Limited access to specialists? This award-winning rural provider found a successful alternative

Libby Care Center of Cascadia in Libby, MT, didn’t necessarily have a wide choice of psychiatrists to turn to when leaders decided to focus on lowering antipsychotic use among residents. So CEO Rachel Toland and her team turned to telehealth, a solution that has helped to bring in resources more quickly, manage behaviors without unnecessary medications, improve a key quality indicator and keep residents in their local community. “It really allowed us to be able to manage patients or residents that we in the past maybe wouldn't be able to consider simply because getting those services would have been difficult,” Toland told McKnight’s Long-Term Care News Senior Editor Kimberly Marselas. That’s just one of the many quality initiatives undertaken by Libby, one of two winners of the 2024 Gold – Excellence in Quality Award from the American Health Care Association/ National Center for Assisted Living. Libby, which advances to Gold after winning silver and bronze in 2023 and 2022, respectively, is also focused on staff training and consistency of care for residents. In this episode, Toland shares how Cascadia supports efforts to imbue quality in a building’s culture, unfolds her team’s roadmap to success and reveals their plans to keep pressing forward.