Based in Dallas, VitalCaring provides home health and hospice care to patients in the Southern U.S., covering Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.

Constant Therapy is a digital health company. Its technology enhances the effectiveness of cognitive, speech and language therapy while also increasing access to and reducing the cost of these therapies, according to the company.

The Constant Therapy app uses AI technology to offer personalized exercises that aid in rebuilding cognitive and speech function for individuals recovering from stroke or traumatic brain injury, as well as those living with aphasia, dementia or other neurological conditions. A team of neuroscientists at Boston University developed the app.

“The pilot program was launched to harness the power of technology to elevate the quality of in-home therapy and alleviate the burden on families and caregivers of patients with cognitive disorders,” Janice Riggins, VitalCaring’s chief clinical officer, told Home Health Care News. “The initiative was driven by several key objectives, including enhancing cognitive abilities to improve physical functioning, enabling patients to age in place more effectively, collecting data to support medical necessity and tailor interventions more precisely, and expediting the patient’s journey toward regaining independence safely within their homes.”

The pilot took place from October 2023 to May 2024 and involved 52 patients aged 54 to 92. The patients had various primary diagnoses, including cerebral infarction, brain tumors, dementia (including Alzheimer’s disease), Parkinson’s disease, encephalitis, encephalopathy and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Patient performance was assessed using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment/MoCA and the Saint Louis University Mental Status/SLUMS cognitive screening.

The program included various exercises to improve auditory and visual memory, reading comprehension, speech, attention, problem-solving and visuospatial processing.

“While the primary goal for patients with chronic diseases is often to maintain cognitive function or slow its decline, we observed more gains in functional cognition, and caregivers reported more social and physical activity gains than anticipated,” Riggins said.

Patients in the program showed statistically significant cognitive improvements, including improvement by at least one cognitive level and achievement of normal cognitive function by discharge, according to Riggins.

“Success in the program required both the patient and caregiver to demonstrate a willingness and ability to comply with the recommended regimen,” she said. “Ideally, patients had access to a device compatible with the app to maximize results during and beyond therapy visits, ensuring continued progress post-discharge.”

Patients’ ability to independently access Constant Therapy’s therapeutic exercises at home has proven valuable to clinician-supervised therapy, Riggins noted. The VitalCaring Cognitive Care pilot program aimed to determine how additional therapy tools could speed up recovery and maximize cognitive functioning for VitalCaring patients with dementia-related diseases and those recovering from stroke or other brain injuries. On average, each patient in the pilot could access an additional 11 hours of digital therapy independently.

“This program equips our clinicians with an additional resource to complement their skilled interventions, maximizing patient success,” Riggins said. “It enables us to support our patients longer in their goal to age in place.”

Following the pilot, VitalCaring plans to explore more opportunities to expand this initiative across its network.

“We’ve already begun training clinicians throughout our organization and are committed to providing this valuable resource to all patients who can benefit from it,” she said.

The post VitalCaring Pilot Program Shows Promising Results For Cognitively Impaired Patients  appeared first on Home Health Care News.

In the meantime, Canopy – a manufacturer of wearable safety technology for health care workers – has announced an expansion of its platform to help with those plans and to keep home-based caregivers safe.

Specifically, the company has launched Canopy Go, which is geared toward direct care workers visiting client or patient homes. 

Founded in 2019 and based in Palo Alto, California, Canopy designs technology to maintain the safety and security of health care workers.

“For the last five years, we have focused primarily on protecting staff inside the four walls of a hospital,” Canopy Founder and CEO Shan Sinha told Home Health Care News. “Canopy Protect works with a complete package of hardware and software that we deploy as part of an end-to-end service that includes all the work required to roll this program out to all staff.”

According to Sinha, the company is expanding rapidly. In the last four and a half years, it has grown to protect 200,000 people nationwide.

“We’ve learned, in working with our customers, that there is a huge amount of anxiety when caregivers go outside the four walls of an organization,” Sinha said. “People feel disconnected when entering environments where they have little to no control and are out of their organization’s security range.”.

Finding a need to expand outside the confines of the hospital building, the company introduced Canopy Go for home care workers.

“Canopy Go is a set of capabilities built on top of the Canopy Protect platform and deployed at a scale that gives home care workers a way to use a wearable button to gain access to support if they encounter a dangerous situation,” Sinha said.

Pressing the safety button puts caregivers in touch with a network of dispatchers who connect them to local law enforcement and facilitate a coordinated response with organization security.

