EPISODE 36 – Mobile Primary Care: The Only Home Health in Southern Oregon Offering This Service

Episode 36 – Mobile Primary Care: The Only Home Health in Southern Oregon Offering This Service

In this episode of the Team Senior Podcast, Jamie Callahan sits down with Shermane Cura, Director of Provider Services at Riverside Home Health, to discuss a service that is transforming care for seniors in Southern Oregon: mobile primary care.

Riverside is currently the only home health organization in Southern Oregon offering primary care services that come directly to patients—whether they live in a private home, assisted living, memory care, or adult foster home. Shermane explains how this model eliminates the stress, confusion, and risks that often come with transporting seniors—especially those living with dementia—to traditional medical offices.

You’ll learn:

• What mobile primary care is and how it works
• How Riverside integrates home health, hospice, and provider services into one seamless continuum of care
• Why bedside primary care is especially beneficial for seniors with dementia or mobility challenges
• How these services help prevent unnecessary hospitalizations
• Why all services are covered by Medicare at no cost to the patient
• How clinicians can get involved in expanding this much-needed service

This episode is a must-listen for seniors, adult children, caregivers, and healthcare professionals looking for practical, compassionate solutions that improve quality of life and keep care where it belongs—at home.

📞 Riverside Home Health: 541-476-1583 (ext. 3)
🌐 Website: www.riversidehh.com

📞 Team Senior: 541-295-8230

At Team Senior™, our mission is to guide you and support you through the maze of Southern Oregon Long-Term Care.

📞 For Team Senior resources, call: 541-295-8230

Or visit our website for more information: https://www.teamsenior.org/

Transcript

Episode 36: Mobile Primary Care - The Only Home Health in Southern Oregon Offering This Service

Host: Jamie Callahan
Guest: Shermane Cura, Director of Provider Services, Riverside Home Health

JAMIE CALLAHAN: Hi, this is Jamie Callahan with the Team Senior Podcast. Our goal is to simplify aging. Society grooms us to plan for retirement, but what about life beyond retirement, where the rubber meets the road? Perhaps you've had a stroke, or you've been diagnosed with cancer, or maybe you're forgetting things and now you have dementia. That's our area of expertise, and we are here to share our insight.

And now, the Team Senior Podcast.

Hi, this is Jamie Callahan with the Team Senior Podcast, and I have Shermane Cura here today from Riverside Home Health. Riverside has a very special service that they offer, and they are the only home health organization in Southern Oregon that offers this. And so we are super excited to have her today to talk about it. Shermane, I'm going to give you the floor to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about Riverside Home Health to start.

SHERMANE CURA: Thanks for having me, Jamie. I've been with Riverside for a little over a year at this point in time. We started this new line of service in December of 2024, and Riverside offers three main lines of services. So we have our home health line of service, our mobile primary care now, which is called provider services for a fancy title, and then we have hospice as well.

JAMIE: I love it. Yeah. Okay, so I just quickly want to talk about the services that Riverside provides, because throughout this podcast today, you're going to hear about a lot of different, incredible things that they do. And I really want to bring it back to the fact that everything that Riverside Home Health offers to you, or hospice, or through their provider services, does not cost you a dime. It is covered by Medicare to have them in your home. And there are lots of different ways that we can help to put this in place. So we're going to touch on that as well. Shermane, tell us first about home health. What is that?

SHERMANE: Home health services offers skilled nursing, different kinds of therapy, whether it be occupational, physical, speech therapy. We offer those services right at the bedside. So whether you live in a private home, an adult foster home, we bring all of that to the bedside. So it's super convenient for the patients, especially people who live in, say, memory cares or assisted livings. It's just helpful for them to stay in the comfort of their environment and be able to do their therapy or their nursing service right at the bedside. And speaking of nursing, home health also offers skilled nursing, so we can take care of wound care, medication management. It's a beautiful thing to offer to the community. It's one of the two things that I love about home health in general.

JAMIE: And when she says bedside, it does not necessarily mean that you need to be bedbound?

SHERMANE: Yes.

