Home care providers are increasingly caring for clients with higher acuity or coming from shorter stays at rehabs — but growth-minded companies are still finding ways to expand their businesses.
Sustainable home care growth will depend on having sufficient trained caregivers, processes for matching clients with available payer options and data-driven relationships with referral partners, experts said on a recent Home Health Care News webinar.
“Ultimately, we’re looking to develop the relationships with the rehabs or directly coming out of a hospital,” Jake Brown, the CEO of Always Best Care, said during the webinar. “For us, to a certain extent, it’s less about the change and the timing of when it’s discharged and more about just being readily prepared to take the referral and begin care for them.”
In short, home care providers must be prepared to accept clients from any source and act as partners to referral sources, Brown said.
Rocklin, California-based Always Best Care primarily offers personal care and companionship services in 298 territories across 31 states and two provinces in Canada. Private equity firm NexPhase became Always Best Care’s majority investor in November.
For Jen Lentz, CEO of Avid Health at Home, being ready to accept any client includes having staff ready to advise on insurance options.
“We’ve had plenty of discharges come to us, and they don’t know who’s going to pay for our service, but they know that they need it,” Lentz said. “We’re helping them navigate how to access the [Veteran’s Assistance] home care benefit or a local grant program that can give them respite, whatever that looks like from a payer perspective.”
Chicago-based Avid Health at Home was formed through Havencrest Capital Management’s 2023 acquisition of For Papa’s Sake Home Care. The company provides personal care, private duty home health care and companion care in Illinois, North Carolina, Michigan, Kentucky and Ohio.
To meet the needs of an increase in hospital discharges, providers also must ensure they are staffed to meet the needs of an expanding client population. This involves local branches recruiting and training for growth — not just the population they are currently serving, Lentz said.
Both helping clients navigate their payer options and staffing for growth are essential to scaling and partnering with rehabs and hospitals, Lentz underlined.
Along with staffing for growth, providers must prepare existing staff to care for changing client acuity levels, according to Chloe O’Connor, the senior vice president of growth and performance at Help at Home.
“Somebody who has a little bit more frailty or less independence coming straight out of rehab could look and feel different than somebody who has dementia or Alzheimer’s, but who has been in their home for a long time,” O’Connor said. “It’s really about how you communicate and how you prepare your caregivers so that you can take on that volume and grow and develop a really successful partnership, so that those referral partners know that the quality of care is there.”
Chicago-based Help at Home offers home care services to 60,000 clients. As of January, the company operated 150 community hub locations across 11 states.
Building referral relationships
As providers adapt to changing client acuity, they must build strong relationships with referral partners to support growth.
Strong partnerships with partners look less like a referral relationship and more like shared accountability for clients in their homes, according to Lentz, with home care providers leveraging their rich knowledge of the clients they serve.
“We are the eyes and ears in a place that nowhere in the rest of the healthcare continuum can see,” she said. “A real partnership is one [where] the information flows. We see something, we say something, and then the health system or the payer actually has a channel to receive it and do something with it, closing that loop. I think as an industry, we have to earn that seat at the table.”
To earn that seat at the table, home care providers must be reliable, Lentz said, and then must prove their value by providing data and positive outcomes, while demonstrating caregiver retention and responsiveness.
The home care industry is at an inflection point when it comes to data and transparency, O’Connor said, due to the evolution of technology that allows providers to offer data and demonstrate outcomes.
“When we’re able to take [data to] payer partners who want to have a conversation that’s about more than just base-level service delivery, it elevates our industry and it elevates the role of a caregiver,” she said.
The partnership must flow both ways, Brown said, with providers demonstrating the value of services and referral partners also demonstrating that they help the partnership.