private duty home care Archives ⋆ Cathy Cress

Merging Care Management with Homecare Gives You a Competitive Edge.

May 16, 2023

Merging Care Management to Homecare Gives You a Competitive Edge.

Merging care management with home Care gives you a competitive edge, but you need to do a Competition Survey to find out how to position your merged agency ahead of all your completion.

Why should you add geriatric care management to your private-duty home care agency?

It can make a client shopping for a Care Managed homecare agency chooses you instead of your competition because you offer one-stop shopping. The adult child does not have to hire one agency to manage care and a second to do homecare. You offer an enticing package for the beleaguered, stressed caregiver desperately seeking help.

That’s called positioning.

Merging care management with home Care gives you a competitive edge and shows what makes you different from your competition. Adult children in a struggling with their aging parents learn that geriatric care management plus private duty home care is an added bonus to families in a crisis. Thus a care management service can be an important differentiator for agencies offering home care. It helps you get more clients and outstrip your competition. So you need to find out through the competition survey if there are any care-managed home care agencies and what you can offer that they do not in their menu of services like care management like Move Management or Home From the Hospital, all offered in my operations manual.

A geriatric care manager can do a great job of teaching clients and families why they need care. A geriatric Psychosocial and functional assessment and care plan is a very clear way for families to understand care needs and recommendations and to plainly see all the options for providing this care and choose your agency. The GCM is looked at as a desperately needed guide, not a salesperson, to get services started.

Care manager assessments are broader in scope than a private duty home care assessment and include not only family and social supports and home safety but spirituality, Quality of Life, finances, legal, nutrition, environment, mental status, depression, sibling rivalry, dysfunctional families, relocation options and assistance and death and dying. A GCM assesses for alcoholism and drug abuse, domestic violence, sleep quality, sexuality, activity tolerance, personal values, and cultural beliefs. So they offer an in-depth overview of clients’ and families’ problems.

Your geriatric care manager’s care plan gives recommendations and options to consider so the family and client can make the best choices for providing this care. The bonus to you is this lengthy, very valuable assessment is billed.

Plus, the Family feels like they have a very involved individual concierge to solve their problems

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New FREE Webinar-Why Merge Home Care and Care Management

Webinar-Why Merge Home Care and Care Management

When-May 18, 2023 -2 PM -3:30 PM PST

The first and most important reason to merge care management to home care is money. You will be able to capture billable hours that you and now giving away for free. The second reason to add care management to home care is market positioning. Clients will choose your agency if you offer this merger and competitors do not. A third reason is that a care manager is perfect for introducing home care to family caregivers. Care Managers sit down with the family and review the geriatric assessment and care plan they created for the client. Last, this 1-1 care manager meeting introduces a concierge guide through the labyrinth of caregiving, showing exactly what homecare plus care management will do to solve the client’s problems, increase their quality of life and offer relief to the sometimes-desperate family members. Find out more by signing up for this free webinar

Learn

How this merger creates more Profit for both Care Management and Home Care

The Advantages of Merging Home Care and Care Management

Competition Survey to make third parties and Adult Children Choose you

Co-Branding the merged agencies.

Technology for both home care and care management

Co-Locating both staff.

Marketing Merged care manager home care.

Critical Success Factors for the Success of the Merger

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NY Times-The Mushrooming Home Care Aide Crisis

October 8, 2021

Crisis in Homecare Aides NY Times

The New York Times featured a story on the crisis in home care aides on September 25th,2021.The NYT article warned ranks of home care aides are expected to grow by more than those of any other job in the next decade, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.But It’s also among the lowest paying occupations on the list. Yet in spite of geriatric care managers and homecare’s dependence on these aides ,nearly one in five aides lives below the poverty line. So we have a crisis built on high demand and low supply.

Geriatric Care management depends on home care aides.

Whether a Geriatric Care Manager is placing aides through a partnership with a private duty Home Care agency or employs them by being a Care Managed Home Care Agency- working with elders means 90% of the aging clients will need from 4 to 24 hour care from home care aides.

Home Care Aide Top Job In Growth

The ranks of home care aides are expected to grow by more than those of any other job in the next decade, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It’s also among the lowest paying occupations on the list. Yet .in spite of geriatric care managers dependence or these aides ,nearly one in five aides lives below the poverty line.

Seniors Want To Remain at Home

By 2030, 21 percent of the American population will be at the retirement age, up from 15 percent in 2014, and older adults have long been moving away from institutionalized care. According to an AARP survey, three-quarters of Americans age 50 and older

indicated they prefer to remain in their current residence or community for as long as possible as opposed to a senior care facility.The

preference among older adults to remain in familiar homes and communities is termed “aging in place “

Home Care Industry in Dire Straights

In 2019, national spending on home health care reached a high of $113.5 billion, a 40 percent increase from 2013, according to the most recent data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

But this growing industry , which Geriatric Care Managers and all aging services critically need to support aging in place or care at home rather than an institution, is in dire trouble.

The pandemic only made things worse. It exposed the vulnerability of not only the

elderly and infirm but also of those who care for them. As Covid-19 spread across the country, many families turned to home health care as an alternative to nursing homes, which had become hot spots for the virus. Shortages of personal protective equipment made the work risky. Many home care aides have not been able to work due to their own underlying conditions, family concerns or general anxiety. This has caused a crisis in the Home Industry, which care managers depend upon for staffing cases. Now with the Biden Mandate of requiring Medicaid and Medicare home care providers to get vaccination, there will be a whole new crisis with care providers under those giant government programs or work in hospitals .

