Integra home health care receives full accreditation

Date: 8/25/2016

EAST LONGMEADOW – To Emily Gralia, CEO of Integra Home Health Agency, the decision in 2010 to expand her family’s footprint from The Arbors assisted living facilities into the arena of home health care was a logical step.

Integra’s recent full accreditation to include skilled nursing and therapy services in its slate of offerings was a triumph for the young agency.

“I think that we felt assisted living was changing, the old model wasn’t sustainable,” said Graila, whose family has developed and operated four Arbors Assisted Living and three Arbors Kids child care centers in the Valley over the past 18 years. “People were staying home longer and when they got to assisted living they were older. We wanted The Arbors to be their last stop, we wanted healthcare in the building [for our clients].”

Though there had been “a lot of other agencies working in our buildings” for some time, Graila said the family – which does business under the name of The Graila Group – was dismayed by the difficulty of coordinating care for clients who needed it.

“The communication gets lost, so that’s why we wanted to tighten that up,” she said.

The Graila Group initially launched Integra Home Healthcare as a private care agency to provide aides to help clients with activities of daily living, companionship, transportation for shopping and doctor’s appointments, house cleaning and meal preparation both in The Arbors facilities and in the community.

This July, Integra received full accreditation to offer skilled nursing services and therapy with reimbursement through Medicare and Medicaid.

“We are accredited through CHAP – Community Health Accreditation Program – basically we have met and exceeded what the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services requires,” Graila said, adding that the lengthy accreditation process means every aspect of the agency’s service model has been examined and evaluated for best practices. “It means we’ve gone above what [the Center] is asking for.”

She said Integra could now offer clients a full slate of skilled nursing, occupational therapy, speech therapy, physical therapy and medical social work as services that are eligible for reimbursement by Medicare and Medicaid and other insurances.

This service expansion will allow Integra to serve clients in both The Arbors and the community in a more comprehensive manner, Graila added.

In each of the four Arbors facilities in Western Massachusetts, Graila said Integra has now established a care team that includes a case manager for private duty services, and a director of nursing and individual clinicians for the skilled services.

“Having our own healthcare agency come in [to the facility] helps clients stay in their ‘home,’” Graila said, “We didn’t want to have them have to [disrupt their lives again and] go to a nursing home.”