JAMIE: Home health is typically approved when it is an effort to leave your home and go to physical therapy. Does not mean that you can't drive. It doesn't mean that you can't walk. It means none of those things. It just means that it is a strenuous effort for you to be asked to do that. Home health is like physical therapy, occupational therapy, things like that. And the example that I always like to use is that if I am meeting with someone in their living room and you share with me that you have historically taken the trash can to the road every week when the trash man comes to pick it up, but suddenly you're having a really hard time getting out of your recliner and you don't know why. And throughout that conversation, we talk about other diagnoses that you might have. Maybe it's arthritis, maybe it's diabetes. Maybe you just slipped and fell a week or so ago. That's when I would likely put in a referral to Riverside Home Health and ask them to do the backend work to help get you approved for home health to do physical therapy in your own home. And I can't say it enough times, it's completely free. Why would you not take advantage of it?

SHERMANE: Yes. It's a beautiful thing that's covered under Medicare, so might as well take advantage of it. You work your whole life for these benefits, so might as well take advantage of it.

JAMIE: Absolutely. Absolutely. So Riverside now also offers hospice, which I think most people are somewhat familiar with. One thing that—it's the third of the three things that they offer—that I think most people are not familiar with, which is, from my perspective, so much needed, and we need more people doing this. In fact, Riverside would love to hire more providers. So if you're interested, please call them if you're a doctor or something like that.

SHERMANE: Please get ahold of me. Yes, please. Please call them.

JAMIE: So they have something that's called provider services. Walk us through what that is.

SHERMANE: So provider services is just a fancy title for our new mobile primary care services that we offer. We are an all-women-led group, so there's a small team of three of us. I am the director of the practice. I run all the operations, all the backend, everything. Then we have our nurse practitioner, Ingrid Passer. She earned her nurse practitioner license in 2022 and has been doing mobile primary care her entire time as a nurse practitioner. She has a huge heart for the geriatric population and has formed so many relationships out in the community, and we are very blessed to have her. Alongside Ingrid, we have our medical assistant, Whitney, who has 10 years' experience working in a brick-and-mortar primary care. So we were super lucky to acquire her when we started this line of service as well. The two of them are the most fabulous duo that I could have ever asked for. They work so hard, and they're providing amazing care out in the community. I couldn't ask for more.

JAMIE: I will say, I don't know Whitney at all, but I have worked with Ingrid for a very long time. She is one of the hardest workers I've ever met in my entire life, and she's also extremely passionate about serving seniors and folks with dementia. I want to quickly touch on the dementia piece and why having a provider service is so extremely important. When we are working with folks—Team Senior, memory care communities, assisted living communities—and the people that are being serviced have a dementia diagnosis, oftentimes it's very difficult for them to go to the doctor.

SHERMANE: Yes.

JAMIE: It's confusing. Why are we getting in the car? Is it even safe to put them in the car? Taking them to the doctor oftentimes creates behaviors, slide-backs, all kinds of subsequent issues as just a result of taking them to the doctor. When you are working with Riverside and Ingrid is a part of your team, Ingrid actually comes to the memory care community or the assisted living community to service that person that is maybe struggling because they've fallen and now they have a small wound, or they are struggling with some behavioral issues. And Ingrid is able to communicate with the medical team that is a part of the community that individual is living in, but is also able to just pop into that memory care or assisted living and see that patient in their own setting. They don't have to go to the doctor anymore.

SHERMANE: Absolutely. Yeah. When you have that dementia diagnosis for these patients, it's such a benefit to them to have that provider come at the bedside. One super important thing for these residents in these facilities is for them to have that familiar environment that hopefully doesn't change much for them. Just keeping their schedule, keeping their normal environment around them, just really helps with their mental stability. So being able to provide this mobile primary care and just walk them through the day-to-day, and having Ingrid be able to be that mentor figure to all of the staff in the memory care and assisted living is a huge thing, too. I don't think people realize how much the workers in these type of facilities appreciate just the constant education and the constant support from all of the different agencies around them. So having Ingrid in there working right alongside them day by day has been super helpful.

JAMIE: I have no doubt. I hear that feedback from so many different communities. And one thing that Ingrid is—she is passionate about sharing that information, and she's very approachable. She's not what you would see maybe as a doctor. She's definitely going to get on the floor with you. She's going to get into the trenches with the families and the staff and everything and help them in any way that she can. She is remarkable.

SHERMANE: Absolutely.

JAMIE: What goes on behind the scenes in provider services? Give us some examples of, maybe not in the memory care area, but how is your office helping Ingrid to be successful, and what is Ingrid doing that maybe isn't in a memory care community?

