Home-based care is reactive by nature: a patient has a need, that need triggers the care team and coordination continues until the problem is resolved. But when an organization is stuck in that continuous reactive cycle, progress on quality and experience goals gets hard to come by.

The subject of the new Executive Perspectives: breaking that cycle.

Joining us on the new episode of Executive Perspectives from Home Health Care News are Mary Bausch, Director of Strategic Operations at VitalCaring, and Si Luo, CEO of CareXM.

Bausch and Luo sat down with HHCN’s Jack Silverstein to discuss the work that Bausch’s VitalCaring is doing with Luo’s CareXM, showing the power of after-hours call triage — and why home-based care providers are leaning into data and care support at scale.

To learn more about how CareXM is helping home-based providers build reliable, coordinated care experiences, visit carexm.com.

The post Executive Perspectives: Mary Bausch, Director of Strategic Operations at VitalCaring, and Si Luo, CEO of CareXM appeared first on Home Health Care News.

The Transforming Episode Accountability Model (TEAM) went into effect on Jan. 1, 2026, and while full industry-wide data likely will not be available until mid-2027, the model will increasingly lead hospitals to emphasize outpatient services and tighten coordination between hospitals, home health agencies and other post-acute partners, experts told Home Health Care News.

“[TEAM] changes the importance and the opportunity for home health to better serve patients coming out of the outpatient setting, which we expect will be a higher volume of patients, but also very potentially very different patient types,” said Brian Fuller, managing director of Washington, DC-based healthcare research and advisory services company ATI Advisory.

TEAM holds participating acute-care hospitals financially accountable for the cost and quality of care during five specified episodes. The model is designed to support care coordination and transitions between providers. TEAM participants must refer patients to primary care services that bolster care continuity and long-term health outcomes, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).

The model bundles payments for lower-extremity joint replacement, surgical hip and femur fracture treatment, spinal fusion, coronary artery bypass graft and major bowel procedure.

“[TEAM] is an excellent source for Medicare referrals,” Dr. Taimur Mirza, chief medical officer at ArchCare and medical director for Mary Manning Walsh, told HHCN. “For post [acute] providers, we really prize Medicare over any other payer source.”

New York City-based ArchCare provides home care, memory care, nursing homes and other services for older adults across New York City and surrounding counties. One of the facilities ArchCare operates is Mary Manning Walsh, a nursing home located in Manhattan’s Upper East Side neighborhood of Yorkville.

A similar model reduces readmissions

For nearly five years, the nursing home Mary Manning Walsh has operated a dedicated floor for patients referred from the Hospital for Special Surgery, a medical center focused on musculoskeletal health based in in New York City. The floor mostly admits orthopedic patients under conditions similar to those now covered by TEAM, said Mirza.

Over that time, Mary Manning Walsh has maintained an average length of stay of six to eight days, a 4% hospital readmission rate and a patient satisfaction score above 90% — metrics that are ideal for hospital partners that lower patient costs, Mirza said.

Collaboration with home-based care has been a crucial driver of Mary Manning Walsh’s lower readmission rates and shorter length of stays, Mirza notes. Upon discharge to ArchCare’s certified home health agency, clinicians monitor the patient for health declines. If a patient shows signs of illness, the home health clinicians prefer to send the patient to a nursing home for evaluation rather than a hospital.

“The hospitals really like that,” Mirza added.

However, these statistics vary across locations. While Mary Manning Walsh has a readmission rate of around 4%, its Staten Island facility, about 21 miles away, has a readmission rate closer to 14%, Mirza said.

“We really have to work on… standardizing the way we do things across all of our nursing homes,” Mirza said.

For TEAM, data available in 2027 and 2028 will help determine with more certainty how the model is trending, Fuller said.

What’s next

While TEAM has upsides, one thing that surprised Fuller was how little attention and focus many hospitals have placed on it.

“We’re still seeing a lot of hospitals take a bit of a wait-and-see approach,” Fuller said. “They’re kind of doing the minimally necessary.”

One reason for that is that, in 2026, TEAM was upside-only. Financial downside risk will begin in 2027, Fuller said, and he anticipates seeing an increase in activity and focus TEAM hospitals, which will involve post-acute care providers such as skilled nursing facilities and home health partners.

However, the comprehensive care for joint replacement expanded (CJR-X) model could enhance hospitals’ focus on models including TEAM, Fuller notes. Finalized on July 31, 2026, the CJR-X model aims to increase collaboration among health care entities including home health providers for joint replacement patients.

Though only a few weeks past CJR-X’s finalization, Fuller said he anticipates the model will build focus on bundled payment models.

“The more we see this bundled payment momentum, particularly in a mandatory format, [the more] it will add to the level of importance and the level of attention that hospitals and post-acute care providers start to devote to these models,” Fuller said.