“With a click of the button, the staff member’s ID and exact GPS location are discretely shared with the security team, enabling timely and effective intervention,” he explained.

Sinha sees an indirect benefit of caregiver retention for those using technology like Canopy Go.

“It becomes a strategic tool for leaders to invest in their workforce and to use in recruiting efforts,” he said. “It’s a symbol of all the ways that health care organizations are protecting and supporting staff and gives them a reason to believe in the organization they work for.”

Further, Sinha sees wearable technology as enhancing patient care by reassuring caregivers that their organization is always in contact and monitoring their safety and security.

“Wearable safety is almost like another level of personal protective equipment (PPE),” Sinha said. “Every health care worker will wear something like this in the future. Individuals will show up to work with much less anxiety that they might encounter an incident, and by reducing this stress, they can focus on caring for their patient.”

The post ‘Like Another Layer Of PPE’: Safety Technology Company Expands Into Home-Based Care appeared first on Home Health Care News.

Top home health leaders maintain that they’re operating in a space filled with “tons of opportunity.”

Payment uncertainty and other contemporary operating dynamics can muddy the waters, but there’s a way through those challenges, those leaders believe.

“I’m going to sound delusional,” Pinnacle Home Care CEO Shane Donaldson told me on stage last week at Home Health Care News’ FUTURE conference. “But I think [the home health industry] is in a great place for the future.”

At the conference, many of the same talking points were hit: Medicare Advantage (MA), fee-for-service rate cuts and staffing.

But providers are on the brink of their third straight year of rate cuts, and are about a decade into significant MA penetration in most cases. The staffing situation ebbs and flows, and providers are used to that, too.

As I talked to home health leaders in one-on-ones and on stage last week, I filled a whole page of notes related to what providers were bullish on.

Donaldson is bullish on the entire industry. Other leaders, too, are bullish – and offered specifics on where they feel like they can score some ‘wins’ in the near-term future to keep their patients happy and their margins healthy.

Those notes, quotes and other takeaways from last week’s FUTURE conference in Nashville, Tennessee, are the topic of this week’s exclusive, members-only HHCN+ Update.

Tons of opportunity

Pinnacle Home Care is one of the largest home health providers in the state of Florida. The New York-based HCS-Girling recently acquired Pinnacle, as both companies look to accelerate their growth goals.

At some point, Donaldson said that he believes HCS-Girling – along with Pinnacle – will have a home-based care footprint all along the East Coast.

Donaldson believes that home health providers will have the ability to optimize operations so much over the next few years that CMS will have to again consider large cuts to payment. He said it would be a “good problem to have.”

“I have a belief that in the not-too-distant future, if we take advantage of the current technologies, when we submit our cost reports, the problem we will have is that our margins are too high,” Donaldson said. “With artificial intelligence, robotic process automation, predictive analytics – all of these things that we have at our fingertips now are going to make life so much easier.”

Donaldson was essentially suggesting that margins will improve so much because of newly available technology that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will again feel the need to chop rates.

Even if that sounds “delusional” – as Donaldson warned it would – many providers feel the same about certain technology advancements.

Take the aforementioned issues plaguing home health care. Scheduling is the leading cause of turnover in the industry, and there’s now AI solutions to address that. That improves retention, and, in turn, staffing. The same goes for AI that helps reduce clinicians’ documentation time.

Predictive analytics can help better manage patients with chronic conditions, which will help in the Home Health Value-Based Purchasing (HHVBP) and in value-based arrangements with other payers.

Those are just a few examples. And, of course, it won’t just be that easy.

But nearly every vendor was enthusiastic about these new offerings at the conference. This time, their enthusiasm was matched by providers.

By driving down operating costs, providers will also be better able to take on MA members that come with a lower – or currently non-existent – margin. Compassus CEO Mike Asselta suggested on stage that providers needed to go through some “maturation” before realizing all of the opportunity that lies ahead of them.

That mostly had to do with presenting value to payers, however.

In that arena, providers are already figuring out ways to better deal with payers, even if a better way is walking away from agreements entirely.

“I would suggest that providers really look at their [payer] strategy,” Interim HealthCare COO Rexanne Domico also said on stage. “What are the regional opportunities? What are other national opportunities? Where can you find that upside that’s not necessarily wholly dependent upon the big managed care providers? There’s some opportunity that’s still out there.”

Almost every provider still agrees that working with health plans in home health care is not easy.

But, anecdotally, providers told me that they’ve had a much better go at it when working with regionally focused plans.

