The year of 2019 in home care was a year of change with a focus on the overall continuum of care. Between Medicare Advantage beginning to pay for in home care and the shortage of qualified caregivers we are in for a ride in 2019.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) shook the home care world in April 2018 when it announced that some non-skilled in-home care services would be allowable as supplemental benefits under the increasingly popular MA program. Home care providers have since been scrambling to form payer partnerships, strengthen their data-collection efforts and figure out how to best capitalize on the new opportunity.
Recruiting and retaining qualified workers has long been a challenge in the home care industry, especially as demand rises with America’s aging population. Most estimates put the industry’s turnover rate somewhere between 40% and 67%, though some individual agencies have been able to avoid those high levels by creating career ladders for caregivers and offering stronger benefits packages. The projected cost of hiring and training a new caregiver to fill a vacancy: about $2,600, according to research firm Home Care Pulse.
All signs point to the labor crunch persisting — or worsening — in 2019. Home care agencies should expect more aggressive poaching of workers and legal issues to crop up as agencies clamp down with noncompetes and other contract provisions.
“You’re going to have lots of companies [with] lots of clients and a great pipeline of work,” Angelo Spinola, a shareholder and attorney who represents home care companies at international labor and employment law firm Littler Mendelson, told HHCN in December. “The issue [they’ll] have is that they don’t have enough of a labor force to satisfy their client demands, so you’re going to see noncompetes, non-solicits and direct hire provisions.”
Source: The Top Trends in Home Care for 2019 – Home Health Care News