As the federal government cracked down on home-based care fraud, HealthView got swept up in the maelstrom.
2026 proved to be a difficult year, but HealthView survived by relying on cash reserves it built in anticipation of tougher market conditions, CEO Steven Gonzalez and Vice President of Clinical Operations Monica Cutia told Home Health Care News. HealthView’s executives now aim to bolster the firm’s AI technology and clinician advancement opportunities.
“This year was hell,” Gonzalez said. “It was a really rough year because we’re in LA County.”
HealthView Home Healthcare Services provides home health, hospice and palliative care services across Southern California’s Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Los Angeles counties.
As federal scrutiny intensified in Los Angeles County, Gonzalez said compliant providers such as HealthView were forced to navigate fast-changing requirements, payment delays and reputational fallout from fraud allegations.
“LA County was hit… the hardest with unexpected changes,” Gonzalez said. “We had to adapt to emergency changes on how to even run the whole entire business from [an] operations standpoint.”
HealthView also received an additional documentation request, or ADR, in connection with an audit of its hospice business, Gonzalez said. The company had to submit records supporting patients’ eligibility for hospice services while payments were withheld pending review.
“You have to prove that the patient was appropriate for hospice,” Gonzalez said. “If they say it’s not appropriate, you have to give that money back.”
The process, designed to ensure the organization’s legitimacy, required extra time and resources on HealthView’s part.
“We got treated like a criminal when we weren’t,” Gonzalez recalled. “For those few months, literally the hospice business completely stopped in our county. No more referrals. It went quiet. … We even had patients’ families wanting to get off service because they’re seeing it on the news.”
Gonzalez reported anecdotes of other local home health and hospice providers closing.
Gonzalez said that HealthView’s financial uncertainty was compounded by the fact that its funds were being held, making banks reluctant to extend loans to the company.
While HealthView relied on its own cash reserves to continue operating, the events of this year have left an impact on the company.
“We’re obviously a successful company … We look like we did well, but it hurt. It still hurts,” Gonzalez said. “Our bruises aren’t gone yet.”
The path forward
While 2026 had been a rough year, a silver lining came in the form of hiring and retention.
Because some Los Angeles-based home health and hospice businesses ceased offering services, HealthView experienced an influx of caregiver workers — a rarity in the home-based care industry.
“As long as I’ve been in home health and hospice, I have never seen so many candidates come through for just one position that we had posted,” Cutia told HHCN.
“We’ve never seen so many candidates ever,” Gonzalez agreed. “I mean, there’s a labor shortage. There’s nursing shortage. We put out one post. We had hundreds of nurses because the companies they worked for went out of business.”
The influx of new caregivers urged HealthView to alter its hiring process. The company expanded its interview process and even adopted ride alongs, Cutia said.
If a candidate is not the right fit for HealthView, staff will also refer candidates to neighboring organizations, Cutia said.
As the employee pool grows, so too will the company’s service lines. The company aims to expand its palliative care program, in addition to adding technology layers to bolster operations, Gonzalez noted.
“We have really big goals,” Gonzalez said. “We want to be the largest home health and hospice and palliative care [provider] outside of health systems in the state of California.”
Culture is also critical. HealthView scored a 98% employee approval rating in the Great Place to Work recertification survey , Gonzalez said. As the firm scales, Gonzalez said a goal is to maintain the employee satisfaction score above 90%.
Culture is not just an employee-retention strategy, Gonzalez said, but the operating model HealthView hopes to replicate as it grows. Cutia and Gonzalez developed an internal software platform called Culture AI, which is designed to help managers prepare for one-on-one meetings, track objectives and illuminate employees’ operational needs.
“We bought CultureAI.com with the idea of, ‘Let’s turn what we do into software that we integrate across any businesses we invest in or buy,” Gonzalez said.
As HealthView looks toward 2027, Cutia wants the company’s growth to create advancement opportunities for clinicians, particularly nurses who may not have seen themselves as business or operational leaders.
“I want us to continue to be able to grow, to be able to give nurses who probably didn’t think that they had the opportunity to be leaders of a program that opportunity,” Cutia said.