CJR-X is scheduled to take effect on Jan. 1, 2028. As hospitals prepare to take on downside financial risk in TEAM’s second year, Mirza said that post-acute providers entering exclusive, geography-based partnerships and assume risk alongside hospital partners should discuss opportunities to share financial gains generated by strong performance.

“If we provide good results, and they get rewarded for that, there should be a conversation where we can share some of those profits too if we assume some of the risk,” Mirza said. TEAM’s shift in focus from inpatient to outpatient changes referral volume for home health providers, Fuller said. It will also potentially increasereferral partners’ expectations regarding specialized clinical programs, front-loaded home health episodes and post-ambulatory surgery center discharge. In addition, more cardiovascular procedures, oncology and orthopedics are likely to be performed in outpatient care settings.

Separate policy changes — including the scheduled elimination of Medicare’s inpatient-only list — could accelerate the shift to outpatient care and raise the stakes for home health providers, Fuller said.

“The elimination of the inpatient-only list for hospitals [is] scheduled to end by Jan. 1, 2028,” Fuller said. “If you’re not treated in an inpatient setting, and if you don’t have a qualifying hospitalization to be eligible for skilled nursing, then your default discharge location almost has to be home — either with or without home health.”

The post 9 Months In, TEAM Pushes Outpatient Services, Tighter Home Health Coordination  appeared first on Home Health Care News.

The new immersive programming aims to improve how local communities handle dementia-related cognitive decline by giving frontline responders and everyday caregivers the tools to defuse crises, to prevent avoidable hospitalizations and to keep patients safely supported at home, Valerie Valiante, vice president of the program of all-inclusive care for the elderly (PACE) and dementia services at Empath Health, told Home Health Care News.

“The experience really helps build a sense of empathy and understanding of what it’s like to experience dementia on a day-to-day basis,” Valiante said. “This can be for caregivers, family members, members of the community, first responders — really anyone who wants to participate.”

Clearwater, Florida-based Empath provides home health, personal care, dementia care, medical and palliative care, and other healthcare services across Florida.

Empath’s dementia services include care coordination, free community education, caregiver training, and specialized adult day programming for individuals with dementia in Ocala, Florida.

Another educational tool is a virtual dementia tour, a licensed in-person experience in which a room is staged and people must fulfill tasks under sensory deficits akin to the experience of having dementia, Valiante explained.

The virtual dementia tour experience adds to Empath’s existing menu of free education and training, caregiver workshops, support groups and one-on-one guidance regarding dementia care, Valiante added.

“We also do memory cafes, and all of these things do come at an operational cost,” Valiante said. “But we are very fortunate at Empath Health because we are a nonprofit organization, and we solely rely on the generosity of the communities where we serve and our foundations.”

Dementia care as part of the continuum

Dementia involves the loss of memory, reasoning, thinking and other cognitive functions to the point of negatively affecting daily life.

Dementia impacts over six million people in the United States and contributes to more than 100,000 deaths each year. Additionally, an estimated 42% of Americans over the age of 55 will develop dementia. according to the National Institutes of Health.

The program is designed to increase understanding of dementia and to build more dementia-friendly communities.

“With all of the offerings that we provide, whether they are directed at personal caregivers, paid caregivers, family members, first responders or medical professionals, our goal is to support families who are experiencing different stages of dementia and different needs,” Valiante said.

Because dementia affects behavior and daily functioning, someone with the disease may experience crises that affect how first responders and home caregivers should respond, explained Valiante. An individual experiencing dementia may wander, display combativeness or experience agitation.

According to a 2018 study from Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy, individuals with dementia are more likely to experience hospitalizations, most commonly due to suffocation, accidental drug poisoning and falls, than those without the condition. Additionally, individuals with dementia are more likely to experience homicide and abuse than those without.

By bolstering understanding of dementia symptoms, the understanding of dementia signs and related behaviors, first responders, caregivers and the community at large can better react in such situations, leading to better outcomes, Valiante explains.

“That’s really the need that we’re filling,” Valiante said. “It’s to help others not only better understand dementia, [and] achieve better outcomes and better respond to situations where someone with dementia is experiencing any kind of issue, escalation or crisis.”

Empath’s focus now is publicizing its dementia services to the public and ensuring that local communities can access them, Valiante explains.

The company’s dementia services align with Empath’s full-life care model, which focuses on supporting the company’s Florida-based community through all stages of life and healthcare needs, Valiante said.

“The biggest point that we really want to come across is that help is here,” Valiante said. “That’s what we are saying to everyone who will listen — that we’re here to support, to connect families with free local dementia education and support, and we want to be the trusted guide in the community for the dementia journey. That’s our mission.”

The post Empath Health Launches Dementia Services Tackling Frontline Crises, Avoidable Hospitalizations  appeared first on Home Health Care News.

The technology-enabled home care provider is now preparing for its next phase of growth, with plans to expand geographically and serve new populations. Those opportunities have been shaped, in part, by California’s expanding Medi-Medi Plans and the changes they are bringing to care management.

