Senior Care Academy - A Helperly Podcast

What happens when leadership treats caregivers like people, not positions ft. Riley Moore

• Helperly, Caleb Richardson • Season 4 • Episode 9

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What if the biggest lever for better elder care isn’t a new tool, but a different kind of leader? We sit down with Riley Moore—whose journey spans skilled nursing, assisted living, memory care, and now family medicine at Lakeview—to unpack how pay, culture, and everyday choices shape outcomes for seniors and the teams who serve them. Riley makes a clear, grounded case: when leaders show up on the floor, take the toughest call light, and coach with empathy, turnover drops and care quality rises.

We explore the quiet mechanics that determine recovery after a major event—how risk profiles, insurance, and reimbursement connect to which skilled nursing facilities patients can access and how well they’re staffed. Riley also shares a real-time shock to the system: traditional Medicare’s sudden rollback of telemedicine coverage, announced with virtually no notice. For older adults who relied on telehealth for medication management and chronic care check-ins, that change forced difficult in-person visits and strained clinics scrambling to rebook. It’s a vivid example of how policy decisions cascade to the bedside and the front desk at the same time.

Beyond policy, this is a masterclass in practical leadership. Riley tells the story of a high-performing but abrasive med tech who became a culture builder after direct, respectful coaching and support. We talk through dismantling the destructive pecking order between nurses, med techs, and CNAs; investing in fair pay to stabilize teams; and building trust with families who rarely see the triage behind delays. The message to rising administrators is simple: learn your people, lead from the front, ask for help when burned out, and communicate early and often—especially when the rules change overnight.

If this conversation resonates, follow the show, share it with a colleague who leads caregivers, and leave a quick review with one takeaway you’ll put into practice this week.

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SPEAKER_00:

Welcome back to Senior Care Academy Podcast by Helperly. Our guest is Riley Moore. He brings a unique blend of healthcare administration expertise and real world leadership. So he's been the executive director at uh generations and Rocky Mountain Care, overseeing everything from staff culture to finances to implementing innovative systems. And now he's at Lakeview Family Medicine. Um, and even there, Riley's mission hasn't changed. He's trying to help create better systems and strong teams for seniors and their families. So, Riley, welcome to the show. Appreciate you coming into the app uh the studio.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

So, kind of let's talk about your path getting into leadership within the healthcare space. So you studied healthcare admin at Weaver State, um, but then you went into like leadership development as well.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Even joining your uh the National Society of Leadership and Success. So, what drew you into leadership in long-term care more and kind of well, just in general, what pulled you to leadership?

SPEAKER_01:

No, good, good question. So actually, um back before I like even went into college, I was working as a transportation director for a skilled nursing facility down in Oram. And Jeremy Meldrum uh was the administrator there. Um, shout out to you, Jeremy. And Jeremy Osman was our uh physical therapy director. So, and I kind of I just really liked picking their brains. I thought it was super cool what they did, like the more managerial side and administrator side. Um, and Jeremy was always willing to answer my questions. I mean, I was a young, like 21-year-old, yeah, fresh, fresh back, uh, served in LDS mission back, and he was more than happy to answer them. So just started looking into it more and I fell in love with it. Uh really, really enjoyed it. And I in my head, I just kept thinking, I want to help as many people as I possibly can in my life. Like that's my personal goal and aspiration. And I felt the best way to do that was by being a great manager and inspiring other people to help as many people as they could.

SPEAKER_00:

So I like that because you can directly help so many people, but if you're a good leader, then your ripple effect can the people that you affect can affect people who affect people, and it goes out so much farther. Um, so you you kind of were in the long-term care, the senior care. Is Lake View similar or is it kind of no?

SPEAKER_01:

So Lake View is actually like family medicine. So helping just overall health care. Um, so just traditional family doctor. We do have a couple geriatric specialists at the clinic, which is awesome. Um, we've got two locations, one in Oram, one in Saratoga. So we're gonna be, well, for those of you who listen after the fact, sorry, you're gonna miss it. But the Saratoga Fall Festivals today, we're gonna have a booth at it. So you can come get your blood pressure read and meet one of our geriatric specialists.

