Strategic Planning For Your Home Care Agency

Is your agency starting to huddle and plan for next year’s growth milestones? Don’t spin your tires, and instead, follow along as we guide you to plan for success with realistic and actionable steps.

Setting smart goals and expectations can help you and your team reach the next revenue milestone that you want to hit. We’ll talk about: 

• Finance
• Operations
• Caregiver and client feedback

How to strategically manage finances going into a new year

Every agency’s goal is to achieve 100% revenue collections, while increasing billing rates and trying to get new clients in the door.

The first step here is controlling what you have control over. You don’t have control over when payers send over payments, but you can control how your team responds or reacts to claims and manual EVV data submission. 

As you diversify or have diversified payer sources, billing and managing cashflow can become more complex and cumbersome. This requires a lot of specific knowledge and manual follow-up and resolution processes.

Once you’ve brushed up on maximizing your agency’s revenue, you can look at opportunities to improve those numbers. You can do that by:

• Implementing new rate increases: You might have a couple of clients with different rates, so you might consider a flat percentage or tiered dollar amounts, whatever works best for you. 
• Trim the fat: Are there any payers with long reimbursement cycles that aren’t worth working with? Start to make cuts to the business when you have steady streams of referrals coming from other payers and sources. 
• Upskill your staff: Do you have an in-house biller who has only been performing billing tasks? Consider cross-training your office staff in different departments, like scheduling, recruiting, and marketing. This helps your team to be nimble in a pinch and keep business running smoothly, especially in your absence. 

Improve operations in time for the new year.

Technology is one of the fastest-evolving parts of home care operations, and you can use this to your advantage. Many agency management systems were piecemealed together, requiring you to use multiple systems and workarounds for proper integration. This makes day-to-day work complicated and tedious. 

As you look at planning for next year, write down all of the systems that your agency uses and what their use is. The longer the list, the more opportunity there is to consolidate. 

See if any systems can perform multiple functions and streamline your daily operations. There’s also a great opportunity to integrate (or further integrate) artificial intelligence and automation into your agency too. 

There will be parts of daily operation that you and your team enjoy—whether inquiry calls or marketing in the community—that need to be managed by a person. 

There are other parts, however, that can be easily assumed by technology that can shore up manual processes, giving you and your team valuable time back in your week. 

READ MORE: How AI and Automation Impact Home Care Agencies

One of the other benefits of automating and relying on technology is reducing burnout. Having to meticulously comb through rows and rows of data and sift through claims information can be stressful, knowing the weight and importance that billing and cashflow has on your bottom line. 

Incorporate caregiver and client feedback for the new year.

As an agency owner, you’re steering the business’ ship in the direction that you feel is best. It’s important, though, to see what your clients, family members, and caregivers have to share about their experience. Sometimes it takes an outside perspective to break through a problem. 

Activated Insights (formerly Home Care Pulse) offers caregiver and client surveys that you can have done for you. On the other hand, no matter what stage of business you’re in, you can initiate your own feedback program. 

Here are a couple of questions to keep in mind for caregivers:

• Why did you apply to work with us? 
• What do you like about your job? 
• What would you like to see changed? 
• Would you refer us to a friend or family member looking for a new role?

Here are a couple of questions to keep in mind for clients/family members:

• What helped you to choose us over other agencies?
• How has your experience been with us this far? 
• What could make things better? 
• Would you refer us to another family who is needing similar services?

When you start to see feedback coming in, this can be a great time to gather your office team together and see what you can immediately implement. And maybe a longer-term plan for things that can’t be done right away, but maybe next quarter, etc…?

Run your business the way that you want to, armed with the information and feedback from your team, caregivers, and customers. 

Start 2025 on a good note.

As your team gathers for the holidays and plans ahead, look at internal opportunities to improve the caregiver experience while improving care quality for clients. 

That isn’t just a supply or demand concern, it touches every aspect of your business. Great care keeps the revenue flowing. Great caregivers do the same. 

By keeping those two audiences at the forefront of your business will make and continue to make your agency successful.