In her new role, LiveWell Partners’ CEO Stacie Bratcher is prioritizing strategic density and service diversification, carefully balancing growth with operational discipline.

St. Louis-based LiveWell Partners is a home health and hospice platform backed by the investment firm Camino Partners. Founded in 2023, the company has grown largely through acquisitions concentrated in the Midwest. It now operates locations across Illinois, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri and Ohio. Bratcher joined the organization as its top executive in March.

Home health represents the lion’s share of LiveWell’s business, though the company also has plans to expand its hospice capabilities through the remainder of 2026 and beyond.

Home Health Care News’ sister publication, Hospice News, sat down with Bratcher to discuss her plans for LiveWell, major industry trends and lessons learned in health care leadership.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What are some of your top priorities as you come into this new role?

My initial focus — so I’m almost 90 days in now — is really centered around three areas: It’s about our people, our performance and then our potential. As we look at delivering the kind of experience that creates what our board chair often calls “raving fans” — those patients, their families, our referral partners and our employees who take every opportunity to tell others how great we are. We really want to be that employer, that provider of care that people want to share with other folks.

As we look to position the organization for growth, we have attractive markets here in the Midwest. We really want to look at what are those opportunities to expand through our market density that we already have, but then, also, how we can add from an M&A perspective to those markets to expand those overall services.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Regarding the M&A, do you have a sense of how that will be weighted? Would it be more towards the hospice arena or some of your other business lines?

Our focus on it will be twofold, including expanding our home health opportunity. Our true focus, especially over these next probably six to 12 months, will really be in our hospice footprint expansion. We’ve got several acquisitions in the hospice space that we’ll be announcing in the back half of the year.

Why this emphasis on the hospice component of the business?

When you really look from a diversification of revenue standpoint and the expansion of the care arenas, it gives us the natural continuum of care. It truly is, because we have great referral source relationships, and so we want to be able to service these patients in the right setting at the right time. So it’s really a natural progression of our overall footprint and our ability to service those communities.

What are the major headwinds and tailwinds you see in the hospice space, and perhaps in your markets right now?

So we all know about a lot of the regulatory pieces that are going on today, but I think stepping back from that a bit, workforce shortages continue to remain one of our most significant issues, so that we can have the providers that we need in order to deliver the care. Recruiting and retaining nurses, aides, and clinical leaders continues to require substantial focus for us.

Also, when we talk about some of the tailwinds, there’s the opportunity to utilize technology to allow the clinicians to spend more time with their patients and less time on documentation. I think when you look at some of the ongoing reimbursement pressure and the regulatory complexity, especially in the M&A space, we have to make sure that we’re spending a significant amount of time really evaluating not only does this entity fit from a culture perspective. But from an assumption of any outstanding regulatory issues, or anything that could even be perceived as such. I think we’ve got to really double down on those things.

We talked a little bit about M&A. What kind of other plans do you have for growing the organization?

When we look at where our markets are strategically; the Chicago market, the Detroit market, Kansas City, St. Louis, really across the Midwest; we have broad opportunities to sit not just in the metroplexes but in those rural-adjacent areas.

So, as we look at organically expanding what our footprint looks like, we can branch out and really improve that overall access to care for patients that maybe are in some of those more rural areas, but really focusing on how we can expand those service lines. It could be adding personal care, whether it be partnering with the [U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)], but how can we expand the great care that our clinicians deliver today in the markets where we already service and just do more of what we do in a better fashion.

What are the most important lessons you’ve learned over the years about health care leadership?

I have learned that sustainable success truly starts with your culture and people. Everybody says that, but in health care, in most businesses, it’s absolutely true. When our team understands the mission, they feel supported, and we give them the tools that they need to succeed. Performance follows.

If we’re making all of our strategic decisions answering just the simple question of does this improve the care for our patients and family, and if it does, it’s usually the right direction, and performance will typically follow.

I’ve also learned the importance of balancing growth with discipline. Growth is fun and exciting, but if we grow and we don’t have that strong operational foundation, then our quality, our financial accountability, rarely creates long-term value. Growth for the sake of growth is not the right thing to do.

As we can build density, so that our clinicians don’t have to travel so far, we can build different pods, and so they have a better satisfaction. Our patients like a sense of community, because they know the clinicians who are delivering their care in their community. It makes sense for us, from a care delivery and a quality of life standpoint, for our clinicians to expand for those reasons, not just to say that we’ve got more pins on a map, or that we have a bigger census.

Another piece, I stepped back from the industry for the past year, when my mother got sick unexpectedly. She was very young, never had any health problems and was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer out of the blue. So experiencing the hospice arena from a totally different seat was a very different perspective for me. Experiencing it as the family and watching hospice care through that lens really gave me a whole different viewpoint.