“Some of our best partners are those regional partners,” Well Care Health COO Rebecca Higbee said on stage. “Those local partners where you can speak to the actual decision makers of the plan.”

Oftentimes, within national health plans, the decision makers on home health rates are siloed from the head decision makers. The rate setters are most interested in keeping costs down, while the head decision makers may see more home health access as a better long-term strategy.

That disconnect leads to snags in negotiations between national MA plans and home health providers.

“It’s really difficult when you’re speaking with large payers,” Higbee continued. “You’re not going to change their mind about the directives that they’ve been given. You’re not going to change their mind about the plan that they have laid out for the next quarter. But you can speak to the medical director of a local plan and really get their buy-in, in terms of the quality and the return for them.”

Domico also said that she believes there’s room for providers to get “more creative” in how they approach different payers, specifically around the presentation of home health care’s value.

A slew of leaders told me that they were encouraged by Enhabit’s (NYSE: EHAB) termination of its contract with UnitedHealthcare earlier this month.

Providers want to work with big payers, but they also need better rates – at least for now.

“I would just say that my heart was warm the other day when Enhabit walked away from the table with UHC,” Donaldson said. “I think that we’ll look back on that as being a significant event.”

The post ‘Opportunity Is Still Out There’: AI, Regional Payers And The Other Factors Exciting Home Health Leaders appeared first on Home Health Care News.

More people than ever want to age in place, but payment and staffing concerns linger in the larger home-based care space. This emphasizes the need for scalable, efficient, high-quality solutions to meet the growing service demand. As a result, artificial intelligence  is emerging as a crucial tool. 

AI is a multifaceted field focused on creating systems that mimic and augment human intelligence. With AI comes the ability to learn, reason and solve problems. However, AI models rely on large data sets to learn, train and evolve, which can lead to privacy concerns.

“Home care agencies are actively reaching out to us to learn how we can help them care better and grow faster amidst caregiver shortages and rising costs,” Sensi.AI Co-Founder and CEO Romi Gubes told Home Health Care News.

Sensi.AI is an artificial intelligence company based in Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel, with offices in the United States. It uses audio technology to detect unusual events in a client’s home and relays the information to the clinical care team. For a relatively young company, it is expanding quickly. The company raised $31 million in Series B funding earlier this year.

This high demand indicates that the home care industry is shifting from a heavily human-dependent model to one that will regularly leverage AI. Agencies that are feeling the pressure of caregiver shortages see AI as a necessary solution, according to Gubes.

“Sensi allows us to take care of more clients, especially those needing around-the-clock care,” Care Around the Block Chief Operating Officer Casey Rausin said. “Without it, providing 24/7 coverage for a client would require five to seven people, which is hard to staff. We can now identify and prioritize when a senior truly needs a human caregiver, and for the rest, we supplement with Sensi as a safety net.” 

Care Around the Block is a Knoxville, Tennessee-based provider of professional care management, home care and dementia care services.

AI can potentially transform the home-based care space by enhancing community-level care, connecting vulnerable populations with providers earlier and delivering tailored support for managing chronic conditions at home. Home care providers are uniquely positioned to act as proactive responders, addressing client needs before they escalate into crises that may lead to repeated hospitalizations.

A question of privacy

While AI offers numerous potential benefits and opportunities to provide better care, alleviate staffing shortages, and aggregate and analyze personal data, concerns arise regarding privacy and keeping that data out of the hands of the wrong people.

Gubes said that her company takes proactive measures to educate its customers, ensuring they fully understand how the technology works to address privacy concerns before they arise. She also noted that audio-based technology provides privacy advantages by avoiding invasive video surveillance, while still being able to focus on specific sounds or patterns that may indicate the need for intervention.

Yet, audio technology does not completely circumvent privacy concerns.

“We work with some AI providers that are using audio monitoring,” Angelo Spinola, the home health, home care and hospice chair at the Polsinelli law firm, told HHCN. “Some privacy laws are triggered, sometimes at a state level, that require consents and notices. Normally, you want a privacy policy and consent from the client, caregiver and also something for visitors.” 

Spinola advised that there should be some notice when other people in the home haven’t consented to being monitored and the device is passively monitoring those individuals.

“Then there’s the scope of that notice,” he said. “I think that is important as well. People need to know why they are being monitored. It may initially be intended to improve the quality of care, but if there are purposes related to the caregiver or employee, that should also be indicated.”