Dike founded Omatochi after caring for her father. She said she saw a need for a different approach to in-home care and decided to bootstrap the company.

“There’s this huge communication gap when seniors are being taken care of. Their families don’t even know what’s going on,” Dike said. “A lot of other apps focus on the agency and how to make the agency operational. But the family app actually focuses on the families.”

Omatochi provides Medicaid-reimbursed technology-enabled home care to low-income older adults. The company, which began with three full-time employees, now has over 500 employees. The name “Omatochi,” is a combination of Dike’s children’s names.

Within the app, family members can see whether the person receiving care took their medication, how they spent their day, what they ate, and more.

The company’s tech stack also includes AI integrated into its workflows, including its electronic health record (EHR).

Plans for growth

Omatochi began serving its current client population full time in January 2024 and now operates in 14 counties, mostly in Northern California. Dike said the company was in the process of hiring an executive in Southern California to lead its expansion there.

“California is 10% of the U.S. market, so we have a long, long way to go,” Dike said. “So SoCal is our next stop.” 

The need for services in California is substantial, Dike said, and Omatochi has barely scratched the surface of the potential market. 

Dike plans to expand Omatochi’s client base to include people dually eligible for Medicare and Medi-Cal. Separately, the company plans to serve people with disabilities through California’s regional-center system. Dike said California’s Medi-Medi Plans — a type of Medicare Advantage Dual Eligible Special Needs Plan, or D-SNP — helped inform Omatochi’s plans to serve dual-eligible beneficiaries.

The California Department of Health Care Services expanded Medi-Medi Plans from 12 counties to 41 counties in 2026, making them available for enrollment in most California counties. The plans combine Medicare and Medi-Cal benefits under a single health plan and care team, with a unified set of benefits and provider network. They include all Medicare Part A, Part B and Part D benefits, as well as Medi-Cal benefits.

While the Medi-Medi plans allow members to have one coordinator, they also narrow a beneficiary’s choices, Dike said in an email.  

“[People whose] plans didn’t match had to move, risking the loss of doctors they’d had for years,” Dike told HHCN in an email. “In California, people in these plans now generally get care management from the health plan rather than through Enhanced Care Management, the Medi-Cal benefit that community organizations like mine deliver. When the program tripled in January, care management for a large share of the dual population quietly changed hands.”

As Omatochi grows, Dike said technology will remain a tool to support — rather than replace — the people providing care.

“Technology makes everything better,” she said. “Of course, it does not replace care; it would never replace care. But when you merge those two, it becomes easier to care.”

The post How Omatochi’s Family App Gives Relatives More Visibility Into Home Care appeared first on Home Health Care News.

Instructions for Voting:

• Go to the HHCN Product of the Year Awards site at https://poyawards.homehealthcarenews.com/.
• Download the Nominee eBook to review all entries.
• Click on the any of the eBook’s “Vote Here” links to access the official voting ballot.
• Cast your votes!

Eligible subscribers are welcome to participate in any categories for which they feel qualified to vote. When evaluating nominees, assess their market impact, service to the industry, and technological advancement.

Voting Guidelines & Eligibility:

• Only one (1) ballot is permitted per eligible subscriber; any duplicate submissions will be disqualified.
• Submissions from individuals who are not qualified subscribers will not be accepted. To become an eligible subscriber, simply subscribe to any HHCN email newsletter.
• To maintain fairness, personnel from companies with products nominated in the current awards program—including their representatives, vendors, agencies, and properties—are restricted from voting, and their ballots will be excluded from the final count.

The gold, silver, and bronze recipients across all categories, alongside the 2026 Most Valuable Product, will be highlighted in the upcoming edition of the HHCN Product of the Year Awards eBook, scheduled for release on November 2, 2026. For further inquiries, please reach out to the Healthcare Awards Program Manager at awards@arrowfly.com.

The post Voting for the HHCN Product of the Year Awards Closes September 30 appeared first on Home Health Care News.

Solenvia raised its scheduled fill rates to 99% and puts caregivers in the home of clients two to three hours after a referral because of a caregiver transportation program, Bryan Dylewski, Solenvia founder and CEO, told Home Health Care News. The company now plans to take its unique operating model into new regions with franchising expansions.

“We believe [we] have solved the caregiver inconsistency issue through our transportation model, which basically transports caregivers to and from cases,” Dylewski said. “A lot of the caregivers in the market want to work… they just don’t have reliable transportation to get from their home to a client’s home daily. We started transporting our caregivers early on, and we’ve had huge success with being able to staff cases consistently.”

Middletown, Connecticut-based Solenvia provides non-medical home care across Connecticut and Massachusetts.

