Home Care Resources

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Sticking with a Strategy is Key

Strategic marketing opens the door to success
Picking the right strategy and following is is one key to success

Had a wonderful interactive webinar yesterday with a long term MOST client who has seen incredible growth in his business based on his strategy, his personalization, and his decision, based on money and results, to use corecubed’s MOST program as his basis for marketing his home care company. He has a strategy that he reviews annually, and each year he sticks with that year’s strategy, measures for success and then does more of what works in the next year while trying some new things.

Seems simple? Right?

Wrong for many.  Right for a few. Most of our established and successful clients do understand that. However, only about 1 out of 10 new clients do. The other 9 out of 10 new clients a) really have no strategy that they follow and b) want a silver bullet to solve their business issues. And, they come to us with a poorly run organization and want us to market a service for them that is marginal at best. Marketing can generate interest and get the phone to ring, but the agency has to follow through with a good intake process, and then a good ongoing service that meets the clients needs.

Back to strategy. What are some strategies?

The best at what you offer priced to be the best.

The lowest priced, but dangerous in home care as quality is so very important in unsupervised home situations.

Specialists in some aspect of your service.

Focused on some aspect of referral sources: home health agencies with no private duty arm, the hospitals and their readmission rate targets, geriatric chronic issues and those who service those.

A helpful resource when someone needs care.

An expert in home care and/or aging and chronic issues of aging.

Fortunately, the MOST program does accommodate any strategy, and is priced to be affordable. To paraphrase our client, how could a home care agency ever match the price we charge for monthly newsletters, press releases, educational powerpoints, recruitment material, sales collateral? Why, creating one newsletter would cost an agency at least what they pay us for the one we create for MOST, and why spend your valuable internal time on that when you could be a) building relationships, b) getting in front of new prospects and c) performing in-home assessments or monitoring visits.

And, it was very interesting to hear how he has used our program over time. Since 2007 he has used the program monthly for changing needs to implement his strategy. He started with our suggestion of a monthly theme, and, using a different theme each month, he has grown his online and in-house resources. He now has PPTS, press releases, banners on his website, resource links and downloadable resource sheets on his website, a complete collection of ads for selling and recruiting, ongoing SEO implementation and blog writing. In essence, whenever he needs anything related to marketing, he comes to us, and, if we do not have it designed so we can tweak it, we create something new. His ideas are usually good, so others in the MOST program benefit as well.

 

 

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Sharing Results When Marketing Home Care

Managing and scheduling reflect a good home care agency
Marketing Home Care using Results from Efficiency

Marketing is a lot about strategically communicating who you are, by words, by visuals and by actions. When you are building a business, there are some natural partners that are chosen as the business grows and prospers. In home care, there are many ways to go to market, but one way is to use the results of your efficient and well run operation and turn that into marketing power.

Do you staff consistently? Do you guarantee that shifts will be filled? Are all the caregivers up to date on their inoculations? How often do caregivers not show up for jobs? How do you prevent a frail elderly person from being alone when the family thinks your agency is covering the time with their loved one?

These kinds of operational results can be turned into marketing messages, both as a way to extend the quality brand, and to differential the agency from competitors. It is this kind of operational efficiency that having a business management and scheduling software tool helps to achieve.

Join Rick Morey, President of HomeTrak, as he joins me for a webinar tomorrow at noon eastern time, for a discussion about the unlikely ways the home care agency can showcase quality through efficient operations. He will also discuss how to use contact information stored in a scheduling program to directly enhance marketing efforts.

If the home care scheduling and business management software has a data base built in that allows for adding additional fields, and for reporting on those, then it is possible to use it for direct marketing. Collecting data on who is referring, how often and how much revenue is generated by that source are just some of the benefits of a good scheduling, business management software for home care agencies.

The message is not always one directly related to sales. In home care, which is definitely marketed differently from other products and services, it is sometimes about the service, the quality of caregivers hired, the management of the care team, and the responsiveness of the agency to the requests of the client.

Want to sign up for our noon Eastern time webinar tomorrow, October 16th? Just click here to sign up for the marketing partnerships for success with HomeTrak!

Making the Website Referral Form HIPAA Compliant

How we wish HIPAA Compliance worked.
Not really HIPAA Compliant!

