Alliance, Aetna, Missioncare Collective Partner With Home Health Providers To Improve Staff Retention

The National Alliance for Care at Home (the Alliance), Aetna Medicaid, a CVS Health (NYSE: CVS) company, and MissionCare Collective announced a partnership designed to improve retention and expand home health worker capacity.

Initially launching in Illinois, Louisiana and North Carolina, the pilot program includes collaboration and data-sharing between the organizations and the implementation of a MissionCare Collective workforce solution among a designated set of home health providers.

As part of the program, the Alliance, Aetna Medicaid and CVS plan to collect data from provider participants through MissionCare Collective’s CoachUp Care platform and meet regularly to evaluate data trends and take action where needed to address recruitment and retention challenges.

“The plan is to review the data quarterly to see what’s changing for these providers based on their recruitment and retention rates prior to implementation,” Kristen Wheeler, executive director of private-duty home care at the Alliance, told Home Health Care News. “Providers [currently using the platform] are seeing an increase of approximately 15% over a 90-day period, so it will be interesting to see if we observe similar retention statistics.”

Wheeler explained that providers often try to “recruit their way out of a retention problem.” However, data indicate that there won’t be enough caregivers available to meet the growing demand for care over the next decade, let alone in the years beyond.

“Recruiting is not going to be the answer,” she said. “We have to figure out a way to keep the people who are in care, in care and prevent them from leaving to work elsewhere.”

Retention is top of mind for Lisa King, senior vice president of operations at All Ways Caring HomeCare, which is participating in the pilot program in Illinois, Louisiana, and North Carolina.

“Our caregivers are the heart of what we do, but too often, they can earn more money in other industries,” she said in a statement. “We need innovative ideas and a scalable solution to retain home care workers.”

Louisville, Kentucky-based All Ways Caring HomeCare offers home care services to aging adults and individuals with disabilities across 21 states.

One of the program’s benefits is that it functions as a think tank for the Alliance, Aetna Medicaid and CVS, Wheeler said, bringing together leaders to improve their understandings of their teams’ perspectives and identify areas that may need revision.

“They are providers of various sizes and types, but everyone is dealing with the same underlying themes,” she said. “We discuss how we need to shift our thinking to ensure [caregivers] feel valued and have a sense of ownership as part of the team. We need to ensure they stick around.”

The providers announced as participating in the pilot program are:

• Illinois: Absolute Home Care Plus, All Ways Caring HomeCare, Family First Home Care, Interim Healthcare Services of Joliet, Inc., Sparta Community Hospital, UW Health Swedish American Hospital

• Louisiana: All Ways Caring HomeCare, Complete Home Health

• North Carolina: All Ways Caring HomeCare, Ally Home Care, Liberty Homecare and Hospice, Piedmont Home Care

The pilot also takes aim at a key problem for home health workers.

While direct care workers face challenges in meeting the increasing demand for home health care, they often struggle with their own health care coverage. MissionCare reports that 32% of caregivers rely on Medicaid, even as they provide essential care to Medicaid beneficiaries.

Using CoachUp Care, the pilot program seeks to understand the social care needs of Medicaid-eligible home health care workers and develop strategies that improve economic security, and create sustainable career pathways for Medicaid members working as direct care professionals.

“The direct care workforce is not only struggling to meet the rising demand for care but also to make ends meet,” Alliance CEO Dr. Steve Landers said in a statement. “By working together across our industry, we can advance strategies that directly support the economic security of home health care workers and provide a more durable solution to help expand the direct care sector, which is projected to add over one million new jobs between 2021 and 2031.”

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