These posts are drawn directly from experience — building contact centers, managing referral teams, navigating insurance barriers, and training the people who hold families at their most vulnerable moments. Published on LinkedIn, 2x per week.
Concept
The number one complaint from referral sources isn't about clinical care. It's about consistency.
Post 1 · Week 1
Team & People
Can a Case Manager serve as an assessment RN for a day? Absolutely. Do they want to? Not at all.
Post 2 · Week 1
Systems
In hospice, scale isn't about the bottom line. It's about how far your reach extends into communities where someone is suffering alone.
Post 3 · Week 2
Patient Focus
If insurance is the first question your contact team asks a family calling about hospice, it tells that family exactly what your organization values most.
Post 4 · Week 2
Team & People
I may have a concept of what the end product looks like. My team provides the specifics. That distinction is how you build future leaders.
Post 5 · Week 3
Systems
A referral team is not a cost center. It's a clinical touchpoint.
Post 6 · Week 3
Concept
Understanding the role of every stakeholder before you design a single process.
Post 7 · Week 4
Team & People
Retention has less to do with feeling like a work family and more to do with teamwork. Those are not the same thing.
Post 8 · Week 4
Systems
The operations manual doesn't replace judgment. It reserves judgment for the moments that actually need it.
Post 9 · Week 5
Patient Focus
Families don't leave hospice organizations because they weren't cared for. They leave because what they experienced didn't match what they believed was promised.
Post 10 · Week 5
Team & People
After 1,000 calls, even the most devastating situations can start to feel routine. That's not a character flaw. It's a point of failure.
Post 11 · Week 6
Team & People
When your contact team is underperforming, look at the feedback they are receiving before you look at the team.
Post 12 · Week 6
Concept
When you change a methodology that referral sources have come to trust, they notice before you do.
Post 13 · Week 7
Patient Focus
She sat in the parking lot for a week before she called.
Post 14 · Week 7
Team & People
If your agents have to jump through hoops to help a patient, you've already broken something.
Post 15 · Week 8
Concept
Well-built systems and processes need experience behind them and courage in front of them.
Post 16 · Week 8
Team & People
The conversation the hospice industry keeps almost having.
Professional Feature · June 2026
Technology
Built without a dedicated IT team.
Every tool below was designed and deployed solo in a live healthcare operations environment — while managing a VP-level role. Self-taught, applied to real business problems, and built to last.
Patient Assessment Analytics Report
Processed 541 assessment submissions across 424 unique patients — barrier analysis, RN performance dashboards, PPS score risk flags, and six strategic recommendations in boardroom-ready format.
Surfaced "Family Not Ready" as #1 admission barrier at 18.9% of submissions
Word
Excel
Dashboard
Marketer & Referral Source Performance Report
Multi-tab Excel workbook analyzing 2024–2025 referral data across marketer books — conversion rates, referral source breakdowns, non-admit analysis, and time-to-assessment distribution patterns.
Enabled targeted coaching at the individual marketer level
Excel
Data Modeling
Daily Census Automation Flow
Scheduled Power Automate flow replacing 45 minutes of daily manual outreach — Adaptive Card forms to Teams, supervisor approval routing, automatic SharePoint write, non-response flagging.
Submission compliance from ~70% to 95% within 30 days
Power Automate
Teams
SharePoint
Power Apps Multi-List Referral Entry Form
Unified Power Apps form connected to three separate SharePoint lists — resolved broken dropdown functionality, standardized data entry across three referral teams, eliminated free-text corruption in analytics.
Eliminated data inconsistencies breaking downstream reporting
Power Apps
SharePoint
Account Data Deduplication & Master List Builder
Python-driven cleanup workflow with custom HTML review interface — identified 51 issues across ~1,000 entries, location-aware logic, side-by-side analyst review tool, full audit trail.
Preserved 49 location-specific accounts across 19 facility groups
Python
HTML
Fuzzy Matching
Real-Time Referral Status Notification System
Power Automate flow triggered by SharePoint changes — routes tailored notifications to support departments via email and clinical leadership via Teams the moment an assessment status updates. No polling, no manual check-ins.
Eliminated chart audit compliance misses; enabled mobile census management
Power Automate
SharePoint
Teams
Outlook
FAQ
Questions I'm asked most.
Straight answers about what CarePath Strategies does, who it's for, and the experience behind the work.
What does CarePath Strategies do?
CarePath Strategies is the healthcare operations consultancy of Della Miller. It helps hospice, palliative, and home health organizations design and build the contact centers, referral systems, retention programs, and operations frameworks they need to grow — without losing the patient focus that makes them effective.
The work spans operating models, staffing and training structures, documented SOPs, and the analytics and automation that hold it all together.
Do you need to be a clinician to lead hospice operations?
No. CarePath Strategies works on the non-clinical infrastructure that surrounds clinical care — intake, referral response, contact center operations, team development, and documentation systems. The value is operational and structural: building the systems that let clinical teams do their best work.
What experience is needed to scale a hospice referral center effectively?
It takes a referral model built for consistency. The thing referral sources value most isn't clinical reassurance — it's the same dependable response every time they call.
Scaling a referral center means building that consistency into structure: response methodology, role clarity, documentation, and accountability, so responsiveness holds as volume and service lines change. This is the model that grew Delaware Hospice from 135 to 800 patients.
How can you reduce patient revocations in hospice or home health?
Revocations usually trace back to a gap between what families expected and what they experienced. A structured patient retention program identifies at-risk patients before escalation through proactive engagement, empowered teams, and data — an approach that reduced annual service revocations by 30% (45% within the first three months).
What does a strong contact center operating model look like for hospice and palliative care?
It starts with the recognition that a referral team is not a cost center — it's a clinical touchpoint. A strong model pairs a clear operating and staffing structure with a consistent response methodology, a documentation framework for intake, and training discipline that keeps quality steady under pressure. The goal is a center referral sources can depend on every time.
How do you develop and retain operations teams in high-pressure healthcare environments?
Retention is less about feeling like a "work family" and more about teamwork built on role clarity, clear expectations, and consistent accountability. With structured development and a real feedback culture, this approach sustained under 2% annual turnover across more than a decade — by building future leaders rather than managing churn.
What kinds of organizations does CarePath Strategies work with?
Hospice and home health providers, palliative care programs, and multi-location patient care organizations — typically those scaling referral and contact center operations, or formalizing institutional knowledge into transferable systems. Engagements are remote and serve national markets.
