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Three years after Maxim Healthcare Group split its staffing division and its home health care division into separate companies, Maxim Healthcare CEO Jarrod DePriest is playing catch-up on one home-based care industry trend: the implementation of cutting-edge technology. In other aspects, DePriest may have identified ways to stay ahead of evolving home care industry trends.
As technology’s role in the home-based care industry has rapidly grown, DePriest told Home Health Care News he realized Maxim “has a lot of ground to make up.” To do so, the company is continuing to build out its proprietary technology stack. Meanwhile, Maxim has innovated its caregiver benefits by offering a paid time off (PTO) program.
Columbia, Maryland-based Maxim provides home-based skilled nursing, personal care, respite care and some behavioral care services.
HHCN recently caught up with DePriest to discuss the expanded employee benefits program it now offers its 30,000 caregivers and 25,000 patients spanning 42 states. He also shared how the company is fighting for bigger changes nationwide amidst the quickly shifting landscape of federal health care policy.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
HHCN: What are your strategic goals for Maxim?
DePriest: Technology is moving really, really fast. When we were split from our staffing company at the beginning of ‘22, when we started looking at like our technology capabilities, we realized that we had a lot of ground to make up. We’ve been going about as fast as we could go when it comes to advancing our technological capabilities, and you can only go so fast. One, you’re limited a little bit on financial resources. And then two, how much change can your operators and your clinicians embrace and adapt to while still continuing to perform their jobs? A huge, huge strategic plan for us is to continue to evolve technology-wise. We do a lot of building of our own platforms, like we build our own electronic documentation platform. We build our own EVV platform. We have a platform for our workers called Maxim Care Mobile that we built internally.
There are way more patients and clients out there who need care than most of us can [provide] just because of the shortage of available workers. So one tactic that we’ve employed the last couple of years is really investing in our workforce and trying to evolve what has traditionally been maybe a staffing model into more of like a true employer model. So investing in benefits, investing in training, investing in career opportunities, and really trying to position ourselves in the in the home care world, as the company that treats their workers the best, and the company that invests in their their career path and invests in their livelihood, and trying to position ourselves as the resident company that people want to come and spend a lot of time and a lot of years working at.
You have said that splitting the staffing and services divisions of the company promotes a client-first focus. Can you give an example of how Maxim is executing on that focus?
One of the biggest ones that we did was, in the beginning of 2024, we made a huge investment in our caregiver population and rolled out a PTO program. Some companies may not have that, but we heard through various feedback loops and doing surveys with our caregivers that that was something that was really, really important to them. So we rolled out that program, and it was a huge investment for the company, but it gave our caregivers peace of mind that they could take a vacation or have a sick day or do whatever needs to be done and still get paid that week. That’s a huge example of thinking about how we move the company forward by taking care of the people who are doing the really great work out there.
What happened after rolling out the benefits program?
We’ve been able to hire and deploy a record number of caregivers. So when you look at rolling out that type of program, one of our goals was to be more attractive in the marketplace, and that is proving out. And I’d say the second [result] is that our retention rates for our caregivers are also growing year over year. So not only are we able to hire more, but more and more of those folks are choosing to stay with us longer term.
What challenges is Maxim facing right now?
Probably the biggest one that all the providers are facing is the unknowns that are going to come with the passage of the [President Donald Trump’s] Big Beautiful Bill and what that’s going to do to Medicaid spending at the state level over the next few years. It’s really hard to ascertain what’s really going to happen. The best that we can see is that at some point, the states are going to have to manage a growing Medicaid population with either the same or fewer dollars coming from the federal government. And that’s going to pose challenges. Some states really embraced the Affordable Care Act and expanded that over the last few years, and the Medicaid roles in some states have really grown quite a bit. So if the federal matching was reduced in those states, what are they going to do? So it’s very concerning. It’s very challenging to not know what the future is going to hold there from a reimbursement perspective.
So it goes back to the last thing we talked about, as we look at investing in our caregivers, investing in our workforce. We have to be very in tune with the decisions we make, because we know that those are one-way-door decisions: if you roll out a PTO program, for example, and you receive a drop in Medicaid reimbursement, you’re not going to take the PTO program away. So we’re just being very, very in tune with what’s happening out there – knowing that there’s probably going to be reimbursement challenges over the next couple of years as states grapple with that.
What is Maxim doing to prepare for those challenges?
We work tirelessly on the advocacy side, trying to educate both Medicaid leadership in the states where we operate and also trying to educate federal regulators and lawmakers about home care and its place in the ecosystem. We’re working with the Home Care Association of America right now on a federal bill to define continuous skilled nursing as a segment, because right now, most providers who are providing private duty nursing or continuous skilled nursing have to follow a little bit of a potpourri of regulations. That would be a huge win. We’ll see what happens in the fall here when the government comes back to work, and if there’s going to be any time left to hear the bill or not. But if not this year, we’ll go at it again
You’re approaching 30 years at Maxim. What do you see happening in home health care over the next 30 years?
I think there’s a huge population that needs care and is going to continue to demand even more care over the next foreseeable future, and that is a lightning rod of a challenge because of the shrinking caregiver shortage across the country. So those two dynamics are going to make it very challenging, I think, for providers to continue to evolve their operations so they can meet the demand of their clients and patients while figuring out, what’s the population of caregivers that’s going to be able to do that [work]? And I think the providers who are able to figure that out and maybe create a workforce to some degree are really going to be in a good position.
By: Sloane Airey
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