Home Helpers Home Care announced Monday that it’s rolling out a new service offering to fill care gaps and reduce preventable hospital admissions.
The private equity-backed franchiser’s rollout comes as more non-medical home care organizations boost their care capabilities to better serve potential payer and referral sources. Home Helper had spent much of the past two years testing and developing the new service offering, officially branded as “Cared-4,” CEO Emma Dickison told Home Health Care News.
“In-home care has been around for a long time: the concept of being able to help support individuals with their activities of daily living, helping them live a more independent lifestyle for as long as possible,” Dickison said. “However, we were looking around and saying, ‘You know, there’s more to it than this.’”
Headquartered in Cincinnati, Home Helpers and its network of local franchise owners deliver personal care, nutrition, companionship and other services to more than 1,000 U.S. communities. The company currently has “right around” 310 franchise agreements overall, according to Dickison.
Chicago-based PE firm RiverGlade Capital acquired H.H. Franchising Systems Inc. — the parent company that operates Home Helpers — in April.
Essentially, Cared-4 is a customizable, comprehensive package that Home Helpers clients can bundle alongside their traditional home care services. The goal of the new program, Dickison explained, is to make sure seniors have access to the necessary tools to stick to care plans and avoid key health risks in the home.
About 62% of all hospital readmissions for seniors are preventable, according to the American Geriatric Society. The top-four risks for readmission are falls, medication problems, nutritional deficiencies and failure to follow care plans following discharge.
“It’s the people who are at risk for falling or can’t manage their medication,” Dickison said. “They may have trouble with wellness with meals. We wanted to figure out a way to take and broaden that continuum of care and solve for those pain points for families.”
An industry trend
Several other home care giants have similarly launched dedicated programs to address hospital readmissions or care gaps in the past couple of years.
The Omaha, Nebraska-based Right at Home, for example, offers “RightTransitions,” a service to streamline communication between providers and support clients with meals, transportation and additional needs. Meanwhile, the Cincinnati-based FirstLight Home Care runs its “Readmission Rescue” program.
While such initiatives have been around for some time now, their importance has only grown following the COVID-19 emergency, Dickison noted.
“Cared-4 is an integral part of our plan,” she said. “We think it is very different from anything anyone else is doing in our space.”
If Home Helpers clients are likely to have trouble with medication adherence, they could include Direct Link monitoring technology as part of their Cared-4 package. Direct Link’s tech tools can also assist with fall detection and vital-sign monitoring.
If clients are prone to forgetting to drink, eat or exercise, they could also schedule regular check-in calls under Cared-4. Simple calls just to say “hello” can also be arranged, Dickison added.
“Adding wellness calls on days when caregivers aren’t in the home is important,” she said. “Most clients don’t need 24/7 in-person care. For those that don’t, [check-in calls] can be a reassurance for families and themselves — that they’re well, that they’ve had their meals, that they’ve done all of the things that they need to to stay healthy.”
The cost for Cared-4 varies depending on which services are included. Regardless of what’s included in the bundle, however, Cared-4 clients ultimately receive just one bill.
“We’ve developed it so that our agencies that are delivering the care can price it as a bundled package,” Dickison said. “As the client, you’re going to get an invoice for one thing.”
A year ‘unlike any other’
The roughly two-year pilot of Cared-4 took place in 21 strategic markets. Generally, it yielded positive feedback across discharge planners, geriatric care managers and continuing care community directors, according to Home Helpers.
“Readmissions unfortunately occur all too often with patients 65 and up, even when the initial emergency department visit was for something relatively minor,” Cynthia Gill, a nurse practitioner at Mills Peninsula Medical Center who participated in the Cared-4 pilot, said in a statement. “We talk with patients and family members about thoroughly following discharge and medication instructions. Patients who have a highly-trained and well-informed support system in place, like what I’ve seen with the Home Helpers Cared-4 program, means stricter adherence to the care plan and a likely better outcome for the patient.”
Following Monday’s announcement, Home Helpers will expand Cared-4 across its national footprint.
In addition to riding the momentum of Cared-4, Home Helpers has also been lifted by the rising demand for home-based care, Dickison said.
At the end of Q4 2020, Home Helpers was up about 18% in terms of system-wide revenue compared to the same period in 2019. In the first quarter of this year, the home care company was up 12% compared to Q1 2020.
“Last year was a year unlike any other that we’ve seen. Our sector, in general, was thriving,” the CEO said. “We’re an organization that has been around for 24 years now. We had good growth to begin with, and that has just continued. We’ve also seen a nice increase in those who are interested in Home Helper Home Care as a business opportunity, wanting to open agencies in markets that we aren’t servicing today.”
Companies featured in this article:
