by Mike Lee
Staff Writer

Bettina Trice has dated the sexiest man alive. She’s traveled the world, had a world championship whippet and all those things still don’t come close to accurately portraying this unique 81-year-old.
Trice started painting when she was four, copying Dick Tracy out of the paper.
She’s lived her entire life by the philosophy you’re never bored if you’re an artist.
In the 1950s, Trice’s mother entered her in a beauty contest. The shy Oklahoma City girl made it to the stage but then figured out she had another problem.
“They accepted me and that night I said ‘Dear Jesus, what am I going to do. I don’t dance and I don’t sing,’” Trice remembers. “He gave me the message of doing art. I sketched the Mona Lisa in three minutes and would you believe I won.”
Trice went to Central High School growing up and then married
Through the years Trice has run Betty’s Gift Shop and she’s worked for Wolf & Wolf Advertising.
Art is life for Trice and one day she hopes to have her work displayed in an Oklahoma museum.
“It keeps you in touch with God,” she said.
For about a month, when she was still Betty Salmon, she found herself face-to-face with Harry Belafonte – voted at the time the sexiest man alive. She coyly asked for an autograph insisting it was for her sister.
“As I was walking away he asked if I could give him a ride,” Trice said. “We dated for over a month.”
She still remembers the first date when they went to a local restaurant.
“He said ‘I want you to go first because I wouldn’t want to embarrass you,’” Trice said. “I took his hand and told him if we couldn’t go in together I wasn’t going in. We went in and everyone stood up and applauded. Can you believe that in Oklahoma in the 1960s?”
In addition to the artwork that adorns her walls at Emerald Square Assisted Living Center, Trice has vacation photos of her and her husband in China and Italy. She spent a month touring China and visited the Great Wall. She’s dined at the luxury Hotel Cipriani in Venice, drinking wine with peaches for breakfast.
Her destinations have also included Japan, Europe and Mexico.
Trice and her husband – who owned Trice Electronics – had three children and plenty of grandchildren and great grandchildren have followed.
Those who may have dined at Sussy’s Italian Restaurant in Oklahoma City may remember the hand-painted mugs owner Jack Sussy used to give out. The Chicago native commissioned Trice to paint some 5,000 cups, each different.
“The waitresses didn’t like me very much because every time they came in they wanted to use their cup,” Trice said. “He finally put in some lazy susans. They didn’t think that was very funny.”
From time to time she gets approached by Emerald Square residents about painting self portraits or portraits of their animals.
She’s happy to oblige, painting almost every day.
Several of the paintings that hang on her wall are of her whippets.
During her life, Trice also became certified to teach tennis lessons. Her and husband built the first indoor tennis court in Oklahoma City.

by Mike Lee
Staff Writer

Debra Moore, RN, didn’t sleep much the night before.
Her new job as clinical director of Oklahoma Hospice Care is a daunting one and keeps her busy.
But the award-winning nurse wouldn’t trade it for the world.
“I feel like I make a difference,” she said, just a few hours removed from sitting up most of the night with a dying patient and their family.
Moore became Oklahoma Hospice Care clinical director near the end of 2014, accepting a staff of more than 10.
“She’s just an amazing, charismatic leader,” says Jennifer Forrester, RT, community relations director. “People want to follow her and she takes ownership and the magnitude of responsibility for that position.”
Moore was the gem Oklahoma Hospice Care had been looking for.
And Moore is a firm believer that Oklahoma Hospice Care is poised for expansion. Oklahoma Hospice Care has offices in Oklahoma City and Shawnee with a radius stretching 50 miles from each office.
She floats the idea of one day having an inpatient hospital.
She’s never been one that dares to dream.
“Here I get the best of both worlds,” Moore said. “I still get to teach about oncology and I get to take care of patients because I’m not a behind-the-desk clinical director. I feel like the only way you’re going to lead something is if you have your hands on it and know what’s going on.”
Oklahoma Hospice Care is a Christian-principled organization specializing in caring for their patients and the patient’s families wherever they call home through personalized plans of care developed with input from the family physician, the hospice physician, the patient, the patient’s family and the members of the hospice interdisciplinary team.
Community Relations Representative Tori Aldridge sums up the task at hand nicely.
“Families invite us into their lives at their most vulnerable point,” Aldridge said. “We get one opportunity to take a tragic situation and make it bearable, even good. We aren’t there to focus on a person’s death. Instead, we focus on the remainder of their life.”
“We don’t speed up their disease process and we don’t slow it down. We go at their pace and do our best to minimize the surprises. The diagnosis and prognosis have been the most paramount surprises in their lives.”
Moore is a native of Oklahoma City. She obtained her nursing degree from Oklahoma City Community College in 1999. She began her nursing career at Presbyterian Hospital in the Med Surgery/Neurological Center and served as RN charge nurse.
Moore spent the next chapter of her career at Midwest Regional Hospital where during her tenure she worked as an oncology certified RN, manager of the Outpatient Oncology Center and finally director of inpatient and outpatient services.
She received the Nursing Award of Excellence in 2008 and the Spirit of Transformation Award in 2011 from the Oklahoma Hospital Association. She has also been an Ambassador for the United Way and served many years as team captain for the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life.
Moore credits her mother, Anna Rose Wilson, for instilling love and compassion that has led her to be the woman and nurse she is today.
With five children and two grandchildren, Moore stays busy even when she’s not busy at work.
She exudes happiness. It’s hard to ever find her in a down mood. And that’s who she looks for when she hires.
“I was looking for caring, compassion and someone who didn’t mind hard work,” Moore said of the opportunity to hire new staff when she got the job. “I was looking for someone to go into the home when I couldn’t be there.
“As far as a clinical perspective you can have all the commercials and advertising you want but word-of-mouth and letting people see what we do, that tells it all right there,” she said. “We’re different because we all do actually care and that’s why I’m glad we handpick our people. We know the people we have working for us.”
And that’s a comfort for both Moore and her patients.
“I measure success by the patient saying ‘job well done,’” Moore said. “It’s simple. Being in this field and probably any field it just takes common sense. What would you want done for your mom? What would you want done for your grandmother? Whatever you would want done for them that’s what you do for the patient.”
And sometimes that means getting a few hours less sleep than she’s used to, like the night before.
“I asked (the family member) if we could have done anything else. She said ‘Debra, you guys were amazing,’” Moore said. “That’s what keeps us going. I got a couple hours of sleep last night but that’s what keeps me going. That’s what makes me not even care about sleep. I can wait until Friday.”

Story and photo by Jason Chandler, Staff Writer

Not every health care agency is accredited by the Joint Commission, but BrightStar Care operates with this distinction.
“It’s an accredidation that hospitals have to have, but very few home care companies would pursue because it’s hard work and it’s expensive,” said Ken Fearnow, president and administrator of BrightStar Care.
In 2013 Fearnow and his wife, Jannie, opened the private non-Medicare franchise agency in Edmond.
“Our slogan is ‘A Higher Standard of Care,’” Fearnow said. “What we hope to do is ensure a higher quality of life.”
The Fearnows believe that because of the types of services they provide that it is essential to hold themselves accountable to the highest quality of standards provided in the industry.
BrightStar serves the greater Oklahoma City metroplex by offering home care and medical staffing. A full range of services are provided in a client’s home, providing that they are well enough to stay at home and don’t need to be hospitalized, Fearnow said.
“It might be companionship and keeping people safe in their homes to people who don’t need a high level of personal care needs,” he said. “They just need safety and some help around the house, maybe light housekeeping and just preparing meals for them and those things.”
BrightStar also provides personal care services to people with a higher level of needs. They might have been discharged from the hospital and need some support in their house. Maybe they can’t get out of bed and they need help with transferring, walking and showering, Fearnow said.
“We also provide skilled nursing services,” Fearnow continued. “That would be anything from providing injections and withdrawing blood all the way to wound care.”
BrightStar also provides infusion therapy for certain types of patients.
“We like to hire people who have a heart for the work that they do,” Fearnow said. “And it’s kind of hard to test for until you get them in the field, but most of the people that are in this business are so because they have a lot of compassion. They really do it more for the satisfaction of helping other people.”
The nursing staff ranges from registered nurses to certified home health aides and certified nurse aides. These aides must have been certified for at least a year before BrightStar will consider hiring them.
“We just feel like they need to have some experience either working in a facility or working as a nurse aide before we want to put them with our clients,” Fearnow said. “We also require that they have CPR certification.”
There are also federal and state requirements for the nurse aides to have a 50-state criminal background check as well as checking the OSBI sex offender registry. They must also have a drug test and a negative tuberculosis test.
“We competency test them in various areas depending on the type of client they are going to see,” Fearnow said.
Members of the staff are in the business to enrich people’s lives, which is the focus of person centered care.
“They do it more for that than they do for the money,” Fearnow explained. “We have some caregivers — I can think of one in particular — who with more than one client we’ve had in their final hours; they’ve been holding hands and praying with them.”
Providing company is important to people who are mostly homebound or transferred with lifts and with varying degrees of disability.
“They require different expertise and different types of care,” Fearnow said. “To ensure this better quality of care, we try to match the likes and dislikes of the client with the likes and dislikes of the caregiver.”
Clients are contacted within 24 hours for feedback and to see if there is anything else that they need. Seven days later, the client is contacted again, followed by a once-a-month communication with the office. Surveys are sent to learn from the client how they are doing.
“We are in their home with them. We want to see how we are touching them at every stage,” Fearnow said.
Enriching the lives of other people by providing excellent care has also enriched Fearnow’s life.
“I always said, ‘The closer I get to the age of the people I’m caring for — and we have several that are about my age — the more important it is for me to provide the quality of care to them and the dignity I would want for myself.”
“It’s been a very rewarding business for me. My wife and I have enjoyed it very much.”