SPEAKER_00:

I'm curious what um what overlap have you seen from uh like the senior care, long-term care side just into regular family medicine? And what I guess are there any lessons that you think long or senior care and long-term care could pull from family medicine and vice versa? For sure.

SPEAKER_01:

Um, I would say definitely one of the biggest things that I see like correlation-wise, is just um overall kind of, and this is more, I guess, maybe a negative thing. Like the healthcare system for elderly isn't great. Like in terms of reimbursement rates for physicians, which affects then like insurance companies with skilled nursings that you can go to and stuff. Like that overall care system, like we're doing the best that we can, but it definitely like needs a little bit of an overhaul. That's interesting, that it's worse for older adults. Yeah, like it it definitely um it's almost like it not it's weird. It's almost like you get punished for going to the doctor a little bit. Like the the more that you go, uh the healthier that you can age, the better. Yeah, the better off you are. Like the the more that you go, uh the healthier that you can age, the better. Yeah, the better off you are.

SPEAKER_00:

Like finance, like that's interesting.

SPEAKER_01:

Because like your your insurance rates are gonna be lower. Um, and then like you get like these risk factors that are associated with you that's called like a raft score. I I could geek out about this stuff probably for like hours and hours, but in in a nutshell, it's like the healthier you are when a major life event happens, because ultimately like crazy things happen, right? Yeah, getting older, your body's gonna deteriorate no matter what, at some point, right? Or you know, you're like 65, fairly healthy, get in a car accident, maybe break something, you know, have to get a hip replacement, a knee replacement, something like that. If you've been relatively healthy your whole life, you're going to have a better insurance that's going to give you a better opportunity to go to a better skilled nursing, and then you're going to be able to recover faster. Because the skilled nursings that have, you know, better, better insurances, or they accept that, they get higher reimbursement rates. So they're able to hire the best people out there. They're able to have, you know, the best nurses, the best in-house physicians, the best physical therapists, all those kinds of things, right? So money is a huge, huge factor with it. Um, one thing that I would say is a positive is that ultimately healthcare doesn't change no matter what realm you're in, whether you're doing family practice, senior care, or even pediatrics, um everybody's doing it because they love people, right? They want to take care of them. So we want to help as many people as possible. And that's everybody's like overall goal. That's the one thing I really love about healthcare. Yeah, is everybody's end goal is the same. Yeah, we all want to help people and get them healthy. So it's just how we go about doing it.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And it is interesting that um as much as like I didn't know that about the senior care side of things where you almost are punished. And it's like the doctors and physicians and everybody want to help, but then they can't, or maybe they can't, the skilled nursing can't hire the right people or as good of people or experience. So it is an interesting kind of dilemma. We we've had a lot of people on that talk about how they are like up at Capitol Hill trying to get uh rate increases across Medicaid VA, Medicare, all the places. Um and it makes sense now that it's they just need more money basically to try to get the people that have all the experience.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh yeah. So it's like, well, and this is like so another thing, right? How just senior care is affected in general. So Medicare, October 1st, right, a couple days ago, they just dropped the telemed coverage for all Medicare patients. So straight Medicare traditional.

SPEAKER_00:

That was only that got spun up like during COVID, right?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, like it was a huge thing. Yeah. And so, and and the interesting thing is that they didn't tell anybody. Like they didn't give any notification on their website, they weren't sending messages out to us as providers. So I I was lucky, I had a nice provider who works for another larger healthcare organization. He sent out a message and he's like, hey, internally they sent this around to us. They said Medicare's dropping coverage tomorrow. Wow. And all of us were like, wait, what? So, you know, we're frantically calling patients, telling them, hey, your telemed appointment that you had set up, we're sorry, you have to come in person.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

And a lot of these people, because of their older, they're sickly, telemed's easy for them. You can sit in the comfort of your home and you can get your medications refilled. Yeah. But now that's taken away from them. I mean, I was talking to a patient's family member a couple of days ago with all this going on, and he was asking me, he's like, well, on their website, it says, you know, we could apply and get an exception. I'm like, that's really hard. Yeah. And and you're going to have to instigate that. Or whatever. I'm like, you're you're the one that has to instigate that too. Yeah. Like they're not going to take it from us, the doctor. They're just going to think, oh, you're just being lazy and you just want them to have a telemed.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Like, so patients have to advocate for themselves, which is really difficult too. And that's that's something I find unfortunate is that it's almost like a way that they take advantage of seniors, is they're like, oh, well, we're going to slide this thing in under the radar, not tell anybody about it, and then be like surprised. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Um, that is crazy. Um on the, I want to kind of go back to your take on leadership or like building those teams. Because you said there was a time that you said leadership is as much about communication as it is about administration. Um, what is a conversation, like communication aspect they've had with maybe a staff member that's really stuck with you as far as like driving that principle home?