In the old days, accepting a referral over the Internet was considered OK. That was before the Internet became so widely used, and before the HITECH ammendment to HIPAA, which came out in 2009. Requirements for technology compliance are now specific. Whenever Private Health Information (PHI) is in play, the website developer has to become a “Business Associate” and we must protect ourselves in addition to having a signed agreement with our clients for whom we created websites, to be their Business Associate.

 The fines for knowingly implementing a system which is in violation of HIPAA/HITECH are huge — to the tune of $10,000 per violation. In fact, if we don’t report something we see someone doing we can be fined for that.  So, not only the agency but also the website development firm share responsibility for making certain that a patient’s information is kept as private as possible.
Having an SSL, a security certificate, is NOT being HIPAA compliant. This encryption is only encrypted when someone fills it out. However, that simple option is in violation of HIPAA because:
–The form is stored on an unencrypted web server
–It sends an unencrypted copy of itself through email (the email can be disabled, but the following problems still exist)
–The database is not on a separate server, which it must be
–There is no audit trail detailing who accessed what information at any given time. That would have to be in place to track the agency’s actions, the website developer’s actions, and the web host’s actions. And that data must be kept for a year!
–The servers must have adequate protections including a firewall and antivirus, and remote encrypted backups taking place regularly. (This is not true of a shared or VPS server which is what most websites use.)
–There must be regular security audits performed, logged, and remedies conducted as needed. All that needs to be logged.
–A breach notification process must be in place as well.
–Anyone accessing the server needs to be trained in HIPAA compliance
So, what used to be simple, is now complex. However, corecubed has a relationship with an affordable solution, and can now offer this opportunity to our website clients: a HIPAA compliant referral form. Just another way that we continue to support our clients in the aging services industry.

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Enter iTunes for Health

ShareCare Headline for December 12

WebMD was founded in 1998, and has served as a model for those searching for health care on the internet. Today WebMD will announce layoffs because how people are searching and finding information on the Internet is changing. Enter ShareCare, a social networking website that is aimed at consumers seeking healthcare. So, what has changed since 1998 in Internet search? Plenty, I am here to tell  you.

Caring.com was an early entrant into the expert led answers to consumer questions. And, this field is clearly just beginning to surface. Wikipedia is probably the most famous consumer fed informational website, but, the nature of the Internet is constant change, based on usage. That “based on usage” component is the key.

Consumers are seeking more information about many things before they buy, make appointments, test drive, or call for information. Google is responding accordingly as well. The SEO (Search Engine Optimization) rules are changing as consumer usage and demands change, and as the Internet starts to reach adolescence. I hesitate to say “mature” as the nature of the Internet makes change inevitable.

We do keep up to date with trends in Internet usage, trends in how to market aging related services using the Internet, and what our clients need to do to be positioned correctly as changes occur. There are some nefarious practices right now that try to trick the SEO Gods, and those users will find themselves black listed. What consumers are demanding, and getting, is control over what they are returned when they search, and what level of expertise they are seeking and demanding when they search for information on the Internet.

 

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The Independent Contractor Question for In-home Care

Planning for 2014 and the employer mandate is something on the mind of many home care agency and franchise owners. Lately in the consulting side of my business, clients are more often looking for avenues to conduct in-home care businesses that are within the law, but less burdensome than they would be should their current employment model not change, and should they have to provide the health insurance or pay the penalty. I will not go into the specifics that make this rule extremely harmful to the fee-for-service in-home care businesses, but, suffice it to say that looking at providing care differently is a good idea.

IRS Focuses on Independent Contractor Status
2014 TAX on Employees Raises Costs

It is because of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), P.L. 111-148, that many  in-home care businesses are looking at ways to deal with that employer mandate which requires that employers with at least 50 full-time employees provide health care insurance or pay a stiff penalty.

The government wants more money, and tapping into this 1099 area is now, and has been recently of great interest to the IRS. For a business, however, they are attractive since independent contractors are about 30% cheaper than employees. They also mean less business time spent on employment rules—state, local, and federal. This is a compelling incentives for in-home care businesses.

A 2011 MBO Partners study found that about 16 million workers were classified as independent contractors and predicted an even greater use of independent contractors in the next 10 years.

The latest IRS tax gap study shows that Form W-2 employees misreport only 1% of their income while a 2009 U.S. Government Accountability Office report showed that 71% of IRS worker misclassification examinations resulted in changes to the worker status.Read More

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