As AI plays a larger role in health care, it’s essential to pay attention to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). However, incorporating AI while ensuring HIPAA compliance can be challenging. AI applications need vast amounts of data for training, including sensitive health information. It is an essential but difficult task to ensure this data is properly de-identified to protect patient privacy while still being useful for AI.

Health care organizations using this technology should carefully work with developers to understand how these tools work to ensure they meet HIPAA standards. In addition, it is crucial to regularly update policies and procedures, implement strong security measures and monitor AI tools for compliance issues.

Technology shouldn’t replace the human element

While technology is undoubtedly an important tool in helping caregivers complete their jobs more efficiently, it is still only a tool. The humans behind the technology should still take ownership of how it is used and what safeguards are put in place.

“I think everyone in health care is learning and evolving how they think about and use AI,” Bayada President and Chief Operating Officer Heather Helle told HHCN. “AI has tremendous promise in application, not just for making the back-end office more efficient, but also in helping us think about streamlining clinical workflows.”

However, according to Helle, AI should be seen as a co-pilot for a caregiver or clinician in the home.

“When you look at the pace of adoption and the pace of change that AI is helping usher in, it’s much faster than we’ve seen typically in health care,” Helle said. “We have to be thoughtful about the risks that come with that and ensure we have the appropriate guardrails and manage that.”

The post Monitoring The Risks That Come With Using Artificial Intelligence In Home-Based Care appeared first on Home Health Care News.

Three years after Honor acquired Home Instead, its goal is not to grow through franchise expansion or acquisition. Instead, it’s trying to find ways for current locations to double, triple and quadruple their current censuses.

In part, it plans to open up that opportunity through advanced technology, including artificial intelligence.

During a recent long and wide-ranging conversation with Honor CEO Seth Sternberg, we talked about how exactly the company would take these forward-facing tools, apply them to home care and successfully balloon home care owners’ businesses.

“We have no plan around opening 100 new offices or 1,000 new offices, right? The footprint is pretty good,” Sternberg told me. “The thing that we need to do is give the tools to our owners to be able to double, triple, quadruple their existing businesses. That looks like the right owners, with the right tool sets, that let them serve much larger swaths of the market.”

In 2024, Home Health Care News has finally cut through some of the noise around AI. We’ve got providers on the record talking about what pain points, specifically, they are planning to attack with AI solutions.

The conversation with Sternberg was a continuation of that.

Now that Honor and Home Instead franchisees are on better terms, there’s a level of excitement from each party on what will come next.

What comes next, particularly around AI, is the topic of this week’s exclusive, members-only HHCN+ Update.

Home Instead’s growth

Home Instead has over 1,100 locations across the world, and the largest home care footprint in the U.S.

Even then, it owns just about 5% of the market.

“Traditionally, home care has simply not scaled on a location by location basis, it just has never happened,” Sternberg said. “Since we started Honor, the whole theory was that you could leverage technology to actually enable locations to scale with high quality, to break the barriers that had always kept this to a completely fragmented industry.”

Leading up to the turn of the decade, prior to 2020, AI was generally thought of as a synonym for machine learning – “using information from the past to predict the future,” Sternberg said.

Now, generative AI – which ChatGPT utilizes, for instance – has opened up more doors when it comes to AI application.

“The wave of technology that’s coming around creating just better client experiences, better employment experiences – it’s just going to be massive,” Sternberg said. “And the level of technology investment into industries that previously have not had that kind of investment, that’s effectively going to shock everyone. Because generative AI uniquely applies to hyper human situations.”

The home care industry is no doubt one of those that has not been on the cutting edge of technology over the years, a factor that could have played a role in the friction between Honor and Home Instead franchisees post-acquisition.

Honor wants to change that now, though.

“We’re really focused on making sure that we stay ahead of the technology curve that’s happening,” Sternberg continued. “And I would argue that everyone else in home care has to be doing the same with their businesses, too. If they’re not fundamentally focused on the entire transformation of their business because of where technology is and where it’s going, they should be.”

Technology generally makes services “better” and “cheaper,” according to Sternberg.

After home care billing rates skyrocketed during COVID-19, home care leaders have been scrambling to mitigate the consequences of that.

Agencies can charge more to pass the costs onto the client, but that could end up in a loss of market share, and also many Americans with no place to go for home care. The ones that can’t pay out of pocket, but don’t qualify for Medicaid’s home- and community-based services.

“To solve all the myriad challenges to deliver home care cheaper is a very, very deep tech problem,” Sternberg said. “But it’s one that I’m definitely very excited about. And I think that you can use the kind of technology that we build to do [solve that].”