SPEAKER_01:

Um, so I would say the the one thing that sticks out to me in particular is when I was working for generations, I was working up at Fairfield Village in Leighton in the Ogden area, uh working as the administrator for the assisted living and memory care. Yeah. Had a really good um, we call them med techs in assisted living. So it's it's kind of like a hybrid, almost like a step in between a CNA and a nurse in the assisted living realm. Yeah. They're passing out medications to people, you know, helping them still do CNA-based tasks, but they focused a lot on the med administration. She was a great employee. She was super quick with MedPath, like she had things down path, she had a really great system, but she kind of was a little abrasive with some of the new employees. Yeah. And she would get frustrated because she's like, I've been doing this for two years. I'm she has a system developed, and then it made her super annoyed when she would like go in and somebody would say, Oh, I haven't seen anybody all shift. Like, you're the first person I've seen. And she's doing, you know, like 4 p.m. Met Pass and the shift started at two. And she's like, How's no one been in here for two hours? Yeah. So then she kind of chewed people out. So I I remember talking to her about that and being like, Listen, like you have such great drive and potential. Like, you're a phenomenal employee. You have to be nicer to people. Like you're scaring people away that are coming to work for us. And mind you, this was like end of 2021, beginning of 2022. So COVID, COVID stuff is not as crazy, but people are still like weary or like maybe jumping back into work for into the workforce after COVID and stuff. So it's hard to find employees. And it's like, please don't drive people away. Yeah. But so from talking to her and just letting her know, like, hey, you have great leadership potential. Let's take these skills and things that you have and let's harness them for good. Yeah. Like, let's work on ways that we can talk to people and be constructive with it. Um, but do it in an appropriate manner. Like, if things are frustrating you really, really badly, you can come and talk to me. And I said, and I told her, I don't care. Like, you can come in, you can yell, you can scream, cry, whatever. Like, cuss me out about what's going on, but don't do it to the employee. We'll figure out a nice way to talk to him about it. Um, then, you know, to she sat there for a minute, kind of was thinking about it. I was like, okay, like I I want to do that. She said, Are you okay if I take a couple days off to like kind of think about this and process it? I'm like, sure, we'll figure it out, we'll do it. Yeah. So she took a couple days, came back. Um, and it was like, I'm not a hundred percent sure what happened in those couple days, but man, a light switch just went off and she was she was amazing. Um, ended up being a great, a great asset for the team. Wow, super good leader. Um, we ended up promoting her, and she was like one of our lead med techs at that point. Then she ended up becoming almost like an assistant administrator for us. Um, was just phenomenal. She was a great employee, super, super happy to have her.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. So and it was just by having a conversation that you needed to communicate with her. Hey, when you do these things, it comes off very abrasive. And we need to like being able to see, like, we see a leader in you, we see somebody that's you're exceptional, but we have to change a few things. And so being able to communicate that and not just live with it probably changed the direction of a lot of things. You said something that I think was interesting. Um, like the staff, even today, I think it's gotten better five years since COVID, but um, there's still it's still just like an inherently high turnover, especially the direct care staff, nurses, CNAs, caregivers, mets. Um, from your experience, what helps keep the good caregivers? Because it's it's just innately difficult work a lot of the time. Oh, yeah. And so it's easy to get burned out or overworked. And how do you avoid that to keep people long term that you know, instead of having them jump ship every three to six months to a new company?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, for sure. Um, biggest thing is you care. Like you care about your employees, you care about your staff, and to have them buy in on your care, um, you have to be there. Like you have to show up. You know, one thing that I was a big believer of, I tried to help out however I could, like all over the building, whether that be going with housekeeping one day and cleaning a couple rooms with them, going and passing out meals during dinner time, uh, actually helping maybe cover a CNA shift, or if a call light's going off and being like, hey, uh, there's four call lights going off. We have three CNAs. I'm going to go get one of them. I need you three to pick who's the most difficult person. I will take the most difficult one. Yeah. You guys take the easier ones. So just showing them that you're there in the trenches with them and that you care about it. And then also getting to know your employees. Like it's almost like there was this weird shift, I would say, um, from like, I mean, I love my parents, they're great and everything. Their generation's awesome, but from like the baby boomers to a little bit past the baby boomers, like beginning of Gen X, there's this weird, like managerial like hierarchy. The manager can't know anything about you. You he has to be really aloof or mean, or she does, you know, whatever. And it I feel like it kind of has broken down over time. But that was the biggest thing that I realized, like thinking about it. All the employees that I work with and have the opportunity to work with, they're all people. Like they have awesome lives, they have goals, hopes, aspirations. So why not get to know that about them? Yeah. So the more I knew about my employees, the more they wanted to stay because they realized I cared about them as an individual. I cared about their personal life, I cared about their professional life, and I wanted them to be happy when they came to work because they spend eight hours, sometimes 12 hours then. So why not make it good?