Dylewski founded Solenvia after caring for his father. Starting around 2012, Dylewski’s father began to experience health issues, falls and mobility loss. After numerous hospitalizations, medical experts diagnosed him with the neurodegenerative disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

Hospital staff would not release Dylewski’s father until they ensured he would have 24-hour care, the CEO recalled. Dylewski retained the services of two home care companies to help his father beginning at 7:00 a.m. to help his father get out of bed and prepare for the day.

In one instance, the caregivers did not show up at scheduled time. In another incident, the caregiver failed to show up at all.

“I didn’t realize at the time the issue [of] lack of caregiver consistency in this industry,” Dylewski said.

Drivers for caregivers

Before rebranding the name to Solenvia in 2026, Dylewski founded his company as The HomeAides in 2014 to help provide more reliable home care. Developing a caregiver transportation model was key to solving caregiver inconsistency, Dylewski said.

Initially, Solenvia hired drivers as 1099 contractors to transport caregivers. As Solenvia scaled over the years, the caregiver transportation model had to evolve with the company’s growth, Dylewski said. Solenvia purchased company cars to create a 15-vehicle internal fleet. Between the company fleet and some transportation services from the rideshare giant Uber, Solenvia facilitates over 1,600 trips a month within its Connecticut locations.

“There’s a specific formula that we use,” Dylewski said. “Just using Ubers — if it doesn’t fall within that mile radius and cost, it doesn’t make sense from a cost perspective,” Dylewski said. “It made more sense to have internal company cars.”

Caregivers share in some of the cost of participating in Solenvia’s internal company fleet, Dylewski said. Charging caregivers for these services prevents the caregiver pool from abusing the internal fleet and defrays the cost of the transportation model. All company vehicles have routing software. Solenvia maintains a dispatch department that creates transportation routes the night before the caregivers’ services. Drivers and caregivers are W2 employees, Dylewski added.

“The drivers actually come in, and they know what their route is,” Dylewski said. “They know the caregivers that need to be picked up, and to what case they need to be delivered to on a day-to-day basis.”

Rebranding and franchising

Franchising was the main driver of the company’s rebrand earlier this year, Dylewski said.

Since franchising involves licensing a brand to an independent owner, the name of the brand must be trademarked, Dylewski said. The United States Trademark and Patent Office denied the company’s request to trademark “The HomeAides,” stating the name was too descriptive.

To give franchisees a unique brand the company could protect, Dylewski said the firm would have to change its name.

“I didn’t want to do this [rebrand],” Dylewski said. “We just had so much invested in The HomeAides here locally in Connecticut. It was like my baby, and now you [had] to change it.”

To decide on a new name, Solenvia looked at trademarking requirements, other brands with descriptive names and what elements the company itself provided consumers, Dylewski recounted.

The company landed on “Solenvia,” which comes from “solace,” what the company delivers to people during difficult times, and “via” to denote its delivery.

Nine months after the rebrand, Solenvia penned its first franchise deal. On Sept. 11, 2026, Solenvia signed an agreement with Shaun and Jaminy Seagriff to bring the company’s older adult home care services to Tampa Bay’s Pinellas and Hillsborough counties.

Solenvia plans to tailor its caregiver transportation model to each franchisee’s location. Solenvia’s corporate headquarters differs from the average franchisee, said Dylewski. The Florida franchisees have two territories and a smaller geographic area. The franchisees will use services from the ridesharing firm Uber, in addition to receiving a company vehicle to use when Uber is unavailable.

For Solenvia, delivering consistent care through its caregiver transportation model remains crucial for future franchising, which Dylewski said is the main way the company will scale and deliver a good product to end users.

“We believe that the owner-operator model is number one [that franchisors are] invested in the brand,” Dylewski said. “They have a belief in the brand. They have an understanding, belief and passion for helping others, serving others, and we believe that that’s needed to really be successful in their local communities.”

The post Solenvia’s Caregiver Transportation Fleet Drives 99% Fill Rate  appeared first on Home Health Care News.

Lujan wants MatrixCare to support an ecosystem resembling Apple’s App Store, where the company can integrate with partners offering specialized solutions rather than trying to develop everything itself. The goal, he said, is to move data more seamlessly across care settings and technology platforms while reducing friction for providers operating on thin margins.

“Home health, hospice, skilled nursing facilities, these providers face enormous workforce pressure, reimbursement complexity, regulatory burden and fragmentation across the care continuum,” Lujan told Home Health Care News. “Every additional click, every aspect of workflow, every administrative task has a real cost.”

MatrixCare provides software solutions to over 15,000 providers in the home health, hospice, skilled nursing, senior living and life plan industries. The company announced on Sept. 1 that it had become an independent company and named Lujan its CEO.

ResMed (NYSE: RMD), a medical device and digital health company, acquired MatrixCare in 2018 for $750 million. In July, Frazier Healthcare Partners agreed to buy MatrixCare, carving it out as a standalone company.  

