When Team Select Home Care launched 14 years ago, it operated as a traditional Medicare home health company. Two years ago, the company made the decision to overhaul its strategy, sell its home health business to Humana Inc. (NYSE: HUM) and dive headfirst into long-term care.
Fast forward to the present, Team Select Home Care is a 100% long-term care company, delivering these services in the home. This new focus, alongside other strategic initiatives, has helped the company double its business.
“By divesting those other divisions, we were able to laser focus and be great at long-term care,” Fred Johnson, CEO and president of Team Select Home Care, told Home Health Care News. “We looked at the landscape of where Medicare home health was headed, as well as where pediatric long-term care is headed, and the number of competitors and where we could really make the biggest impact, and so we decided to go.”
Indeed, Medicare-certified home health care providers continue to face a number of pressures. The biggest pain point is the consistent Medicare rate cuts ushered in annually by the home health payment rule. The 2026 proposed home health rule marks “the largest cut ever proposed.”
When Johnson first joined the company in 2015 as its CFO and vice president of operations, he helped found Team Select Home Care’s pediatric long-term care division, the first step that led to the company’s current business model.
Phoenix-based Team Select Home Care serves the medically complex pediatric population, as well as seniors in the home. The company operates in 16 states and is one of the largest pediatric long-term care providers in the country. It received a strategic investment from private equity firm Court Square Capital Partners in 2023.
The company’s services consist of roughly 65% to 70% pediatric care, and 25% to 30% senior care.
Between 2017 and the present, Team Select Home Care has achieved an average compound annual growth rate of 53%. Johnson credits the company’s de novos for helping achieve this growth.
“We consistently plant six to 10 new de novos a year,” he said. “Sometimes they take a couple of years until they really start to hit maturity. We’re getting a lot of the benefit from de novo that we placed previously.”
Strategies for growth
Aside from de novos, technology has been a growth driver for the company. Johnson emphasized the importance of technological sophistication in home-based care.
“We’ve invested a lot in data, metrics and outcomes,” he said. “We’ve been able to grow significantly in managed care states, specifically states like Florida and Texas. We’ve been able, with a combination of volume and hospitalization rates that are less than half the industry average, to secure reimbursement rates well above the fee schedule.”
Securing better reimbursement rates has allowed Team Select Home Care to invest in clinicians.
“When we have the ability to pay nurses more than the competition, in some of these markets, good things happen,” Johnson said.
For Team Select Home Care, technological sophistication also means the development of a predictive hospitalization tool that uses real-time changes in condition to flag children who are at-risk for hospitalization.
Team Select Home Care has invested heavily in this AI tool, and Johnson believes it will lead to an increase in preferred provider relationships for the company.
“The tool could save lives someday and keep kids out of the hospital,” he said. “It’s fantastic for children’s hospitals, which struggle to discharge children. In the pediatric industry, only about 65% of the hours get filled, so 35% of the time, families are struggling for care, and we can get those kids out of the hospital faster.”
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