SHERMANE: So the type of services that we offer with provider services, or our mobile primary care, is honestly everything that would be offered in a brick-and-mortar primary care office. So we're able to do all of the Medicare wellness exams, advance care planning. Say one of their residents just went to the hospital and they need an assessment done after they get discharged back home, whether that be in assisted living or anything. We're able to go in there and do something called transitional care management to make sure that they're getting all of the care needs that are needed after they're discharged from the hospital. So it's nice to be able to keep tabs on them. And having the different lines of services through Riverside—say we see a patient that just discharged from the hospital and obviously we see that they would benefit from having a little bit extra eyes on them—we have home health. That's an easy slip right in. Send them a referral, and we have that line of service also, so we can get that started super quickly.

JAMIE: And they can have both—home health—

SHERMANE: Absolutely.

JAMIE: Or hospice and Ingrid.

SHERMANE: Yes, absolutely. Yeah.

JAMIE: That's amazing. And that is also a great benefit to our community. How does Riverside ensure quality, compliance, safety among the provider network?

SHERMANE: I think it's no different than our home health and hospice line of services. So when we look at different compliance techniques like bag technique and sterile environments and everything, it's the same thing for my team. They have to follow the same kind of guidelines that any other clinician has to work with going into these facilities. So we have education for someone to monitor them every now and then just to make sure that their bag technique is still good. We have communication with the different materials that she may need for certain exams that she may be doing. So they're able to do even like venipunctures and vaginal exams out in the field and everything. So making sure that they have all the equipment they need to perform all these procedures.

JAMIE: That's so important for people to know, because of course they're scratching their head saying, "Okay, so I'm going to leave my primary care and I'm going to use this doctor that's going to come and see me. And while I really like that idea," whether it's the individual themselves or the adult child saying, "This is brilliant," I think people scratch their heads a little bit around: What can she really do in the field? Yeah. What can she really do in my home?

SHERMANE: Yeah. That's a conversation that I tend to have a lot during the onboarding process of getting new patients onto our services. It takes a while for me to be able to explain that literally everything that would be done in an in-house primary care is everything that we can do for them out in the field also. So we can do all of that at the bedside and the privacy of their own home.

JAMIE: It's so important for people to know that. And it's also, I think, really important to mention that through good coordination with home health or with hospice or with your provider services, you are preventing many hospitalizations.

SHERMANE: Yes. I think that is the main goal for all lines of services—is to prevent hospitalization—and also being partners with the hospitals in both counties. Everyone's goal is to prevent rehospitalization. So being able to offer this new line of service with Riverside, it's a beautiful thing because we now have this beautiful continuum of care within Riverside. So say we have a patient that's on our primary care services. We want some extra eyes on them with some skilled nursing or maybe some therapy. Being able to refer them to our home health is super helpful. That way we can just get that extra therapy, extra nursing eyes on them on a weekly basis. And then say they aren't improving, or we see that maybe hospice services will benefit the quality of their life. It's an easy transition into our next line of services with hospice. So being able to offer that continuum of care within Riverside has been a beautiful thing.

JAMIE: Absolutely. We live in an area where, geographically, we're not a big city, right? We're not a few blocks from our next patient. We're possibly 30 miles away from our next patient. Yeah. How does Riverside address that?

SHERMANE: We are able to serve all of those small rural communities out in Josephine County, Jackson County—you name it, we probably have a patient out there. So it's the same for my small team also with provider services. We have patients out in Merlin. We go all the way out to different places in Rogue River. We're all over Jackson and Josephine County. If we are able to help and we have it open in our schedule, we will help whoever we can.

JAMIE: And I'm sure you could use more hands to provide more help.

SHERMANE: Oh my goodness, yes.

JAMIE: Let's talk about that for a minute. If a clinician or a provider is considering working with a service like this, namely Riverside in our area, because you are the only home health agency that is offering this, what should they know about the expectations, supports, benefits of being a part of your provider services team?

SHERMANE: So like I mentioned earlier, we are a very small team currently for provider services. We're three women just going through the trenches, trying to figure it out day by day. Whoever comes on board will just have to know that they're going to have to be go-getters. We have built this program from the ground up to what it is now, and whoever comes in is just going to need to be ready to keep building those bricks with us. And the beautiful thing about Ingrid, too, is she has such a passion for education. So when she was going through nurse practitioner school and having her preceptor who used to run a mobile primary care as well, and then acquiring that from him, she wants to be able to pay that forward to the next generation of nurse practitioners. So if there's anyone out there who's ready to do a practicum or anything for their nurse practitioner license, please get ahold of me. We can see what we can do for you.

