Adding PDHC to your care management agency can significantly increase revenue
but it also involves several changes to your operations, marketing, hiring, and overall agency management. In the 2013 Care Management Benchmark Study, care managers who owned a home care agency made four times the revenue in-home care in 95% and in all cases made double their revenue.1 The process follows many of the same steps outlined in the previous sections on adding care management to PDHC agencies.
Merger Gives You Ultimate Control
The addition of PDHC staff gives you ultimate control of the care management process because you have control across the entire relationship with the client, from care managers to PDHC staff, if your client chooses PDHC. You do not have to depend on the integrity, safety, and reliability of outside care management agencies to deliver high-quality care to your customers.
However, this means adding a large burden of creating that safe, reliable PDHC staff yourself to those clients who are care management clients (i.e., all PDHC clients must have some level of care management). If you choose to accept PDHC clients who are not care management clients, don’t plan on these clients automatically becoming care management clients because families that start with PDHC alone tend to stick with PDHC only.
To change that, we suggest marketing internally to your PDHC clients using several case studies that show how care management can enhance the quality of PDHC; otherwise, families often opt for the lower-cost option of only PDHC— and assume you (as their agency) will provide care coordination and perhaps care management for free. You can also present care management services when the home care family is in a crisis like the care provider is burnt out and ready to unnecessarily going to place the elder, or when the elderly client needs to move because ( Move Management)
Market to your Existing Home Care Clients to Sell care management
We also suggest adding care management products that care managers can do successfully for home care clients like Home From the Hospital. If you have a home care clients who is facing hospitalization and your family is long-distance offer this care management product. Here a care manager can guide the client and family through pre and post-plus in the hospital to successfully help the family, who if long-distance needs a guide who is right on the ground to be the surrogate family member guiding the patient to a successful discharge home without readmission and working with a Medicare agency post-discharge. Adding other care management products to your new merged menu of services. This will be an effective tool in competing against PDHC agencies that will likely position themselves against your practice as a low-cost option. You need to be able to show the incremental model that geriatric care-managed PDHC offers versus stand-alone PDHC.
