What is the biggest problem with home care agencies right now?
So the question is, what is the problem with home care agencies right now? There's a lot of problems. I think the main problem stems from the fact that home care agencies look at their employees as an input to their production function. Like pizza Maker looks at dough, right. They don't look at their caregivers as their clients, as the people that they are supposed to support as the, you know, the outcome of their process. Which is actually the way I think hunter agencies should think because if you look at your caregivers and some kind of a labour input into the service, then the whole culture and set up of the home care organization is how to make the use of this resource the most efficient, how to pay the minimum to the nurses and caregivers to maximize the gross margin, how to organize them to work in a way that minimizes the complexity for the office that fixed hours, fixed shifts, fixed requirements. How do we minimize the fixed costs that connect that is connected to the labour input, right? You see just an expense. Then you want to pay for a visit or pay for an hour, have no guaranteed hours, no health care if possible at your own cost. And what that creates is that the employees, the caregivers feel that the agencies don't care about them. They don't care about them. They don't care about what they think they don't care about... They don't let them make decisions with regards to their clients, right? The decisions are made by the case managers and people in the office. They don't feel that the company cares about the professional progression about the job, about their job safety, about their ability to make ends meet. And this leads to a lack of caring back. They don't care about the brand, they don't care about the home care agency –– many work in home care as a second, third job. If there is anything that comes up, the home care shift for the home care visit is the first one to be dropped and that creates an unreliable service and that impacts the level of service to clients. And that impacts the ability of the home care companies to deliver value to the payers, to the doctors, to the patients themselves. And that reduces the dependency that the health care system has on the home care industry as a whole because it seems it looks as an unreliable service that you know, 50% of the time it doesn't show up or doesn't show up when it's supposed to show up where there is very high turnover, where it's very hard to get continuity of care. And this problem can be fixed by a change of mindset. By home care companies, home care agencies understanding that they are not in the business of delivering home care. Home care companies are not in the business of delivering home care. Home care agencies are in the business of delivering home care support to the care teams on the ground, which are the ones who deliver the care, right. Nobody in the home care agency, not the CEO or the administrator or the dealer or the recruiter delivers any care to anybody. What they do is deliver home care support to the teams on the ground. And when you change this mindset –– okay, these are my clients. So let's by technology that is focused on helping them in the field, not technology that is focused on getting bills, paid quicker and maximizing compliance at the expense of the user experience. If I want to support them, let's give them choice of clients. Let them choose with who they want to serve. And this way they will care about their clients more. They will care about the plan, they will be more reliable and they won't just leave when something goes wrong. They will tell us. Let's find out what else our caregivers want and give them, support them and give them the feeling that we care about them. And then if the caregivers feel that the brand cares about them, they will care about the brand. They will care about their clients. And when you care, you give very good care and your clients feel better and you can get the health results and the payers see that you're delivering value and they send more work your way and they increase the rates. Or they spend more money into the home care industry. And everybody wins. Patients, the home care agencies, The players and of course the caregivers. So five minutes about economy home care agencies. Hope that was interesting.
