2016, Looking Back, Looking Forward at CVNA

The 2016 CVNA Annual Report is out and it includes an Infographic detailing the services CVNA provided. In reviewing the report, I am delighted and awed – and hope you are, too – by all that our dedicated and compassionate employees have accomplished, as well as all the changes the organization has weathered. In May 2016 we merged with our sister agency, RVNA, and now serve a combined total of 17 counties along the Front Range. We created an Innovation Lab, an internal research and development program through which we explore promising practices, foster creative collaborations with both health systems and community-based organizations, and creatively design or redesign systems, processes, and/or programs to ultimately achieve positive health impacts that are both sustainable and scalable. (And in 2017 we were able to pilot two Innovation Lab initiatives, CAPABLE and Telemedicine!) And we achieved a 4.5-star rating by Medicare for quality of patient care (out of 5 stars).

The pace of change has not diminished in 2017, either. As I type, CVNA is packing up and embarking on an exciting move from our current Grant Street building to our new building in Arvada at 6750 West 52nd Avenue. As I wrote about in my prior post, the move is an important part of investing in the future of CVNA by providing a much more efficient office, new equipment and computers, and ultimately an overall more pleasant place to work. The sale of our old building is also dramatically improving the strength of CVNA’s balance sheet due to the high value of the land along Speer Street in Denver and due to the fact that the building we purchased and the build out will cost much less than what 390 Grant Street was sold for. This is critically important so that we may continue to provide care that is either not compensated or under-compensated. As detailed on pages 3 and 4 of the annual report, CVNA spent nearly $1M between May and December last year on subsidized services.

Further, over the past ten years CVNA has not kept pace with technology improvements. Our technology infrastructure is built on aging servers, old computers, and fax-based processes. Like many non-profits and smaller organizations, we have not had the resources to keep pace with technology improvements like virtualized servers and seamless remote access to departmental systems; we have made do with what we had and patched and glued our way as well as we could. The only bright spot in our technology backbone is our use of Homecare Homebase as our electronic medical record system which allows all of our data to be in the cloud with all clinicians using tablets or smartphones to chart care. However, most all of our remaining systems are old and have limited our ability to implement new and unique ways of working like secure texting, video conferencing, and remote work for office workers.

The sale of the Grant Street is affording us the opportunity to completely re-build our entire back-office by virtualizing all of our servers. CVNA will also invest in over 30 new laptops for office workers so that our teams can be productive wherever and whenever there is a need so that field workers have much better access to support while they visit clients in the home and community. CVNA will also dramatically speed up access to the internet which will allow for much more efficient remote work and, most importantly, video and virtual meetings thereby limiting the need for field staff to come to the office for meetings. This will also expand the ability of our education team to train and support field workers in our northern locations of Ft. Collins and Greeley.

In addition to the new space and new equipment, the new building supports agency growth. The building itself is all on one floor and includes over 30,000 square feet of space. Currently we are only building out ~20,000 square feet leaving approximately 10,000 square feet for rental space and providing an additional income stream. CVNA can then use this space to grow as needed in the coming years, to house more training rooms, and/or for more storage and eliminate the need to rent offsite medical records storage. While there are clearly many benefits, we acknowledge that the move will be an adjustment for staff that work in the office and in the field as the location is not as central as the current location. It is, however, much closer to a major highway and closer to our Northern Colorado operations.

The rest of 2017 is surely going to be challenging and busy, and 2018 will be interesting as well as CVNA learns to live in a new office environment, in a new metro Denver location. Keep your eyes tuned to this blog for move updates, including a community open house we plan to hold next spring. In the meantime, please take a minute to read the 2016 Annual Report; learn about the million miles our staff traveled to care for more than 31,000 clients and about our  Hospice Chaplain Robert Crump-Bertram and super volunteer Eveline Thomas!