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No one was more prepared to fill the top seat at CommonSpirit Health at Home than Trisha Crissman.
Crissman had served as interim president of CommonSpirit Health at Home since 2023, and last week, the company announced that she would take helm of the company as the official president and CEO.
In many ways, Crissman has had a front row seat to the evolution of CommonSpirit Health. She has been with the organization since early 2015.
Crissman served as chief operating officer for Catholic Health Initiatives, a former iteration of the company.
CommonSpirit Health at Home is headquartered in Milford, Ohio. It offers specialized home care, home infusion, hospice and medical transportation services nationwide. CommonSpirit Health at Home operates 83 locations across 13 states. The company serves as the home-based care arm of health system CommonSpirit Health.
As a veteran of the organization, Crissman was immediately prepared to get the ball rolling on CommonSpirit Health at Home’s strategic priorities, which include becoming a dynamic and future-facing home-based care partner and provider.
Crissman recently caught up with Home Health Care News to discuss that topic and much more, including her other role at the National Alliance for Care at Home.
HHCN: You stepped into the role of CEO at CommonSpirit Health at Home very recently. As CEO, what are your priorities, specifically within home-based care?
Crissman: Although this has been a role that I’ve been kind of serving in jointly – as the chief operating officer – for about 15 months, I’m excited to be in this new role.
As the largest Catholic home-based services provider in the country, and as a national service line for the larger CommonSpirit Health organization, our priorities are and will always be intimately tied to the needs of our larger organization, as well as the joint venture partnerships that we support in our communities. This really translates to honing in on strategies that serve our partner hospitals as they continue to look for any and all ways to create bed capacity to care for more patients in the community, who are in need of acute care and intervention. That means driving reduced length of stay through earlier discharge home, ED diversion tactics and SNF-at-home — those are just some of the solutions that support our partners. These strategic solutions, as well as others, will continue to be a focus for health at home well into the future.
Alongside this is also the need for health at home to continue to focus on creating clinical capacity internally, in order for us to be able to care for the increased demand of patients being discharged out of these partners’ hospitals, as well as ensuring that CommonSpirit Health at Home is the employer of choice in our communities.
This means making sure that we’re offering competitive compensation and an opportunity for our employees to work within an organization that’s committed to serving humanity, in what I believe is this very noble and sacred way, and to find a strong sense of purpose and belonging in doing so. In other words, continuing to drive high levels of engagement with our employees by connecting them deeply to our culture. This is, and will remain, a top priority. It is the bedrock for any other strategic priorities that we’re embracing. We have to get that right if we’re going to do anything else successfully.
How does being a long-time member of CommonSpirit’s leadership team prepare you to take the helm as CEO?
Aligning our ministries as one CommonSpirit took place in early 2019, so I’ve had the fortunate opportunity to be a part of that early five-year work of assimilating these very large organizations culturally. From a strategic planning standpoint, I’ve gotten to know local leadership in the markets, as well as the newly formed executive leadership team at CommonSpirit Health, under the leadership of Wright Lassiter III, who has been in his role for a little over two years now.
I really feel like the last five years have been an immersion into the visioning and the creation of the organization that we are still becoming as CommonSpirit Health. There’s been significant effort around really prioritizing what it is that the larger organization needs to do to be successful … the focus on organic growth and leveraging our size with payers and with vendors, and creating this customer-focused patient experience, digital branding. Some of those top priorities I’ve been able to be a part of from the very beginning, and engage health at home, vertically and horizontally, in the right places, with the right leaders, to make sure that we can be the best supportive partner in our markets across the enterprise.
From just a high level, I would say, I feel very fortunate and well-prepared relationally and from a connectivity standpoint, to take this expanded role further.
As a new CEO, is there a program, pilot, or type of partnership that you’re hoping to implement, or go after, that hasn’t been done at CommonSpirit Health at Home?
We’re constantly looking at the right partnerships, particularly with regional health care systems, because this is kind of in our acumen. It’s what we’re evolved to be really good at, and it helps us diversify our portfolio over time as well.
But I would say, there’s still an opportunity to evaluate the needs of what I would call the expanding ecosystem for post-acute care that I’ve referred to in various conversations as kind of this proverbial jump ball. As the need for care in the home is expanded, and pushed out of an acute setting, and into the home, the right ecosystem needs to be there in order to ensure that it’s successful. Whether that’s medical house calls or personal care or behavioral health or laboratory services. There’s a wide variety of services that will be required in the home, that in some ways are there now, but have yet to be really defined, I think, solidly.
I don’t necessarily think that CommonSpirit Health at Home would be looking to buy or build those capabilities, but looking at how we could create strategic partnerships to be able to provide those services, to further expand the care in the home ecosystem, so that those patients can be discharged sooner, or possibly maybe even avoid a hospitalization.
We’re looking at what those right strategic partnerships might look like for CommonSpirit Health at Home well into the future, and certainly our ability to be agile and respond to what those increasing needs are.
JV partnerships have been important for the company. What types of companies are you looking to partner with in the future?
We benefit greatly from partnering with really strong regional health systems, and our most recent JV with Parkview Health is a really great example of that.
It’s not uncommon for health systems to kind of evolve and diversify their portfolio over time to meet the needs of the patients that they’re serving, especially as more care is being transitioned from facility-based settings to the home.
Oftentimes, I think that partnerships with the right organization, like CommonSpirit Health at Home, can provide the required scale and focus, expertise, leadership, tools and resources that are vital to successfully managing and expanding non-acute operations like home health and hospice.
We benefit from the partnerships because we can leverage the perspective, the cultures and the best-in-class practices that those organizations bring into the relationship, and as a result, we become a stronger, more versatile, well-rounded organization. Most importantly, when we partner with regional health systems, we wind up finding pretty amazing leaders to join our team, and that expands our collective acumen and capabilities. We evolve and grow together, and we’re better together as a result of our joint ventures. The partnerships that we form are, it’s worth mentioning, some of the best-performing entities and locations across our platform, and the reason is that we have mutually agreed upon commitments to ensure that we achieve the goals of the agency, and that we align the strategies that are of our business plan.
It’s not just CommonSpirit Health at Home as a managing partner, it’s the partnership as an entity with key stakeholders within the health system that can help us be successful, make introductions, and help us strategize and problem solve. Then everyone wins.
Aside from CommonSpirit, you also serve on the board of the NAHC-NHPCO National Alliance for Care at Home. Can you talk a little bit about this?
This has been the evolution of several years of really, really deep trench work with key leaders across the industry.
I feel so honored and privileged to be a part of it from its grassroots beginning, and our leaders have been really thoughtful around crafting the right organization to lead this industry forward, and really intent on our mission and values. We’ve spent a significant amount of time searching for leadership, and we’re excited that that was just recently announced.
I think that the hard work now begins. This new board will begin the hard work of making sure that there is no stone unturned that needs our attention in our industry, for not just home health, hospice, or palliative care, but all care that could be provided in the home. It’s a very exciting time, and I have learned an immense amount from amazing leaders that I have walked alongside through this process. I feel really humbled and privileged to be a part of the important work shaping our future.