The goal is to create better jobs and lower costs for services.

On top of that, in a franchise system, you have to reach those goals without decreasing owners’ bottom lines.

Applying AI

Sternberg told me that Honor has 22 distinct AI algorithms working in the Home Instead network right now, all of which interface with each other.

I asked him if he thought that staffing would be the No. 1 pain point AI would address in home care. Not exactly, he explained.

Because health care – and home care – are so complicated, there are pain points everywhere. One client’s issue with a provider could be traceable to a back-office error completely off the radar. In essence, every issue creates another one. And that’s why viewing staffing in a silo is as problematic as addressing a patient’s care in a siloed manner.

“I think, unfortunately, technology has to solve all the problems, and they are married,” Sternberg said. “We have distinct systems solving discrete problems. And then they kind of ladder up, so that a care pro ends up liking their job more, and then provides better care to a client.”

One tool compares franchise owners’ businesses to the rest of the network – on outcomes, recruiting, retention and other measures. Another finds every referral source within a market, and suggests which ones the owner should get in touch with. A similar tool finds where potential new caregivers are in that market.

These are also self-learning tools, which ideally improve the more they are put to use.

“We have a team that talks to [franchisees] and says, ‘Hey, we see this happening in your business, this tool is the one you really need to dive in on now,’” Sternberg said. “This tool is the next to enable you to grow even faster. It’s very much about understanding [each] business uniquely.”

The post Where Honor, Home Instead Want AI To Take Home Care appeared first on Home Health Care News.

After Honor acquired Home Instead in 2021, many Home Instead franchisees were not sold on the strategic direction they were given. They believed Honor’s model lacked a “proof of concept,” and were unwilling to alter operations to appease their new parent organization.

But, over the last few years, a lot of the friction between Honor and Home Instead franchisees has eroded.

Bill Mishkin, a Home Instead franchise owner with an agency in Melrose, Massachusetts, was one of the strongest voices advocating against looming changes coming by way of Honor. He helmed the Independent Association of Home Instead Franchisees, which was made up by at least 253 owners and 325 franchise locations.

There were a handful of core gripes that Mishkin and other franchisees had, much of which had to do with Honor’s technological ethos.

“Technology companies want things to fit into a box,” Mishkin told Home Health Care News in 2022. “They want specific numbers of hours. They want specific duties that people need to perform. And our client care can change day to day and hour to hour. And we’re really afraid of losing that most-important high touch.”

Home Instead is the largest home care franchise in the U.S. Its network includes over 1,100 locations across 13 countries, as well as more than 100,000 caregivers. On its end, Honor is a home care technology company that has raised hundreds of millions since its founding in 2014.

In June of 2023, Honor also laid off 15% of Home Instead’s HQ staff, including many long-time Home Instead employees. Nearly two years after the acquisition, the turbulence remained.

Of late, a few moves from Home Instead – and likely years of building trust with hundreds of franchisees – have begun to pay off, however.

Mishkin told HHCN that recent developments have turned a Northeastern cynic like himself into an optimist regarding the future of the Home Instead brand under Honor.

“One thing that a lot of us owners really saw is that Honor has brought Home Instead some incredibly bright and talented people, whether from Amazon or people with strong franchise experience,” he said. “The recent discussion seminars we’ve had are really informative and really next-level compared to what we’ve seen from HQ in the past. I was really impressed. And I’m from the Northeast, I’m cynical by nature.”

Those new additions to the Honor/Home Instead team came shortly after the aforementioned layoffs, and included: Linn Free, who was named senior vice president of operations at Home Instead; Stefan Haney, who was named senior vice president of growth technology; and Mark Privett, who was named vice president of design.

Free comes from Yum Brands (NYSE: YUM), where he led KFC Global, while Haney and Privett come from Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN).

Additionally, Mishkin said that Honor has now been “getting their hands dirty,” bouncing around from office to office to ensure Home Instead owners’ voices are heard.

“They’re seeing what goes on in offices, they’re visiting offices, they’re going into homes,” he said. “I think that the realization is that they just can’t come and give you ideas, they need to understand what the business is and why it’s so challenging. And now I think they’ve done a pretty good job of taking that deep dive.”

Honor CEO on the turnaround

Honor CEO Seth Sternberg agrees with Mishkin’s sentiment. He thinks that the turnaround has come from “showing” and not just “telling.”