The transaction means that MatrixCare will no longer have to compete internally with a large parent company for attention and investment. The change will allow the company to make faster decisions, invest with greater focus and organize itself around customer priorities, Lujan said.

Lujan most recently served as CEO of Sight Growth Partners and previously served as vice president and general manager of Lifeline Vascular Care at DaVita, among other roles.

Faster decisions, new initiatives

MatrixCare’s new CEO has identified several priorities for the company’s next chapter, including aligning product investments more closely with customer needs, improving interoperability and using AI and automation to reduce administrative work.

The largest opportunity, Lujan said, is creating a tighter connection among what customers need, what MatrixCare builds and how customers ultimately realize value from its technology.

AI has the potential to reduce administrative burden in clinical documentation, revenue cycle support, and other workflows, but MatrixCare is not looking to simply maximize its AI usage.

“The question isn’t how much AI can we put into MatrixCare,” Lujan said. “Really, the question is: Where can the technology eliminate administrative work for our customers?”

Lujan contrasted that approach with what he described as AI “vaporware” elsewhere in the technology market — announcements that invoke AI without delivering tools that work or solve meaningful customer problems.

“We’re going to make sure that what we’re developing here actually solves our customers’ problems,” he said.

While aiming to reinvigorate MatrixCare’s processes and investments, Lujan has identified the post-acute workforce shortage, regulatory complexity and interoperability.

The workforce shortage is the most immediate concern, he said. Post-acute providers need technology that lets a limited pool of clinicians and caregivers focus on the highest-value activities instead of spending valuable time on documentation and administrative work.

At the same time, MatrixCare must help providers navigate state and federal regulations, revenue cycle management, government and commercial payers and extensive documentation requirements, Lujan said.

While contending with those hurdles, the new CEO is focused on developing the tools that help post-acute care providers, including home health agencies, to help with high-stakes scenarios.

“Financial tools and the revenue cycle are critically important across the entire continuum because cash is their lifeblood, and oftentimes many home health agencies are going out of business,” Lujan said.

The post MatrixCare Speeds Up Post-Acute Strategy Under New CEO Jonathan Lujan appeared first on Home Health Care News.

AI-based tools and other technologies have flooded the home care industry, but choosing the wrong one can mean the difference between streamlined operations and a costly, disruptive mismatch.

Determining whether a vendor can deliver good business results means piloting tools before wide deployment, scrutinizing contract terms, asking pointed, evidence-based questions about efficacy and assessing whether it is better to build the technology in-house, industry leaders told Home Health Care News.

“If we don’t ask the right questions from our end to the vendor, or if the vendor doesn’t ask the right questions from their end in terms of presenting a potential solution, then really there’s a lot of opportunity for that potential mismatch,” Anthony Rodriguez, marketing and brand manager at Solenvia, told HHCN.

Before working with a vendor, Rodriguez first determines what Solenvia’s current operational needs are, rather than considering which vendors he wants to work with.

“It most often starts with the operational problem that we’re trying to solve or gaps in our current workflows or processes that could benefit from additional technology software,” Rodriguez said.

Middletown, Connecticut-based Solenvia provides non-medical home care across Massachusetts and Connecticut.

Determining whether a vendor’s technology truly provides solutions to the company’s problem is something Shadi Gholizadeh, chief quality and innovation officer at TheKey, echoed.

“There can be overload a lot of times of people coming in to show us their solutions, and so we really look at like number one: is this even a real problem to solve?” Gholizadeh asked.

Based in Delray Beach, Florida, TheKey provides in-home care, respite care, Alzheimer’s and dementia care, skilled nursing and other services across 32 states.

Certain technology solutions become very “hot,” such as caregiver matching tools, ambient AI or remote patient monitoring, Gholizadeh said. However, she emphasizes whether a vendor’s solution answers a problem TheKey may have.

In addition to assessing operational needs before working with vendors, Honor CEO Seth Sternberg asks what the desired business outcome is.

“You’re not usually looking for technology,” Sternberg said. “You’re usually looking for a business outcome.”

With that ultimate business outcome in mind, Honor will then determine whether they will build the technology in-house or buy it from a vendor, Sternberg said, as the company has done both.

San Francisco-based Honor is a home care technology company. It acquired home care provider Home Instead in 2021.  

After identifying the desired business outcome, Honor determines which features are needed to solve the problem and aligns expectations with what actually exists in the market. If a tool with all desired features does not exist, leadership must determine if they will further compromise on the features or build the technology itself.

The role of the demo

After determining the problem that needs solving, Rodriguez requests a demo from the vendors he is considering working with. If a vendor will not provide one, he views that as a cause for concern. It could mean the solution is not adaptable to Solenvia’s specific use cases or needs, Rodriguez said.

Demos are especially critical when the barrier to entry for developing a new technological tool is low, Gholizadeh said.