SPEAKER_00:

No, I like to that point of um kind of the generation that came up in the workforce, uh, like 80s, 90s, and early 2000s, the Gen X baby boomer type, or even the 70s. It was a lot more of like the traditional like corporate America hierarchy, like uh stoicism stoic leaders that are kind of it's hard to read. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so it has been, it's a good thing, and I think to have that breakdown a little bit where it's um where work is a place where you can have conversations and you have a relationship with your boss, and it's like a good place to be. And I think that's a huge plays a huge role in um creating trust is remembering like you when you came in, they were saying happy birthday, that was so fun. Um but remembering birthdays, remembering their kids' birthdays, remembering um a fun trip that they have coming up, and then ask how, like just human stuff, is such a good way to build trust and affinity where they'll they'll want to stay long term because they're your you're they trust you, they love you, they want to be around you as a leader. Um within the the healthcare and senior care healthcare facilities um and the way that they support their staff, what's and maybe this is an administrative leaf thing, what is the first thing that you'd want to change to like better support direct care staff?

SPEAKER_01:

Uh the like if I had a magic wand and could do it tomorrow, yeah, it would be pay for everybody. Because I'm I mean, today, today's world, things are expensive and people deserve to get paid appropriately for it. That that's the first and foremost thing. The second thing I would say would just be like overhauling culture a little bit sometimes is not a bad thing. Like there's this negative, this weird like negative thing where in like skilled nursings, like nurses talk down to CNAs, or in the assisted living realm, it's like med techs talk down to CNAs, or like, you know, and then it's this chain of command kind of thing. Yeah. It's like pecking order almost. Yeah, very, very much so pecking order. Um, if you could break that down and get like true, genuine buy-in and have like, you know, nurses understand, hey, like I'm a nurse, but once upon a time I was a CNA, yeah, I can help do a CNA job. Or a med tech to understand, like I I can do what the CNA does. Or helping a CNA feel inspired to the point that it's like, guess what? That nurse who maybe was chewing you out a couple of minutes ago because you did something that was kind of potentially maybe harmful for a patient, they were in your shoes once upon a time. Yeah. And they're trying to teach you the best way that they know how. So maybe like trying to have an open dialogue and realize like, oh, everybody's kind of in the same boat. We've all been there. Let's work together to make this the best place possible.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. I like that a lot. That I think that you see that in a bunch of different like industries and and um my mind, I'm just very like in the entrepreneurial world. And it's so often you have the people that like have made it or whatever, their 40s, 50s, 60s, and they just want to pour into the the up-and-coming generation. Um, but even in other like sectors, you see that where um people that have made it, they went through the hard thing, and they know, like, oh my gosh, that going from caregiver all the way to nurse to like lead uh I forgot the O N. It's a lot of work and it's painful. And especially if you have like a family that you're also like trying to take care of, this is tough. I'm gonna support this person that's behind me to make it easier. Like, I think that that would be a huge, huge benefit just to everybody. One, it feels really good for the nurse to be able or the the med tech to turn back and just be like, your job is really hard as a CNA, so it's mine, but here's the things that made it easier. Yeah. Instead of, like you said, kind of having a pecking order of like, oh, well, that's a CNA's job, you know. Yeah. Um seniors and families, and just I guess more broadly, since right now you're in kind of uh more general medicine, they don't always see what's like behind the curtains in admin and leadership. So, what's one thing that you wish families knew um about running healthcare facilities that like maybe would give them a little uh a little bit more sympathy?