He also believes that Honor still had a lot to learn about the Home Instead brand, even after the extensive due diligence it conducted prior to the acquisition.

“When we initially bought Home Instead, we obviously did due diligence, but we didn’t know all the things,” Sternberg recently told HHCN. “As we came to understand the actual state of the business – from the perspective of people who run businesses with a lot of data and processing technology – there was just some pretty fundamental blocking and tackling that we felt we had to put in place just to literally understand where things were at, to even have the data flows to be able to analyze what has happened. And to the franchisees, that doesn’t feel like progress. That feels like, ‘Time is passing, and I’m not seeing anything.’”

That blocking and tackling took “about a year,” according to Sternberg. Then it took additional time to instrument the business, to start receiving the information it needed. After that, it was finally time to create solutions and tools that will help fix problems that were recognized.

“I think what the owners have now seen, because we finally had enough time to do it all, is tools released that they just never knew they needed,” Sternberg said. “But now that they have them, they’re like, ‘Wow, that’s amazing. That actually materially improves my life, and improves my business as a franchisee.’ That’s really the biggest thing. Instead of telling them what we are going to do, franchisees are now seeing what we are actually releasing to them. And that’s just a huge difference.”

The recognizable payoff helps, and so does the fact that Mishkin and and other franchisees have met with Honor leaders to get on better terms.

Mishkin, for one, believes that data becoming more visible – and more actionable – will be a game changer.

“They keep coming up with more stuff, and more data for us to be able to work with,” he said. “And to be able to access it in a much easier format than what we’ve seen in the past. The hope is to have one dashboard where you can find all of your metrics in one place. They’re really working towards that. They’re definitely minimizing the amount of work that we have to do to get some of this information now, which is great.”

One example is the dashboards and reports that Honor is driving through Salesforce, which is the platform that most Home Instead franchisees are on.

Ultimately, Mishkin and Sternberg both believe that the Home Instead-Honor partnership has a chance at developing new solutions to the aging problem in the U.S. – ones that don’t exist today.

“We have no plan around opening 100 new offices or 1,000 new offices, right? The footprint is pretty good,” Sternberg said. “The thing that we need to do is give the tools to our owners to be able to double, triple, quadruple their existing businesses. That looks like the right owners, with the right tool sets, that let them serve much larger swaths of the market.”

The post ‘Showing, Not Telling’: How Honor Has Repaired Its Relationship With Home Instead Franchisees appeared first on Home Health Care News.

Villi’s on-demand platform connects individuals with caregivers around the clock, whether it’s a senior needing personal care services or a new mother requiring an extra hand.

“Rebranding to Villi wasn’t about procuring a new name or logo, but rather embracing what makes us unique and reinforcing our dedication to better serving our clients,” Mary Meeker, Villi’s national director, told Home Health Care News. “Our new name, born from the age-old expression ‘It takes a village,’ symbolizes the power of our community to support those who simply need a little help.”

Recently, in-home companion care models have become more popular, in part due to a shortage of caregivers and increased demand. Miami-based Papa announced unicorn status in 2021 with a similar business model. They use technology to connect older adults with “Papa Pals,” who provide companionship, technology assistance, meal preparation, light housework and similar services.

Villi’s in-home services are operated by the 35-year-old Maxim Healthcare Services Group. With an on-demand, 24/7 online platform, Villi connects clients with people from their local community, providing real-time information and assistance whenever and wherever the client needs it, according to the company.

“Villi’s user-friendly technology enables companion support to easily be scheduled from our web-based platform whenever the client needs our services,” Meeker said. “Clients can look at companion profiles, post jobs and chat with a Villi advisor. All our companions are properly vetted and interviewed. All Villi companions are employees and not independent contractors. Our clients can feel comfortable and confident knowing that our companions have been properly vetted, trained and committed to Villi’s mission.”

Villi does not require contracts. Hourly rates include liability insurance, fees for processing IRS tax paperwork, and the time and cost associated with intensive companion screening.

“The safety and well-being of our clients and companions is our top priority,” Meeker said. “All of our companions undergo a rigorous selection process including county, state and federal background checks and a behavioral-based interview. As Villi employees, they are fully vetted and insured, giving our clients greater peace of mind. If our clients have concerns at any time, they can always contact a Villi advisor. Likewise, our companions can report concerns to us directly, and if at any time they feel uncomfortable while at a client’s home, they can leave and report the incident.”

Villi currently serves the Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Fort Worth communities, with plans to expand to additional cities and states in the near future.