“You have a lot of people coming to market with a very early idea. That’s fine to test it out. But we need credible evidence that it works beyond just testimonials,” Gholizadeh said. “I want to test it out. If you’re telling me you have a voice AI agent, I’m going to test it out with every possible use case. I’m not going to just take your word for it. Tell me what outcomes have improved. Tell me what the population was that you used.”

During the demo process, it is essential for providers to pay careful attention to any errors that occur. Errors can have tremendous impacts on varying scales, Sternbeg said.

“The result can be everything from ‘Oh, that was inconvenient’ to ‘That’s a disaster for my customers’ and a massive legal liability,” he said.

Asking empirical questions

Rodriguez typically spends a few weeks making phone calls to potential vendors, where he requests more information about the platform or solution and shares more about Solenvia’s operational models.

“Those first couple of weeks are critical,” Rodriguez said. “We’re typically doing multiple demos with those vendors again, just to do full due diligence to identify any gaps in the solution that they’re offering.”

One key characteristic of any new solution is interoperability, Rodriguez said. Solenvia uses AxisCare, a home care scheduling software, as well as the business cloud platform Zoho. New technology must work with the company’s existing processes and systems.

In all, Solenvia uses technology from between eight and 10 vendors, Rodriguez said. Sometimes, he saw that many companies do not do their own due diligence on Solenvia. He recalled vendors pitching products better suited for assisted living facilities or non-medical home care. Or, the vendor might have excellent technology but still is not suited for Solenvia’s operational needs.

“We have to then take a step back and say, ‘Okay, this seems great, but does it fit our model? Does it solve a problem for us? Or is it the next new hot thing that is being pushed and promoted?” Rodriguez said.

During the vetting process, Sternberg asks vendors how they created the product, how many engineers were involved and what context it was built for.

At TheKey, Gholizadeh asks whether the tool has clinical results and how it would fit into the provider’s delivery model.

“Let’s say [the solution] is an engagement tool for people living with dementia. I’ll ask vendors, ‘How many people living with dementia were involved in the creation of this? Did you talk to them about it? Did you test it with them? What did you learn? Did you talk to their families?’” Gholizadeh said. “I’m very reluctant to go too far into conversations with vendors where they haven’t been using it with a population.” 

Business considerations and avoiding commodification

Technology decisions should include business considerations beyond ROI — and can have business implications beyond operational efficiency.

When working with a vendor, providers should avoid signing contracts any longer than one year, Sternberg said, and ideally sign month-to-month contracts.

On a broader scale, Sternberg notes that using vendor technology homogenizes an industry. Providers should use homegrown technology to differentiate themselves within the industry, he said.

“Because if they’re using someone else’s, they’re just a commodity,” Sternberg said.

Understanding how a vendor uses technology, especially for AI tools, is also key to prevent aiding competitors.

“To make matters worse, if the vendor can use your data for anything they want, including training their models, then your data is making your competitor better,” Sternberg said. “People really have to think in ‘AI-land’ what actually matters to them, and where they want to be different versus where they want to be just like everybody else.”

Honor aims to build as much of its own technology as possible to differentiate itself from competitors. Not all technology will be built in-house, however. Honor relies on vendors for accounting systems and customer relationship management (CRM).

“Let’s say that your competitors all use the same vendor, and let’s say that you’re living in a world where software drives a lot of the operations of a business. Then, if you’re all using the same software, you’re all just the same thing,” Sternberg said. “You might as well just be one company.”

The post Rigorous Tech Vetting Shields Home Care Agencies From Costly Liabilities, Mismatches  appeared first on Home Health Care News.

2026 proved to be a difficult year, but HealthView survived by relying on cash reserves it built in anticipation of tougher market conditions, CEO Steven Gonzalez and Vice President of Clinical Operations Monica Cutia told Home Health Care News. HealthView’s executives now aim to bolster the firm’s AI technology and clinician advancement opportunities.

“This year was hell,” Gonzalez said. “It was a really rough year because we’re in LA County.”

HealthView Home Healthcare Services provides home health, hospice and palliative care services across Southern California’s Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Los Angeles counties.

As federal scrutiny intensified in Los Angeles County, Gonzalez said compliant providers such as HealthView were forced to navigate fast-changing requirements, payment delays and reputational fallout from fraud allegations.

“LA County was hit… the hardest with unexpected changes,” Gonzalez said. “We had to adapt to emergency changes on how to even run the whole entire business from [an] operations standpoint.”

HealthView also received an additional documentation request, or ADR, in connection with an audit of its hospice business, Gonzalez said. The company had to submit records supporting patients’ eligibility for hospice services while payments were withheld pending review.

“You have to prove that the patient was appropriate for hospice,” Gonzalez said. “If they say it’s not appropriate, you have to give that money back.”

The process, designed to ensure the organization’s legitimacy, required extra time and resources on HealthView’s part.

“We got treated like a criminal when we weren’t,” Gonzalez recalled. “For those few months, literally the hospice business completely stopped in our county. No more referrals. It went quiet. … We even had patients’ families wanting to get off service because they’re seeing it on the news.”

