Winter ’15
17
www.homecarefla.org
FEATURE
Where to Go for Private
Home Care Business
By Steve “The Hurricane”
O
ne of the best reasons for
being in health care is
that anyone can become a
patient of yours one day,
and most will, even yourself. With that
in mind, it can be an overwhelming and
daunting task to decide where to go in
order to find the best source for the life
sustaining “substance” your private home
care business needs and craves. There are
some obvious places like hospitals or an
Area Center for Aging, but those are often
closed to private home care agencies,
or are overrun by long established
competitors that simply can’t and won’t
be dislodged. So if you’re a brand new
private duty home care agency, where
should you focus your efforts in order
to get the best referrals? Here are three
referral sources I recommend, and how
you can be the driver in tapping into their
referral potential.
1.
SKILLED NURSING
FACILITIES
Skilled Nursing Facilities (SNFs) are,
personally, my favorite places to go for
referrals. Think about it, who ends up in
an SNF? Typically, the weakest patients
from the hospitals end up there. These
patients have the need for care and tend
to be larger cases (i.e. 40+ hours a week).
Plus, they require the urgency to start
services since they are expecting to be
discharged soon.
The drawback on SNFs, however, is that
they are not all created equal! You can go to
and find
50 or more SNFs within a 25 mile radius
of your business. But not all of them will
have the discharge numbers to send you a
boatload of referrals. This is why you have
to assess and “qualify” your SNF leads.
Of the 50 or so in your market, you will
want to quantify the three or four SNFs
that discharge 50+ patients a month (You
can usually tell which facilities do this
because they make it extremely difficult
to get involved and start referring). But an
SNF that discharges 50+ patients a month
can easily refer one patient a week in your
direction. The methodology is simple:
Which patients should they send to you?
They’ll probably send the patients most
likely to be readmitted into the hospital
within 30 days, since Medicare will not be
enough to keep them home safely. So if
the SNF discharges 50 patients a month,
and roughly one in every five will end up
back in the hospital (national readmission
rate is 19.3%), that leaves twelve patients
for the SNF to refer. It’s difficult to
determine exactly who will be readmitted
upon discharge, but from both the therapy
and nursing notes, let’s just say the SNF
can foresee eight of those twelve patients
being readmitted. Now out of those eight
patients, not everyone can afford out-of-
pocket care, so let’s cut that number in
half, and there you have your four patients,
or one referral a week. With 52 weeks in
a year, you’ll have yourself an SNF that
qualifies as a very strong referral source.
Here’s how often you should
visit your SNFs based on their
potential to refer you:
• Less than 20 discharges/month:
recommend visiting once a month
• Between 20-50 discharges/month:
recommend visiting twice a month or
every other week
• Greater than 50 discharges/month:
recommend visiting weekly
The discharges you want to look for are
Medicare patients, since they have the
most access to affording and funding
private care. So now you have the formula.
Go out there and start qualifying your
SNFs! Once you find the places that have
the potential to refer, do everything you
can to get inside their doors. Remember:
the busier they are, the harder it will be
to get in with them — but the juice is
worth the squeeze!
