Earlier this month, home care leaders Sara Wilson and Bob Roth joined our Home Health Care News 2025 Outlook webinar, where they discussed their strategies for remaining financially resilient in the industry, the business opportunities they are leaning into at Home Assist Health and Cypress HomeCare Solutions and much more. Throughout the discussion three important […] The post Inside 3 Top Factors Shaping Home-Based Care in 2025 appeared first on Home Health Care News.
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Earlier this month, home care leaders Sara Wilson and Bob Roth joined our Home Health Care News 2025 Outlook webinar, where they discussed their strategies for remaining financially resilient in the industry, the business opportunities they are leaning into at Home Assist Health and Cypress HomeCare Solutions and much more.
Throughout the discussion three important themes emerged — staffing, business growth and data. And these three themes have come up repeatedly in HHCN stories over the past month, suggesting that they will be top factors shaping the sector in the year ahead.
In this week’s exclusive, members-only HHCN+ Update, drawing from the outlook webinar discussion and other industry voices, I examine how these three areas are shaping up to be major points of focus for providers this year and offer key takeaways, including:
– Youth and experience are key workforce themes, as providers focus on young people new to the workforce as well as workers past traditional retirement age
– With transactions picking up, providers also are pursuing growth through new services and care models
– The right kind of data is lacking or not visible enough to key stakeholders
Staffing: A mixed picture
Staffing continues to be a persistent pain point for home-based care providers.
Broadly, staffing pressures seem to have lessened in recent years. In fact, a recent Home Health Care News Home-Based Care Outlook Survey for 2025 found that staffing concerns have gone down by 4%, in comparison to previous assessments.
Comfort Keepers CEO Natalie Black’s recent sit down with HHCN backs up this finding.
“I would say the labor market, for the most part, has become a bit less challenging,” she previously told HHCN.
However, 55% of survey respondents still identified staffing as the greatest challenge — compared to changing payment dynamics, regulatory changes, consolidation — facing the home-based care space in 2025.
Black noted that a less challenging labor market hasn’t meant that one that is completely devoid of bumps in the road.
“Yes, the labor market has become less challenging, but that doesn’t mean it’s less challenging as a whole for our franchisees,” she said. “For us at Comfort Keepers, we’re really focused on our caregivers. That has not changed. We’re focused on recruiting compassionate people, and skilled individuals.”
With staffing challenges top of mind, Cypress HomeCare Solutions has found value in embracing more experienced workers.
“Many of us are not going to fully retire,” Roth said during the discussion. “I really believe that part of the workforce solve for the future is going to be people that are in that baby boomer category, that don’t want to work five or seven days a week, that only want to work two or three days a week and want to be able to have purpose and make a difference in people’s lives. That certainly is one we’re very much paying attention to.”
Roth isn’t alone in this thinking. Senior Helping Seniors is a company that has embraced hiring active seniors to serve as caregivers, as a part of its business model.
Roth also believes that helping train potential caregivers earlier in life could help the industry yield future results; regardless, he pointed out the importance of learning these skills, such as those involved in CNA and direct workforce training.
“We do have a number of high schools that are doing that,” Roth said. “I think we need to really, as a group, get involved in our communities and try to build those skill sets with our young adults. Those are skillsets, whether they get into the health care profession, that they can use with their loved ones, as their loved ones are aging. It’s a generational thing that we really can’t just hope that we solve for tomorrow. We have to be thinking 20 years out, 30 years out.”
Word of mouth is also crucial. Cypress financially incentivizes its caregivers to recruit other caregivers, through referral bonuses. Roth has called it “a secret sauce” for the company.
At Home Assist Health, the focus is investing in the company’s employee life cycle.
“We have to recognize the employee’s experience, from initial attraction,” Wilson said. “Are we resonating with them with our recruiting strategies? Are we living up to that message all the way through their entire employment experience through to the off boarding.
In order to address recruitment, Home Assist Health is also working with academic institutions. The company has partnerships with Arizona State University for its community health worker training education. The company has partnered with a number of high schools as well.
Throughout the years, a number of home-based care providers have collaborated with academic institutions to build labor pipelines.
No matter the approach, it seems that providers see cracking the staffing issue as the key to accelerating their business. The 2025 outlook survey found that 30% of respondents believe that addressing staffing challenges would help their companies achieve its greatest business efficiencies.
Growth: M&A and new service lines
The labor market isn’t the only aspect of home-based care that’s shifting.
We recently reported on a Mertz Taggart report, which found that deals declined in 2024, with M&A activity decreasing from 183 deals in 2021 to 110 in 2023, and 72 in 2024. Yet, things have begun to pick up this year.
“Transactions are beginning to progress,” Cory Mertz, managing partner at Mertz Taggart told HHCN. “While we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves, we’re observing a strong start to Q1 2025 in terms of closed deals.”
In addition to home-based care dealmaking picking up, it’s likely that 2025 will see increased PE interest.
“Private equity needs to buy, and they need to buy fast,” Dexter Braff, founder and president of health care M&A advisory firm The Braff Group, said at WTWH’s INVEST Conference in August 2024. “It’s very likely that 2025 is going to be a big spike.”
Along these lines, home-based care leaders are identifying key growth drivers at their companies this year.
For Cypress, this means continuing to embrace technological solutions in order to differentiate the company’s business.
“We utilize tech and innovation to enhance care delivered in the home, but we’re also looking to build out our on-demand, fractionalized care in our community setting,” Roth said.
Home Assist Health also has a number of main growth drivers for 2025.
“Most definitely, proactive care strategies,” Wilson said. “That’s growing our community health, work services, continuing partnerships such as advanced community, where we can really help put in interventions for social determinants of health areas, expanding to a home health licensure, allowing us to provide more wrap-around services to those individuals we’re already serving. Also, optimizing our business practices and allowing more of our staff’s time to focus on where it matters most, and that’s care at home. I think those all kind of come together very nicely.”
Data: A sore spot
Ultimately, industry insiders believe that home-based care will need accurate and relevant data if it’s ever truly going to progress. And despite the ever-evolving nature of technology and the ubiquity of data, leaders are pointing to an increasingly urgent need for the right data to prove out the home health value proposition and support healthy payment rates.
At Home Assist Health, this means data that will bolster efforts around treating clients living with specific conditions.
“I would love to see us be able to demonstrate through data our impact on positive changes related to health indicators such as maybe diabetes, COPD, weight loss, and then its association with reduced hospitalizations and emergency department visits, and then, of course, maybe an uptick in appropriate use of primary care and specialist appointments,” Wilson said. “I think those are areas of data that would really prove the true impact.”
And as we’ve recently reported, this is work that other at-home care providers, SSM Health at Home and Amedisys (Nasdaq: AMED), are tackling through disease-specific care models.
Aside from care delivery models, improved data is also crucial in relation to home health reimbursement.
Specifically, David Jackson, CEO of Choice Health at Home, recently called for the inclusion of Medicare Advantage data in cost reports submitted to the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
“We’re only cost reporting on our traditional Medicare, so the visibility to the financial ramifications on the agencies is not even being [fully visible] to Congress,” Jackson previously told HHCN. “Whenever the [Medicare Payment Advisory Commission] MedPAC stands up and says, there’s this Medicare margin — and 50% of the population is on Medicare Advantage — you see the issues that are happening.”
Looking ahead, Roth emphasized the need for home-based care to push forward armed with data.
“We need to be able to really establish ourselves and show our purpose in the care continuum, and that’s one of the things we’re lacking,” he said.
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