Gonzalez reported anecdotes of other local home health and hospice providers closing.

Gonzalez said that HealthView’s financial uncertainty was compounded by the fact that its funds were being held, making banks reluctant to extend loans to the company.

While HealthView relied on its own cash reserves to continue operating, the events of this year have left an impact on the company.

“We’re obviously a successful company … We look like we did well, but it hurt. It still hurts,” Gonzalez said. “Our bruises aren’t gone yet.”

The path forward

While 2026 had been a rough year, a silver lining came in the form of hiring and retention.

Because some Los Angeles-based home health and hospice businesses ceased offering services, HealthView experienced an influx of caregiver workers — a rarity in the home-based care industry.

“As long as I’ve been in home health and hospice, I have never seen so many candidates come through for just one position that we had posted,” Cutia told HHCN.

“We’ve never seen so many candidates ever,” Gonzalez agreed. “I mean, there’s a labor shortage. There’s nursing shortage. We put out one post. We had hundreds of nurses because the companies they worked for went out of business.”

The influx of new caregivers urged HealthView to alter its hiring process. The company expanded its interview process and even adopted ride alongs, Cutia said.

If a candidate is not the right fit for HealthView, staff will also refer candidates to neighboring organizations, Cutia said.

As the employee pool grows, so too will the company’s service lines. The company aims to expand its palliative care program, in addition to adding technology layers to bolster operations, Gonzalez noted.   

“We have really big goals,” Gonzalez said. “We want to be the largest home health and hospice and palliative care [provider] outside of health systems in the state of California.”

Culture is also critical. HealthView scored a 98% employee approval rating in the Great Place to Work recertification survey , Gonzalez said. As the firm scales, Gonzalez said a goal is to maintain the employee satisfaction score above 90%.

Culture is not just an employee-retention strategy, Gonzalez said, but the operating model HealthView hopes to replicate as it grows. Cutia and Gonzalez developed an internal software platform called Culture AI, which is designed to help managers prepare for one-on-one meetings, track objectives and illuminate employees’ operational needs.

“We bought CultureAI.com with the idea of, ‘Let’s turn what we do into software that we integrate across any businesses we invest in or buy,” Gonzalez said.

As HealthView looks toward 2027, Cutia wants the company’s growth to create advancement opportunities for clinicians, particularly nurses who may not have seen themselves as business or operational leaders.

“I want us to continue to be able to grow, to be able to give nurses who probably didn’t think that they had the opportunity to be leaders of a program that opportunity,” Cutia said.

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The proposed deal between Addus HomeCare Corp. (Nasdaq: ADUS) and AccentCare would see Addus acquire nearly all of AccentCare’s personal care business. The move would add significant personal care scale to Addus, while leaving AccentCare more concentrated in home health, hospice and palliative care.

The deal marks a shift for AccentCare. In 2023, former AccentCare CEO Stephan Rodgers said that the company was very focused on the care continuum. Now, the company is narrowing its focus to the core of its operations.

This makes the deal another high-profile example of a home-based care company deciding that owning every piece of the continuum may not be the best fit for its strategy. For Addus, the deal represents an opportunity to grow in personal care. For AccentCare, it offers a chance to focus more on the clinical businesses it sees as central to its future.

With a company as joint-venture-minded as AccentCare, I can’t help but wonder if the deal will implicate the company’s JV strategy. AccentCare has long worked with health systems through JVs in home health, hospice and palliative care. As the company narrows its owned service mix, those partnerships could become an even more important way for AccentCare to stay connected to a broader care continuum.

In this week’s exclusive, members-only HHCN+ Update, I’ll explore the Addus/AccentCare deal, offering analysis and key takeaways, including:

• What the divestiture says about the one-stop-shop model 

• Why the deal could have implications for AccentCare’s health system JV strategy 

• What the transaction reveals about how major home-based care providers are defining their “core” businesses 

Not a one-stop-shop

I’ve used the phrase “one-stop-shop” a lot as a healthcare reporter. Whether companies offer a full continuum of care or specialize in a single product line is a major strategic decision, and we’ve seen several notable examples of home-based care providers changing course in recent years.

AccentCare is a clear recent example. The company’s website currently describes it as covering a broad continuum of services, consisting of personal home care, home health, palliative care and hospice. Once this deal closes, likely in Q1 2027, the company’s continuum of care will be shortened quite a bit.

From talking with sources, I have never gotten the impression that there is a right or a wrong way when it comes to determining the breadth of services. Some folks feel fervently that establishing a full continuum of care is optimal to improve care coordination. Others say that staying in their lane allows them to be experts at what they do, while relying on exceptional partners to ensure smooth handoffs and quality care.

