly, for seniors living on a fixed income, the program had to be affordable. According to the president, that’s why senior organizations only serve about 10% of the senior population with institutional-type programs. Taking the reverse approach, Sears Methodist coupled together services that are readily available to the community along with merging technologies to enable the average senior to afford it. “They’ll be able to stay at home far longer than they can today,” Perry said.

New approach
Ten years ago, Sears Methodist came up with a new approach to treating dementia patients. Instead of putting all dementia patients in one building and calling it a dementia wing, Sears Methodist broke the disease down into various stages and came up with a curriculum on how to train staff and design living environments.

One of the pitfalls of dementia is that in the early stages, people have lucid moments in which they know they have dementia, yet they have moments of forgetfulness, according to Perry. “We don’t want those patients to see others that are two or three stages beyond them to see what life has in store for them,” he said.

That problem is eliminated at Sears Methodist by breaking the disease down into manageable stages, treating patients and putting them together with others in the same stage. As a result, patients have experienced lower anxiety levels and a decreased need for psychotropic drugs.

Sears Methodist designed its own facility for the project. At first, the state of Texas didn’t give it permission to build the facility because it didn’t look like a nursing home. But according to Perry, that was the idea. “We had to get a piece of special legislation passed to allow us to build it,” he said, noting the organization currently has four facilities based on this model.

The model was developed by the staff based on Sears Methodist’s experiences in dealing with Alzheimer’s residents in its traditional model nursing homes. Perry brought in physicians that deal with dementia care, as well as physicians from Texas Tech Medical School, to critique ideas and look for any weaknesses in the concept. The organization has a relationship with the medical school, which enables it to access their faculty and the medical students.

“We used them as advisors throughout the design process,” Perry said. “It was a collaborative effort, but Sears Methodist took the lead on designing the training curriculum, working through some of the design issues of how the units would look. Families have told us they much prefer this type of design and approach over the traditional model of dementia care. Most importantly, the patients are happier, have less difficulty dealing with their environment, and enjoy a much higher quality of life.”