While caregiver fill-rate challenges permeate the home care industry, provider Solenvia has nearly eradicated the issue through its caregiver transportation model.
Solenvia raised its scheduled fill rates to 99% and puts caregivers in the home of clients two to three hours after a referral because of a caregiver transportation program, Bryan Dylewski, Solenvia founder and CEO, told Home Health Care News. The company now plans to take its unique operating model into new regions with franchising expansions.
“We believe [we] have solved the caregiver inconsistency issue through our transportation model, which basically transports caregivers to and from cases,” Dylewski said. “A lot of the caregivers in the market want to work… they just don’t have reliable transportation to get from their home to a client’s home daily. We started transporting our caregivers early on, and we’ve had huge success with being able to staff cases consistently.”
Middletown, Connecticut-based Solenvia provides non-medical home care across Connecticut and Massachusetts.
Dylewski founded Solenvia after caring for his father. Starting around 2012, Dylewski’s father began to experience health issues, falls and mobility loss. After numerous hospitalizations, medical experts diagnosed him with the neurodegenerative disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).
Hospital staff would not release Dylewski’s father until they ensured he would have 24-hour care, the CEO recalled. Dylewski retained the services of two home care companies to help his father beginning at 7:00 a.m. to help his father get out of bed and prepare for the day.
In one instance, the caregivers did not show up at scheduled time. In another incident, the caregiver failed to show up at all.
“I didn’t realize at the time the issue [of] lack of caregiver consistency in this industry,” Dylewski said.
Drivers for caregivers
Before rebranding the name to Solenvia in 2026, Dylewski founded his company as The HomeAides in 2014 to help provide more reliable home care. Developing a caregiver transportation model was key to solving caregiver inconsistency, Dylewski said.
Initially, Solenvia hired drivers as 1099 contractors to transport caregivers. As Solenvia scaled over the years, the caregiver transportation model had to evolve with the company’s growth, Dylewski said. Solenvia purchased company cars to create a 15-vehicle internal fleet. Between the company fleet and some transportation services from the rideshare giant Uber, Solenvia facilitates over 1,600 trips a month within its Connecticut locations.
“There’s a specific formula that we use,” Dylewski said. “Just using Ubers — if it doesn’t fall within that mile radius and cost, it doesn’t make sense from a cost perspective,” Dylewski said. “It made more sense to have internal company cars.”
Caregivers share in some of the cost of participating in Solenvia’s internal company fleet, Dylewski said. Charging caregivers for these services prevents the caregiver pool from abusing the internal fleet and defrays the cost of the transportation model. All company vehicles have routing software. Solenvia maintains a dispatch department that creates transportation routes the night before the caregivers’ services. Drivers and caregivers are W2 employees, Dylewski added.
“The drivers actually come in, and they know what their route is,” Dylewski said. “They know the caregivers that need to be picked up, and to what case they need to be delivered to on a day-to-day basis.”
Rebranding and franchising
Franchising was the main driver of the company’s rebrand earlier this year, Dylewski said.
Since franchising involves licensing a brand to an independent owner, the name of the brand must be trademarked, Dylewski said. The United States Trademark and Patent Office denied the company’s request to trademark “The HomeAides,” stating the name was too descriptive.
To give franchisees a unique brand the company could protect, Dylewski said the firm would have to change its name.
“I didn’t want to do this [rebrand],” Dylewski said. “We just had so much invested in The HomeAides here locally in Connecticut. It was like my baby, and now you [had] to change it.”
To decide on a new name, Solenvia looked at trademarking requirements, other brands with descriptive names and what elements the company itself provided consumers, Dylewski recounted.
The company landed on “Solenvia,” which comes from “solace,” what the company delivers to people during difficult times, and “via” to denote its delivery.
Nine months after the rebrand, Solenvia penned its first franchise deal. On Sept. 11, 2026, Solenvia signed an agreement with Shaun and Jaminy Seagriff to bring the company’s older adult home care services to Tampa Bay’s Pinellas and Hillsborough counties.
Solenvia plans to tailor its caregiver transportation model to each franchisee’s location. Solenvia’s corporate headquarters differs from the average franchisee, said Dylewski. The Florida franchisees have two territories and a smaller geographic area. The franchisees will use services from the ridesharing firm Uber, in addition to receiving a company vehicle to use when Uber is unavailable.
For Solenvia, delivering consistent care through its caregiver transportation model remains crucial for future franchising, which Dylewski said is the main way the company will scale and deliver a good product to end users.
“We believe that the owner-operator model is number one [that franchisors are] invested in the brand,” Dylewski said. “They have a belief in the brand. They have an understanding, belief and passion for helping others, serving others, and we believe that that’s needed to really be successful in their local communities.”