It is clear that some high-profile aging-in-place giants have sold personal care businesses to focus on their home health and hospice arms. Those moves suggest that, for at least some large providers, the operational complexity of managing a broad continuum can outweigh the strategic benefits of having every service under one roof.

Amedisys’s 2023 divestiture of its personal care division to HouseWorks is one example. Amedisys’s two largest segments were home health and hospice, and the company narrowed its focus on these by selling.

“We strongly believe in the value of personal care and this divestiture allows our personal care division to grow under a proven leader in the industry while Amedisys focuses our attention on our core business units of home health, hospice and high-acuity care,” former Amedisys Chairman and CEO Paul Kusserow said at the time.

Addus was the buyer in one of these deals, when it acquired Gentiva’s personal care arm for $350 million in December 2024. Gentiva President and CEO David Causby said at the time that the deal allowed Gentiva to focus on its core businesses.

“This will ensure continued growth for that segment under proven leadership and will allow us to sharpen our focus on our industry-leading core hospice and palliative businesses, where we have the greatest opportunity to deliver the compassionate care that defines who we are, to those who need us the most.”

Both Kusserow and Causby used the word “core” in their statements about these mega-deals. That language is telling: These acknowledgments that the business did not fit the strategic priorities of their organizations.

A focus on “core” businesses for Addus and AccentCare is what came up when I chatted with Les Levinson, partner at Robinson+Cole, this week. He noted that AccentCare’s decision to divest nearly its entire personal care arm (save New York) reflects a shift to its core.

“If you really were interested in just divesting particular locations or regions, you could have done something differently,” Levinson said. “But basically, getting out of the entire segment indicates that that’s probably not going to be core to your operations going forward.”

To me, these deals show that major companies are placing meaningful bets on the narrow-field-of-expertise model. The question is not whether personal care is valuable — it clearly is — but whether it is more valuable as part of a larger continuum or as a standalone business operated by a company built specifically around it.

Moving forward, I’ll watch whether AccentCare’s shift to a narrower focus pays off, both operationally and strategically. I’ll also keep an eye on trends in the one-stop-shop vs. narrow-field-of-expertise game. I’ve previously written that General Atlantic’s $3 billion acquisition of TEAM Services was due in part to its position as a diversified infrastructure powerhouse. I think the choice to go broad or narrow can affect how attractive an organization is to investors. But investor appeal is not the only consideration. For a company that is not looking to sell — or one that has not reached the scale needed to support a broad continuum — narrowing its focus may be the better bet.

AccentCare’s JV strategy

AccentCare’s personal care divestiture is also worth looking at through the lens of its joint venture strategy. The company has built a number of partnerships with health systems over the years, including home health joint ventures with organizations such as Baylor Scott & White Health, Memorial Hermann, UCLA Health, UC San Diego Health, Fairview Health Services and Asante. It also has a hospice and palliative care partnership with ChristianaCare.

If AccentCare is shedding most of its personal care business while retaining its home health, hospice and palliative care platforms, its health system JVs could become an even more central part of the company’s strategy.

AccentCare has been talking about health system partnerships for some time, so I would not necessarily call this a full-on revitalization of its JV strategy. Former CEO Steve Rodgers told HHCN’s sister publication, Hospice News, that JVs were a focus for the company and a path to sustainable growth. But the personal care divestiture could make that strategy even more focused: AccentCare may be concentrating its attention on the services it believes can best serve as the clinical and operational backbone of those partnerships. 

The Memorial Hermann deal is a useful example. AccentCare and the Houston-based health system formed a JV in 2023 that combined their home health and hospice operations in the market, with AccentCare managing the organization. At the time, the partnership was framed around expanding access and reimagining home-based care. The structure illustrates the value proposition for health systems, in that they can stay a key player in the post-acute experience while leaning on a specialized home-based care operator for day-to-day management, staffing and clinical operations.

More broadly, health system JV activity reflects a familiar dynamic in home-based care. Health systems are increasingly looking for expert partners that can help them manage a service line that is strategically important but operationally difficult. Home health and hospice require specialized regulatory, reimbursement, workforce and clinical capabilities. A health system may want stronger visibility into what happens after discharge, but it may not want — or be best positioned — to run those businesses entirely on its own. That seems especially true at a time when health systems are under pressure to improve care transitions and manage costs, while home-based care operators are looking for reliable referral relationships.

That is where providers like AccentCare can fit.

For me, AccentCare’s portfolio moves complicate the one-stop-shop versus narrow-field-of-expertise conversation. The company is narrowing its owned service mix, but its JV model still allows it to participate in broader care coordination with health system partners. In other words, it may be pivoting away from being a one-stop shop of its own accord while still positioning itself as an expert partner for health systems that want to create a more connected continuum for their patients. That feels like an important distinction. AccentCare may be getting narrower as a company, but its role within a health system’s broader care ecosystem could potentially grow. I’ll be watching to see if AccentCare’s JV strategy shifts or expands following this deal.

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