Future Leader: Jon Erik Higginbotham, Vice President, Business Development, Clinical Analyst, Homecare Homebase

The Future Leaders Awards program is brought to you in partnership with Homecare Homebase. The program is designed to recognize up-and-coming industry members who are shaping the next decade of home health, hospice care, senior housing, skilled nursing, and behavioral health. To see this year’s Future Leaders, visit https://futureleaders.agingmedia.com/.

Jon Erik Higginbotham, vice president of business development and clinical analyst at Homecare Homebase, has been named a 2024 Future Leader by Home Health Care News.

To become a Future Leader, an individual is nominated by their peers. The candidate must be a high-performing employee who is 40-years-old or younger, a passionate worker who knows how to put vision into action, and an advocate for seniors, and the committed professionals who ensure their wellbeing.

Higginbotham sat down with Home Health Care News to talk about why leaders should be malleable, and why it’s important to keep care costs low.

What drew you to this industry?

When I started my nursing career, I wanted to stick to pediatrics. When I got the opportunity to go into the aging population industry, which is really what home health and hospice is, I realized that there were a lot of similarities between pediatric care and aging population care, where it’s more of a holistic care. You’re not just taking care of the patient, but you’re taking care of the family a lot of times. There were just a lot of synergies, and it just made a lot of sense for me to change gears a little bit.

What’s your biggest lesson learned since starting to work in this industry?

It’s very over regulated, and that’s something you typically don’t see on a lot of other aspects of health care. That was really eye opening for me, because compared to pediatrics, there’s just not as much regulatory burden that you have to deal with.

If you could change one thing with an eye toward the future of home health or home care, what would it be?

Keep the payers out of health care — do what’s best for the patient all the time, regardless of how much money it costs.

We’re at a crux right now in our industry where the payers are focused, solely, on margins in the home health and hospice space. Outcomes are important.

I think keeping the payers out of the game is really important. I think keeping advocacy from the lobbying perspective out of the game is also important. I don’t need massive health systems lobbying with pharmaceutical companies to drive up prices just so they can hit certain numbers. I need the cost, in general, to be as low as possible. Because home health and hospice does that, it’s really frustrating that we become the section of health care, the 2%, that gets so over regulated and under reimbursed. Home health and hospice both reduce rehospitalization rates more than any other realm of health care, so why would I not want to invest money so patients and families are not having to go back to the hospital.

What do you foresee as being different about the home health or home care industry looking ahead to 2025?

My hope is that [the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)], with some of the new data that they’re capturing, is going to start to come around to say, ‘we are really underpaying these home health agencies, especially from a Medicare Advantage perspective,’ where they’re basically capping costs at 60% of the Medicare rate.

In a word, how would you describe the future of home health or home care?

I think it has the brightest future out of any part of health care.

What quality must all Future Leaders possess?

The ability to turn on a dime. With technology changing and with a lot of the political agendas and lobbying agendas, I think you really have to be prepared for everything in anything. Being able to be malleable instead of super rigid is extremely important for a future leader.

To learn more about the Future Leaders program, visit https://futureleaders.agingmedia.com/.