Service Line Specialization Differentiates Home Care Providers, Drives Referrals And Investment

As competition intensifies in the home care industry, providers can get stuck in a “sea of sameness.” Home care providers are turning to specialty service lines as a key differentiation strategy.

Specialized service lines can make a provider more attractive to referral partners and investors, on top of helping them stand out from the crowd, industry experts said at Home Health Care News’ Capital+Strategy event. However, providers must demonstrate substantive programming and operate comprehensive training programs and robust education strategies.

“The joke in Florida is there are more home care agencies than there are service stations in this state,” Ralph Laughton, CEO of Heart, Body & Mind Home Care, said. “In about 2020 to 2021, we decided that we need to have meaningful differentiation in the agency in order to grow and scale. For that reason, we chose Alzheimer’s, dementia and Parkinson’s care.”

Fort Myers, Florida-based Heart, Body & Mind Home Care offers personal care, companion care and hospital discharge services throughout Florida.

Specialty service lines are relatively uncommon, although many providers tout extensive lists of such programs on their websites, which may not be substantive, according to Laughton. Still, he identifies a burgeoning trend for private duty home care agencies to specialize in Alzheimer’s and dementia care.

Implementing a new service line

Once providers have decided to implement a new service line, they must establish training programs for caregivers; however, providers’ strategies for training and certification differ. 

For a franchise operation, expanding into a new service line presents specific challenges, according to Rich Paul, chief operating officer of SYNERGY HomeCare.

“We have to do a little more coaxing sometimes,” he said. “We’ve focused on three things. We focused on creating materials to enhance the services we provide to the client. How we support the family was a big component of what we did. And the third area of focus was, how do we train caregivers so that they really can provide quality care?”

Tempe, Arizona-based SYNERGY operates over 240 in-home senior care franchises in about 550 territories nationwide. Its specialty programs include memory care, Parkinson’s care, cancer care, maternal care and total well-being.

Creating educational materials for franchise partners allowed them to become subject matter experts in a particular specialty, allowing them to share information with their communities, Paul said. This tactic allowed SYNERGY to gain additional market share, he added.

SYNERGY’s caregivers are not all trained in all of the organization’s specialty programs. Instead, the training programs offer workers different career pathways.

“Ideally, you would have a bench of caregivers,” Paul said. “A few would specialize in memory care, a few in cancer care, a few in maternal care, a few in disability care. Then you can pull from that bench when needed, based on the needs of the client.”

As an independent agency, Heart, Body & Mind Home Care took a different approach to implementing specialty service lines.

Laughton developed a training structure and implemented it over the course of two years. All of the agency’s approximately 140 caregivers received training from the Parkinson’s Foundation and became certified dementia providers, working with resources including the National Council of Certified Dementia Practitioners and dementia expert Teepa Snow.

“What that allowed us to do is teach our caregivers right, and not just rely on online training, but [to] buy into the philosophy that we wanted to specialize, embed that in the culture of the agency, and then provide that training to the caregivers, not just virtually, but hands-on, because they’re in the homes by themselves,” Laughton said.

The benefits of specialized care

Standing out with well-developed specialty programs can increase the value of a provider to their potential referral and investors.

Private equity firm NexPhase Capital acquired SYNERGY in January, and product differentiation was part of its presentation during the transaction process.

“What we really wanted to illustrate through specialization is breaking away from the sea of sameness,” Paul said.

Operating real, in-depth specialty solutions, as opposed to just a line on a website, can also make a home care provider more attractive to referrers, Paul said.

“With all of the programs we’ve developed, we’ve created different types of guides, if you will, that we’ve been able to take out to referral partners,” Paul said. “We go to hospitals, we provide a discharge planning guide for home care to social workers and discharge planners. Referral partners tend to like the materials we develop, it makes their life a little bit easier.”

To demonstrate that an organization’s specialty programs are substantive, providers must present referral partners with proof to back their claims up, Paul said, including that caregivers are certified in certain conditions or service areas and franchise partners are educated.

Heart, Body & Mind Home Care also shares outcomes with referral sources, along with client satisfaction surveys.

Joining associations and including logos on providers’ websites can also lend a provider increased credibility.

“We joined national associations, so the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America and the Parkinson’s Foundation in New York,” Laughton said. “We wanted access to not only their educational material, but we wanted to credential ourselves in the agency. That was important.”

Establishing credible specialty programs will likely only become more important for the home care industry.

Looking to the future, demand for home-based specialty care programs will continue to rise as the home care industry matures and hospital stays become shorter, Paul said.

“Home care is only a 20-year-old industry,” Paul said. “It’s pretty young. So there’s a lot of opportunity, in my opinion, for innovation and creativity and to really kind of define what the future of this industry looks like.”

The post Service Line Specialization Differentiates Home Care Providers, Drives Referrals And Investment appeared first on Home Health Care News.