Like any good administrator, Brookhaven Extensive Care’s Mollie Woolridge is constantly looking for better ways to help her residents.
So when she heard about the Prevent Clinic and what it could do she was sold.
“We always want to give the best care for our residents so anything that’s new and can make their lives better or easier we want to try,” Wooldridge said. “What they pitched to us was what we needed because readmissions are an issue and these can prevent some. It can at least let us know when someone is declining.”
Enter John Murgai and Lee Rose with Prevent Clinic – an on-site health monitoring and management firm that specializes in identifying patients who are at-risk for hospital readmission.
Once those patients are identified, Prevent Clinic focuses on continued monitoring until the patient’s prognosis improves.
Patients in the Prevent Clinic – largely those with congestive heart failure – are examined once they begin the program and are then seen weekly.
“We know from the start if they are at risk and what to look for and they are monitored regularly by additional people,” Wooldridge said. “And it’s people that learn to know them.”
Brookhaven specializes in nursing care. And Dustin Schuler is the Director of Nursing.
From a clinical standpoint, he was all for using Prevent Clinic.
“It was just giving us an extra tool to care for the residents,” he said. “For a long time with skilled care you had to send them out to the hospital to get any kind of testing done. It was just a great option to help the residents.”
Wooldridge monitored the numbers and liked what she saw.
“When did this work? From the very beginning,” she said.
Prevent Clinic’s ultrasounds and dopplers are also at Schuler and his staff’s disposal.
“The technology the mobile x-ray has is pretty high-end,” he said.
“Once I got the nurses on board 100 percent it was definitely additional peace of mind,” he continued. “I think they like it, knowing there’s another test they could run. It gives them something else we can go to. They realize sending the resident to the hospital isn’t good for them and it isn’t good for the family.”
Health care reform has pinpointed hospital readmissions as a key area for improving care coordination and achieving potential savings.  Medicare patients have the largest share of total readmissions and the highest associated costs for readmission.
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, there were approximately 3.3 million adult hospital readmissions in the U.S. in 2011. That resulted in $41.3 billion in additional hospital costs.
For Medicare patients, the No. 1 condition resulting in readmission was congestive heart failure which was responsible for 134,500 readmissions. Septicemia and pneumonia were the next two conditions responsible for the majority of readmissions. These three conditions alone resulted in $4.3 billion in hospital costs.
At a time when hospitals are trying to lower a patient’s length of stay, patients are unfortunately coming home sicker than before.
The thinking is that objective hemodynamic data can lead to better outcomes and ultimately a lower cost of care.
“It’s an added plus on our side because we do something nobody else does,” Wooldridge said.
Initially, Wooldridge admits her staff was leary of taking on a new process. But Murgai quickly won them over.
“Trying new things is always difficult because you don’t want to add more work to already overworked people,” Wooldridge said. “But I think this helps them in so many different ways. It’s not additional work it’s additional eyes on our residents. More people can see a decline or an improvement.”
Murgai said Brookhaven is the first facility to use Prevent Clinic’s optimized program.
“We test every patient here,” Murgai said. “Every patient gets tested … that way nothing falls through the cracks for them.”
And the cracks are where patients can slip through, leading them back to the hospital.
“Hospitals are where sick people are and people get sicker sometimes when they go there,” Rose said.
That’s why keeping them out of the hospital is the best prescription.