JAMIE: Please reach out to her.

SHERMANE: Yes.

JAMIE: There are so many people that we refer to their program, and they are taking them, but it is slow sometimes to onboard folks just because there is way more demand than supply right now. Yeah. They need another nurse practitioner or a doctor or something like that. I want to hear a story. Tell me a story of a way that Ingrid and your entire team have impacted someone's life.

SHERMANE: Yeah, so I feel like this happens on an everyday basis. We will get contacted—as of recent, there was an adult foster home that got ahold of us. They had a resident that they just didn't know what to do with and where to go to help with her quality of life. So we took her on as a patient, even though she sounded a little high acuity, but we wanted to see what we can do to help her out. And just after that first assessment, we realized, "Oh man, she would really benefit from being on hospice services." And the problem with her not being on board with hospice yet at the time is she kept on being told by her previous primary care provider that she didn't have a diagnosis that would make her qualify for hospice. But the beautiful thing about Riverside is even if we do a quick glance on the paper and maybe she doesn't have anything that has her qualify, our medical director and our hospice team will always dig into it and see what we can find to help put that quality of life for the patient. So we did just that. After we did our start-of-care appointment with this resident, we sent it over to the hospice team. Ingrid was like, "Hey, I know it doesn't appear that she would have a diagnosis that would have her qualify, but if you guys can please just dig into it a little bit more, I really think that hospice would benefit her quality of life."

JAMIE: I've seen you guys do this several times.

SHERMANE: Oh yes. So you are really good at this. Yeah, it benefits the patients at the end of the day, and we're all about the quality of life at the end of the day.

JAMIE: And it's true that if someone goes on hospice and their condition improves, they can graduate off of hospice.

SHERMANE: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. It's not a forever thing. If they do start to improve or they're just staying at a baseline and not declining anymore, they can definitely graduate off of hospice services. And say later on down the road they do start to decline again, we can definitely get them back on board on hospice services.

JAMIE: That's a big benefit, and I think, too, that's a little bit of a relief for families that are not really sure if they want to go down that road. It allows them to try it. But I think what happens more often than not is that they truly see their quality of life improve, and then they realize that they made the right decision.

SHERMANE: Yes. Yeah. We talk about that all the time in the industry.

JAMIE: Finally, Shermane, I want to give you the opportunity, and I will reshare it, to tell people how to contact you.

SHERMANE: Perfect. Yeah. So if anyone is interested in getting their loved one onboarded with our primary care services, I am the first line of defense to get insurance verifications done and everything. So please get ahold of me in the office. Our phone number is 541-476-1583. Extension 3 will get straight to me. Or feel free to send me an email: shermane.cura@riversidehh.com.

JAMIE: Again, I'm going to share this again because I really want to encourage people to reach out to Riverside Home Health. One of the things that they do that truly sets them apart from other organizations is that when I lay eyes on somebody that I feel could benefit from home health, I don't have to send you to your doctor and then ask you to ask your doctor to jump through all these hoops to get it done. One of the most amazing things about Riverside is that I can send Riverside the referral with your information, and they will jump through all of those hoops for you. It is a tremendous benefit.

SHERMANE: We will do all the dirty work for you guys.

JAMIE: That is an apparent and obvious thing. Yeah, we love it. One of the reasons why we love you. So again, to reach out to Riverside Home Health, you are going to call 541-476-1583. Again, 541-476-1583. And if you want to get Shermane directly, you just hit extension 3. Their website, if you want to look up some things on your own, is www.riversidehh.com—for home health. But you don't spell out home health. It's riversidehh.com.

SHERMANE: Yep. That's it.

JAMIE: Thank you so much, Shermane, for being here. We really appreciate you taking the time.

SHERMANE: Thanks, Jamie.

JAMIE: You got it.

Thank you for listening to the Team Senior Podcast. We're here every week sharing new and relevant information. Remember that we're just a phone call away. Team Senior can be reached at 541-295-8230. Again, 541-295-8230. Until next time, this is Jamie Callahan.