How to Add to Your Care Offerings As A Home Health Provider

Competition is stiff in home care, but there are ways you can set yourself apart from the crowd. Offering additional services and benefits associated with care can improve finances, grow the agency, and build a solid reputation in your market. Read on to learn more about how your agency can lay the groundwork for offering additional services.

The cost of home care is rising and paired with caregiver shortages, it can be difficult to grow and scale your business. All challenges aside, there are still achievable pathways to expanding your service offerings despite these shortages.

Some of these offerings can include:

• Wellness calls
• Partnering with rideshare platforms such as Uber and Lyft to provide low-cost rides
• Administrative support
• Developing specialty disease programs

Let’s dive into each of these in detail so that you can learn more about how to incorporate them into your home care agency.

Wellness calls

Wellness calls are an important security measure to ensure that a family’s loved one is taken care of. Whether a patient lives alone or in an apartment within a community, they might not have someone that is checking in with them daily.

Your agency can offer a wellness call service to call clients on a regular cadence to make sure all is well. Caregivers can perform these tasks as well as your office team, or caregiver mentors. These can be priced per call or on a monthly lump sum, but either way, you’ll help a family get the peace of mind that they need knowing that their loved one is okay and cared for by your agency.

In addition, this is a service that you can offer before clients are ready to receive home care. Use it as a try-before-you-buy concept to get to know how your agency runs first. As their needs increase, they have a seamless entryway into becoming a home care client. These calls might not bring you a large profit margin, however, the value of giving a family peace of mind will help you lure prospects and current clients toward the upsell.

Transportation services (in partnership with rideshare providers)

We understand that it’s difficult to coordinate appointment-only shifts for clients, and if you can partner with a rideshare company like Uber Health or Lyft to provide low-cost rides for your clients, they’ll be more likely to utilize it. Abiding by an hourly minimum for what is a short appointment might not be the best idea for a client, but if you can form a partnership like this, it will help keep the costs low, while meeting the client’s needs.

When an agency partners with an organization like a rideshare company, it’s important to voice the needs of your clients such as a spacious car, drivers who can assist the client in and out of the car, and to be mindful of neurocognitive disorders such as dementia, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s disease. Your clients will feel at ease with a driver that passed a background check, and there’s plenty of room for a caregiver to tag along to take notes at appointments and more.

Administrative support

Working in the home care industry, you know how finicky paperwork can get. For clients, it can be even worse. Onboarding documents are especially difficult in that sense. One service that you can offer to your clients is administrative support.

You have resources and knowledge that they might not know. For example, if you have a veteran that wants to start services, they might not know what paperwork to fill out or how to fill it out. The text is awfully small and hard to read. Help them understand what each form does, and what needs to be done in order to help them get the benefits that they deserve.

Your clients will be immensely appreciative of the time that you take to help, and whether you charge by the form or by the hour, the time you spend with each client will help you get to know them better. Take some time to learn more about their likes, their dislikes, their interests, their favorite foods, and more.

Home care offerings are infinite

These are only a few ideas to help you get started on expanding your offerings as a home care provider. There are infinite possibilities and directions that your business could take with new ideas.

You could offer care management, offer skilled care, or partner with a physician’s office that offers senior-specific primary care. As inflation and rates increase, home healthcare agencies will need to continually offer more value and substance to clients. Differentiating yourself is and will be essential. Successful agencies make it a priority to brainstorm with executive and clinical staff to continually consider ideas to expand services to clients, thus building a solid provider reputation and ensuring growth.

Developing specialty disease programs

A specialty disease program can generate quality growth and differentiation your home health agency from the competition. The six common disease programs include wound care, diabetes, stroke recovery, heart failure, dementia, & COPD. There are fundamentals to building a disease program for community-based healthcare, as well as commonalities CHAP looks for when certifying one. You can learn more about Specialty disease programs in this joint webinar presented by ALORA and CHAP.

Want More Information on Related Topics?

Learn more about optimizing your agency’s growth, operational efficiency, and other topics pertinent to home health care by exploring our additional blogs:

1. What is keeping my agency from growing?
2. The key metrics your agency must watch
3. The seven steps to starting a successful home health agency (whitepaper)
4. Top tools and tips to help your home health agency grow
5. The value of an EMR in home health

Author’s Note: Views, information, and guidance in this resource are intended for information only. We are not rendering legal, financial, accounting, medical, or other professional advice. Alora disclaims any liability to any third party and cannot make any guarantee related to the content.