Solutions to the National loss of Home Care Aides

There are many other factors fueling the loss of paid care providers and there are great solutions offered by Leading Age a national non profit for aging and home care.

This includes , expanding training, increasing pay and increasing the caregiver pipeline to include college students, high school students and recent immigrants.

GCM Agency Lifespan Wins Top Awards

April 11, 2021

Geriatric Care Management Home Care Agency Wins National Award

Lifespan a 35-year-old geriatric care agency in Santa Cruz, California won prestigious awards from both national and local groups this month. Home Care Pulse awarded the care management home care agency ” Provider of Choice Award” for being best in class for rendering quality care to their clients, being trustworthy, and providing outstanding home care services the award was based on customer and staff surveys. Locally they also won the Santa Cruz Good Times Award for “Best of Homecare “award while competing with all home care agencies in their county.

Lifespan helped build trust during the “annus horibillus ” year of COVID through their own website.Clients could see their extreme COVID safety precautions prominently provided on the navigation bar of their website.

Outstanding Home Care in the year of COVID

The award recognized their outstanding home care services providing quality care through impeccably trained COVID safety-equipped and monitored home care staffing during the pandemic, building community trust. Clients in Santa Cruz, California needing care management services during COVID and ongoing were provided geriatric care management services developed over the agencies 35-year history and fine-tuned for clients’ needs during the epidemic

Quality of Life as Well as Quality of Care

The agency continued to offer Well Being – a service for lonely and isolated seniors who dramatically suffered during the pandemic from sheltering in place. Lifespan not only served the quality of care needs of clients but also the Quality of Life Needs answering isolation and loneliness in a pandemic

Videos Showing Home Care Safety Build Trust

Finally, they showed the community their excellence and safety through videos in their email newsletters for 6 months, done with a phone by a talented staff member. The agency provides Quality of Life activities and adds videos about Lifespan‘s Well Being Program. They upload them to their YouTube channel another great way they build trust with their agency. Market safety from Covid-19.

During the continuing but diminishing pandemic, as clients begin to use services like care managers and home care again, it is critical that you build that trust by showing customers you are safe. In Lifespan’s case, you can also win awards for this.

Beware of Starting a PDHC & Geriatric Care Management Agency- Real Shortage of Care Providers Nationally

March 7, 2017

Startup geriatric care managers or existing GCM’s considering adding private duty home care agency to their practice, should think twice. There is a perilous present and future shortage of homecare aides to employ for the business- the very product of PDHC. Better to partner with a good fully staffed PDHC.

It is a country wide challenge for private duty home care agencies to find staffing, for many reasons. Despite growing demand, caregiver shortages remain as the top problem agencies face today. A whopping 70% of agencies said this was their biggest hurdle in 2016, followed by caregiver turnover, which 53% of agencies agreed was a top threat.
Rising wages for care providers has recently become a more significant problem for home care agencies, when it comes to recruiting. A lack of qualified candidates is the next reason
Another big problem in recruiting was finding caregivers who are within close proximity to clients, yet the problem still paled in comparison to the recruiting factors .
Trumps ban on Muslims affect ‘s health care in general
Recent immigrants from other countries will be kept out. Nurses and doctors who cannot yet practice in the US and care providers in general, who cannot come into the US ,will sorely affect the private duty home care industry on top of the present need for staff in our own country. Any care manager or private duty home care agency will tell you that recent immigrants are a great resource to PDHC and make excellent hard working care providers. Along with nurses they represent 1.5 million workers in healthcare today.

The potential demise of the ACA will affect the number of homecare aides as 1 in 5 depend on the ACA for insurance. If the ACA is changed as threatened, homecare aides may be too sick to work the brutal hours they must work in the PDHC industry.

Geriatric Care Manager beware-better to partner with a private duty homecare agency at this point in the geriatric care management business.
Find our more.

Why Does a Geriatric Care Manager Need to Partner with Private Duty Home Care ??

March 2, 2017

Why Do You Need to Partner with a PDHC agency?

Geriatric care managers need to partner with private duty home care. Why??

80% of Aging life or geriatric care managers are boutique or stand-alone agencies. The do not have a private duty home care component.
But the majority of aging GCM clients do now or will need care providers and private duty home care agencies
Aging Life or geriatric care managers, may begin a case by just offering geriatric care management. But they will need to bring in some type of private duty home care eventually as 6.3 million people over 65 need long term care.
Long-term care often involves the most intimate aspects of people’s lives—what and when they eat, personal hygiene, getting dressed, using the bathroom. Geriatric care managers arrange this and but they do not do it directly.

Other less severe long-term care needs may involve household tasks such as preparing meals or using the telephone, which is usually non-medical care. Geriatric care managers make sure this is done for a client but again do not clean homes or answer the telephone. They need to partner with an excellent private duty home care agency.

However a beginning geriatric care managers cannot afford to start private duty home care and geriatric care management. . Non – skilled home care can take 40 K to 60K start up, skilled care agencies 60K-80K and Medicare $150K-300,00.

On top of this you are starting two business at once. You have start up activities, (hiring staff -a present homecare nightmare) which are all encompassing, then marketing and sales for home care

Only 20% of GCM’s offer care managed home care and they are, according the 2014 Benchmark study on Care Management but those e agencies have either been in business a long time or are privately funded start up’s- well capitalized.
So start-ups, you need a good PDHC partner.