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Home care providers with multi-state footprints – including large national players like AccentCare and Help at Home – are finding that cultivating a strong local presence not only comforts clients and caregivers but also drives better outcomes and strengthens referral pipelines.
Blending the resources of a national company with a personal, community-rooted approach to care requires a dedicated marketing and operational strategy, experts told Home Health Care News.
“People feel more comfortable in home care that is a local presence, regarding being a part of a national company,” Jeanette Weinz, brand president of Executive Home Care, said. “They feel that the person understands them, where they live, their culture, … and that they’re hiring the appropriate caregivers that are going to really provide that experience.”
Hackensack, New Jersey-based Executive Home Care offers non-medical in-home services, including companionship, personal care, live-in care and an Alzheimer’s and dementia care service line. The company has 82 franchise locations in 17 states.
Some of Executive Home Care’s franchise operators choose to de-emphasize the company’s national presence and instead emphasize the local nature of the individual franchise, Weinz said.
Franchise operations are not the only companies to emphasize a local presence.
Chicago-based Help at Home, which has 200 locations across 11 states offering personal care and integrated care management services, “absolutely” seeks to foster a local feeling among its locations, according to Ray Smithberger, the company’s chief operating officer.
“With five decades of experience, we not only understand that home care is local, but that it’s personal,” Smithberger told HHCN in an email. “As we’ve grown as an organization in breadth and depth, we’re also intentionally embedding ourselves in our local communities, which enables us to provide the best in-home care experience – providing the right support at the right time to our 60,000 caregivers caring for our 70,000 clients.”
Personal touch – and stronger referral pipelines
Health care decisions are incredibly personal and made at the local level, according to AccentCare’s Chief Marketing and Communications Officer Heather Wilson.
“Patients and their families want to know who will be taking care of them or their loved one,” Wilson said. “Having that shared sense of community and culture also plays a role that comes from being connected locally.”
Post-acute health care provider AccentCare provides personal care, home health, palliative and hospice care in more than 250 locations across 32 states and Washington, D.C. – and the company also seeks to create a local feeling for its clients.
While patients and clients seek out connection and a personal touch from their home-based care provider, certain benefits come with being a large-scale business. Technology stacks are typically more robust, training is often standardized and franchise companies can help franchise operators with tasks such as marketing and branding.
Becoming a franchise owner of a national company provides extra help that typically makes the process much quicker than opening a mom-and-pop operation, according to Weinz.
Combining the benefits of a national presence with a hyper-local approach provides patients with the best of both worlds. It also helps providers build out their referral pipelines.
“Referral partners want to know that their patients will be taken good care of – they too want to know and trust those people they are entrusting their patients with and there is much more to that than a well-known brand name,” Wilson said.
Building a local presence and reputation allows Help at Home to provide Medicaid-eligible populations and veterans with hard-to-find, accurate information about in-home personal care options, according to Smithberger.
“We are experts in the local communities with long-standing relationships with our referral agencies and state partners who can be a trusted resource to fill that gap to help simplify the information and provide guidance for [home- and community-based services] options,” Smithberger said.
Creating a hyper-local feeling
To create a local feel for clients while leveraging the benefits of a large-scale company, providers utilize operational and marketing strategies.
Technology plays a key role in Help at Home’s strategy.
“Our technology and innovation investments streamline operations and strengthen connections between our local operations and the caregivers, clients and partners in the communities we serve,” Smithberger said. “By centralizing administrative processes and simplifying recruitment and retention, we’ve enabled our local teams the ability to focus on what matters most: supporting caregivers and clients in our local communities. This ensures the best possible client-caregiver matches based on demographics, location, language and personal preferences, which equals the best possible home care.”
Practically speaking, Help at Home’s technology offerings include an on-demand app available for its workforce. The app consists of learning opportunities, scheduling, pay details and communication through chat or phone.
The company has also created “community hubs” inside Walmart and near local grocery stores, offering potential clients and caregivers information while “meeting people where they are, in the heart of their community.”
Marketing also plays a crucial role in creating local relevance on a national scale.
“It’s a challenge when you have a national brand that requires the local franchisee to build the brand at the same time they’re running their operations,” Teresa Celmer, chief marketing officer at BrightStar Care, said on a HHCN webinar in April. “So what we’ve done is we have a team of people that are dedicated to local marketing.”
Chicago-based BrightStar provides home care, senior living and supplemental staffing services. Peak Rock Capital acquired BrightStar in March.
BrightStar’s local marketing team creates the marketing infrastructure for the company’s franchisees, Celmer said, including setting up their website, setting the right keywords, building a Google business profile and launching social media presences on Instagram and Facebook.
“We have this mindset of being always on and to be able to have a portfolio of assets that are specifically targeted to their services and to their location,” Celmer said.
For AccentCare, building local relevance through marketing includes telling hyper-local stories, empowering teams on the ground to be their own storytellers, telling local stories and creating local relevance.
Through different combinations of marketing and operational strategies, a local, community-focused approach to in-home care pays off for providers.
“We’ve unlocked the potential of community-focused care with a high-touch, high-tech model that strengthens connections,” Smithberger said. “The result has been measurable improvements in caregiver and client well-being, satisfaction and outcomes.”
The post Local Touch, Wide Reach: Creating A Hyper-Local Strategy For In-Home Care appeared first on Home Health Care News.