“In early 2025, we plan to expand Villi into Maryland and Northern Virginia,” Meeker said. “When looking to expand, we consider many factors, such as location, demographics and needs of the community, to name a few. Long term, we would like to operate Villi across the country.”

The post Maxim at Home Rebrands To Villi, Bets On In-Home Companion Care appeared first on Home Health Care News.

The company works with the likes of BrightStar Care, Home Instead, Visiting Angels, Griswold and Always Best Care, according to its website. It leverages audio technology to detect abnormal events in a senior’s home.

In 2022, the company raised $14 million in Series A funding. The most recent funding round was led by Zeev Ventures and Insight Partners. Existing investors Entrée Capital, Flint Capital, Jibe Ventures and Secret Chord Ventures also participated in the round.

“When our customers say that Sensi is more than just technology, that there is a heart behind it, we know we are on the right path,” Sensi.AI Co-Founder and CEO Romi Gubes said in a statement. “We are dedicated to ensuring every senior can age with dignity in the comfort of their own home, the place they love most. This funding from renowned investors will help us continue to innovate our product and scale our go-to-market strategy, bringing our vision to life.”

The dementia care expert Teepa Snow is an advisory board member at Sensi.AI. Her Positive Approach to Care program previously partnered with the company.

“We’re very excited because Sensi is this sort of audio awareness system. It has that level of awareness — what’s happening in that environment 24/7. It’s not really recording every second, it’s just noticing things,” Snow previously told Home Health Care News. “When it picks up on something that’s care related, or distress related or good care related, or an anomaly, then it records about 10 seconds of an interaction right around that. Then it creates a signal to the dashboard that says this has happened, and it could be an indication that something good or not good is going on.”

Sensi.AI is based in Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel, and also has offices in the United States. In addition to the aforementioned providers, it supports “over 80% of the largest home care providers in the U.S.,” according to the company.

Its technology extracts hundreds of insights on a senior’s well being, and that information is sent back to a clinical care team that includes social workers, occupational therapists, geriatric clinicians and nurses.

With staffing shortages persisting in home care, providers have recognized emerging technologies as one way to augment care staff in the home.

“When I came across Sensi, I immediately recognized the magnitude of the problem they were solving. It requires more than simply applying AI technology,” Oren Zeev, founding partner at Zeev Ventures, said in a statement. “I am confident that Sensi’s advanced audio AI technology along with their talented team will spearhead a transformation in the care ecosystem unlike anything seen before.”

Home-based care providers and AI

For years, home-based care provider leaders expressed their belief that AI solutions could ease pain points in the space.

Both home health and home care providers saw the opportunities to supplement staffing, or even to recruit or retain better. Home health providers also saw the opportunity to ease the documentation burden on clinicians, increasing efficiency, operations and retention rates.

Now, those solutions are actually beginning to be realized. Home care providers are partnering with platforms like Sensi.AI, and they’re also developing their own AI solutions.

Take the Phoenix-based Devoted Guardians as an example. It has completely transformed its recruiting process through AI, ensuring applicants are always receiving timely responses from the company.

“The minute someone is engaging us on any of these platforms, we have an AI system that’s going to engage back — answer any question that they might have and really drive them to scheduling interviews — to really cut down on those ghosting problems that we’ve been all seeing over the last couple of years,” Devoted Guardians CEO Aaron Sinykin told HHCN earlier this year.

Home health providers have also come up with AI documentation tools like Apricot, which was launched by the home health CEO Trent Smith. Apricot can reduce documentation time for home health nurses by “up to 85%,” according to Smith.

“I just saw a solution to some problems that we had,” Smith said. “And I was fortunate to know people that could help me build it. We found a nail and then went and built a hammer for it, as opposed to building a hammer and looking for a nail.”

While many providers are now applying AI, they’re using it in a variety of ways. The support for Sensi.AI is just another example of the possibilities for the emerging technologies in both home care and home health care.

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Soon, one of the government-backed efforts to offer assistance to those organizations will end. The U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced Monday that its advanced and accelerated payment program tied to the cyberattack will end July 12.

“In the face of one of the most widespread cyberattacks on the U.S. health care industry, CMS promptly took action to get providers and suppliers access to the funds they needed to continue providing patients with vital care,” CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure said in a statement. “Our efforts helped minimize the disruptive fallout from this incident, and we will remain vigilant to be ready to address future events.”

Whenever something completely derails the operations of America’s health care ecosystem, CMS has the authority to grant advanced and accelerated payments to providers that are paid via Medicare or Medicaid.

Effectively, these types of programs function as a short-term loan, giving home-based care providers and others access to capital at a time when their books are in disarray.

“Launched in early March, the [Change Healthcare] payments were designed to ease cash flow disruptions experienced by some Medicare providers and suppliers, such as hospitals, physicians, and pharmacists, due to the unprecedented cyberattack that took health care electronic data interchange Change Healthcare offline in February,” CMS explained in a Monday announcement.

In total, Change-related accelerated payments have been issued to over 4,200 Part A providers, such as hospitals, totaling more than $2.55 billion.

CMS also issued 4,722 advance payments, totaling more than $717.18 million, to Part B suppliers, including doctors, non-physician practitioners and home health agencies, according to the agency.

Many of the providers that capitalized on these pre-payments have already made good on their loans. In fact, of the thousands of payments disrupted, 96% have already been recovered, CMS noted in its announcement.

“A lot of these players only need to find one hole in the boat to get in,” Ben DeBow, founder of Fortified, recently told Home Health Care News. “Once they’re in, they can navigate around. If you’re running on an unsupported legacy platform, then that is not under support anymore. That is a common way into a lot of organizations. Some recent ones came in on a company that were running Windows Server 2003. That’s a very old platform.”

Change Healthcare, a part of UnitedHealth Group (NYSE: UNH) subsidiary Optum, reported enterprise-wide connectivity issues in late February. Not long after, health care providers began experiencing technical difficulties.

On Feb. 26, a ransomware group took responsibility for the attack.

By March, CMS began offering relief to health care providers, and lawmakers began to call out UnitedHealth Group leaders for how they handled the situation. At the start of May, UnitedHealth Group CEO had to testify in front of Congress to answer questions about the cyberattack and his company’s response.

“This hack could have been stopped with cybersecurity 101,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said during the Senate Committee on Finance hearing.

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That’s according to a new survey from Vivalink, a digital healthcare solutions company that offers remote patient monitoring (RPM).

“Hospital at home is a very fast growing and a very high interest market segment, and we’re paying a lot of attention to that market,” Vivalink CEO Jiang Li told Home Health Care News.

The survey responses come from over 1,000 U.S.-based individuals who are 40 years and older.

One of the survey’s key findings is that 84% of respondents are interested in participating in hospital-at-home-related monitoring, rather than being monitored in the hospital, so that they can return to their home in a more timely manner.

Survey respondents’ overwhelming desire to receive care in their home wasn’t surprising, according to Li.

“Human beings really like the comfort of their home, and if they can get health care in a friendly and familiar environment — it’s much less stressful,” he said.

Indeed, the survey also found that 77% of respondents said they would trust a recommendation from a health care professional that directed them to utilize hospital-at-home-related monitoring.

Plus, among the respondents who tried hospital at home, 84% said that the experience with their program was positive.

Survey respondents also reported an easy user experience with devices that were part of their care plan. Specifically, 49% of respondents said that RPM devices are easy to use.

On the flip side, the 16% of respondents who were not likely to participate in hospital-at-home programs named issues with devices as a big reason for this.

Still, Li pointed out that user experience with devices is very dependent on the company the hospital-at-home program decides to partner with.

“If you step back and look at all the devices available on the market, I’ll say the device to device variation, in terms of the patient experience, varies a lot,” he said. “It really depends on the [care] service provider, and what kind of device they choose to give to a patient, that in turn will significantly impact the patient experience.”

The survey also found that the awareness of hospital at home was generally lower among older adults. In fact, only 42% of respondents aged 70 and older had heard of hospital-at-home programs, compared to 77% of respondents in their 40s.

Older adults were also less likely to participate in hospital-at-home programs. Only 11% of respondents said they had previously participated, while 66% of respondents in their 40s had been part of these programs.

People who live urban areas were also more likely to participate in hospital-at-home programs than their counterparts living in rural communities.

However, respondents living in urban areas were less likely to prefer completely remote primary care than those living in rural communities.

Factors such as the number of hospitalizations a person had also played a role in willingness to partake in hospital-at-home programs. Respondents that had three hospitalizations or more over the past 12 months were more interested in hospital-at-home programs than those who had two hospitalizations or less.

Li hopes that the type of data highlighted in this survey will move the needle in terms of pushing the extension of the Acute Hospital Care at Home waiver forward. 

“There’s a lot of data and evidence already exists supporting the case for extension, this is another data point for them to consider,” he said.

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