The Home Care business is a challenging one because it depends primarily on finding and retaining qualified caregivers as baby boomers grow older and require some form of home assistance in their daily living.
Other than finding, training and retaining the right people to provide quality home care services, where do agencies look to grow their business? How do they manage their multiple referrals sources and their home care marketers?
Growing your agency:
It goes without saying that in order to grow your business you need to have a diversified home care marketing plan and measure your return on investment for each marketing channel, adjusting your plan as needed. The marketing plan for home health should be designed to cover as many referral sources as possible and should not exceed 5% of your revenue to keep your profit margins within the target that you have set.
Here are some home care referral sources to target, based on our experience of more than 24 years managing a multi-disciplinary agency that offers private duty, home health care and home infusion therapy services.
– Past and current clients
– Doctors offices
– Hospital Discharge Planners
– Pharmacies
– Online presence
– Skilled Nursing Facilities
– Assisted Living Facilities
– Adult Day Healthcare Centers
– Continuous Care Retirement Communities
– Home Health Care Agencies
– Hospices
– Churches
– Banks
– Insurance companies
Get simple data to grow your business:
Data is king nowadays! Look online for data providers that give you reliable information on doctors, home health care agencies, hospitals and long term care facilities that have provided services to Medicare beneficiaries. This will ensure that patients are over 65 and require some kind of a home health care service. You can then pass this data on to your home health marketers so that they pursue such valuable contacts and generate much needed referrals to your agency. Better yet, you can find specialized software vendors that will provide you with such simple data, along with a CRM to manage contacts and tasks that you would assign to your infield home health marketers.
Managing your Home Care Referral Sources:
Most of the above listed referral sources require home care marketers to introduce your agency and services, asking for referrals and working on nurturing their relationship. Managing all of the referral sources and the needed sales people to generate business can be a daunting task without the use of a specialized Customer Relationship Management (CRM) such as Isoratec CRM in order to oversee all sales operations and evaluate the performance of each home health marketer that you hire to get you referrals. Isoratec CRM comes with Medicare data to help you grow your referrals.
Conclusion:
Starting and successfully managing a Home Care agency requires a comprehensive marketing plan, qualified marketers and technology to measure and assess performance. It also needs qualified caregivers to deliver the appropriate service to your home care clients so that they help grow your referrals through word of mouth.
Good luck growing your home care agency!
Tony J. Onaissi is the founder and CEO of Isoratec, a home care technology company, and of Home Care Lebanon, a home health and home infusion business he founded in 1997. Contact Isoratec about CRM software at https://www.isoratec.com/