SPEAKER_01:

I would say the biggest thing is like genuinely the people that are at these facilities, they really do care for your loved ones. Like I understand things might happen that make you upset. The worst thing that you can do is like come in and scream and yell at a CNA or a med tech or a nurse because something hasn't been done. It's not because they don't love your your loved one. Like they do. These are some of the most compassionate people on the face of the earth that are working in healthcare. So that that's the my biggest message. Like, just be a little patient with us. We're human beings at the end of the day. Like, we're not perfect, we're gonna make mistakes. And and guess what? This is one thing um that kind of one of one of my mentors taught me and told me about, right? Every you might have a facility that has let's say 40 people in it, 100 people in it. But in that facility, each one of those hundred people, 40 people, whatever the number is, is the most important person in someone else's life. It's somebody's mom, it's somebody's dad, grandma, grandpa, whatever, right? But you are being entrusted with all those lives of all those very important people to those individual families. So if something isn't being done for your specific individual, it's probably because someone else's perfect individual was being cared for. Like that's the other thing you have to think about. We have all these people that we're caring for, and we're doing the best that we can. Just be patient. So that's the biggest thing.

SPEAKER_00:

I I um it makes me think of uh Tanner and Shea. They have this uh Instagram account, Tanner or Jiffy. He had they've they've grown to quite a following, but basically he had cancer and he uh fought it for about four years before he passed. And the video that he made right before he passed it, or and then they posted it after his funeral, was um, he just said, assume good intent. Like people aren't generally out there being malicious. I generally like we didn't mean to if um you know your mom had to wait an extra two hours or something to get their shower. It wasn't intention, we weren't rude and malicious. It was assume good intent. They're taking care of something that was really pressing. And they're they're trying to care the best that they can for, like sit your loved one. So I love that. Um, if a young professional that's listening today wants to step into a senior care leadership or or hospital admin or healthcare administration, what's your one piece of advice to help them build out that team below them that truly cares?

SPEAKER_01:

I would say the best thing that you could do to get a team that truly cares is show your team you care about them, and invest in them. Uh, you know, whether that be getting to know them personally, helping them in a task that's difficult, like taking the extra five minutes. There were days that it's like I was tired. I had been sitting at my computer, either being in offices, doing administrative tasks, and I was like, okay, I really don't want to do this, but I can see from my desk there's like seven call lights going off. I'm gonna go help answer a couple call lights. So just taking the extra time and effort to do it. Like, just buck up. You're at the end of the day, it's all right. And then if you if that's hard, um, I get it. If you're feeling burnt out, like you have a boss for a reason. That's that's my other biggest point of like advice. Reach out to your higher ups if you're struggling. Don't be afraid to reach up and say, like, I need help, I don't know, uh, or this is a problem that we're facing. So just reach out when you personally need it too. Yeah, because you're not Superman and can't take on the world.

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Um, no, I love that advice. I think it's it's very true. Um, Riley, thank you so much for um pulling back the curtains on leadership and the long-term care and just healthcare admin in general. I love your perspective and how it shows that it's not just about managing operations, it's about creating a culture where caregivers thrive and then the residents feel valued. Um and this has been another Senior Care Academy podcast by Helperley. Raya, thanks so much for joining us. It was great.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, for sure. Uh, final shout out. Um, I am so blessed and happy to work with the people that I have in the industry that I have. Um, Dr. Crump is who I work with right now. He's an amazing family practice doc. So super grateful to work with him and everything he does at Lakeview. Um, I've been truly, truly blessed in my life to work with some great people, and he's one of them.

SPEAKER_00:

I love that.

SPEAKER_01:

That's awesome. Yeah, appreciate that.