Home health and hospice providers based in Ohio have launched a joint venture, branded as Heritage Home Health and Hospice.
The JV — involving Heritage Home Health Care, Legacy Hospice and Advanced Home Health and Hospice — is designed to provide home health and hospice services across the Buckeye State, as well as the Erie, Pennsylvania, region. The legacy organizations will continue to operate as they have been.
The JV promises a “deeper understanding of clinical resources,” modernized technology, expanded back-office support and an improved operational infrastructure, a statement from Advanced Home Health and Hospice indicated.
Advanced CEO Richard Griffin said the decision to form the JV “wasn’t a hard one.”
“We reached a conviction a while ago that we hold firmly: the future of home health and hospice does not belong to the organization that tries to do everything alone. The families we serve deserve clinical excellence delivered at scale — and scale, done right, is genuinely hard to build in isolation,” Griffin told Home Health Care News’ sister publication, Hospice News in an email. “A joint venture let us pursue something we’d been turning over for years: take two mission-aligned organizations, each strong on its own, and combine them so the whole is meaningfully greater than the sum of its parts.”
Tens of thousands of patients in need of home health and hospice dwell in the Ohio and Erie markets, according to Advanced. Ohio’s senior population is among the largest in the United States, with over 2.2 million residents aged 65 and older, according to the state’s Department of Aging. This demographic represents roughly 19.1% of the state’s total population, outstripping the national average of 18%. Projections anticipate this rising to 26% by 2030.
The JV is oriented around five pillars, according to the companies:
- Patient First: Every operational and clinical decision is measured against patient outcomes, timely access and the dignity of the person receiving care.
- Ownership Without Blame: A culture of accountability that resolves problems directly and learns from them rather than defending process.
- Radical Transparency: Open communication with clinicians, families, and referral partners about outcomes, plans, and performance.
- Technology as Relief: Investment in tools that reduce administrative burden on nurses, aides, therapists, and social workers so they can focus on patient care.
- Disciplined Growth: Measured expansion that preserves clinical quality and never stretches teams beyond what serves the patient well.
The JV has pledged faster response times for referral partners, more consistent communication and a deeper clinical bench. Heritage Home Health and Hospice means faster response times, more consistent communication, and a deeper clinical bench.
Representatives from the health care brokerage firm Stoneridge Partners brought the legacy organizations together to discuss a potential JV, according to Griffin.
“We don’t enter partnerships with people we don’t trust, and trust isn’t something you negotiate — it’s something you build, one honest conversation at a time,” Griffin said. “By the time we got to structure, the hard part was already behind us. Both organizations already knew we wanted to build something together. The mechanics were just a matter of getting the details right.”
Any organization can “hit a ceiling” in terms of the amount of clinical infrastructure, recruiting capacity, technology adoption and back-office support it can build, Griffin said. By joining forces, the three partners can expand on their current capabilities.
The JV also forms a more resilient organization that can withstand greater economic and operational complexities, he indicated.
“Together, we can invest in all of it at a level neither of us could justify independently and put those resources directly behind frontline caregivers across more locations,” Griffith said. “In practice, that means stronger recruiting and retention, more consistent clinical systems, and the operational backbone that frees our clinicians to spend their time on patients instead of paperwork. It also means resilience: when one part of the platform is under pressure, the rest can absorb it.”