Talkin’ Shop: Transcend Staff Chats About the State of Home-Based Care

With many of our articles and research papers, Transcend aims to have a discrete point of view and concrete takeaways. We want to ensure insights and thoughts align with our philosophy and perspectives on home-based care so we can pass useful ideas on to our clients and partners.

While we’re all for brevity and tangible information, sometimes it can be fun to just sit down and chat. There’s so much going on these days that it can be refreshing to just have an open-ended conversation about the state of the community. In this episode of our Transcending Home Care podcast, I took time to sit down with my amazing coworker and Senior Partner Stan Massey.

Stan has decades of experience in home-based care. He has supported some of the biggest rebrands the community has seen and has written some of the most memorable and moving campaigns to connect family caregivers to the support their loved ones need. I have been fortunate enough to join Transcend after spending time at several national home-based care providers, as well as working in advocacy and policy for one of the major trade associations.

Where We’ve Come From

As a part of the conversation, Stan and I chatted about the changes we’ve seen in the last several decades, including the growth of palliative care. The number of community hospices that have identified upstream needs for their patients has increased dramatically. Hospice’s interdisciplinary philosophy has applications and benefits well before a six-month prognosis. We reflected on how that’s grown both through palliative care, but also via services like PACE, adult day and other forms of senior support and advanced illness management.

With this growth has come a realization that an agency’s mission has, in a lot of cases, outgrown its name. Whether by geographic expansion, service line diversification or M&A, brand names have had a limiting or confusing effect for consumers and would-be staff.

It’s also clear that the lack of a standard definition for palliative care is a stumbling block for many programs. While this does give programs the ability to experiment and innovate, it seems clear that it’s a hindrance to measurement and providing standard data and outcomes. Still, it’s been exciting to watch palliative care blossom in recent years.

Where We’re Going

We also talked about what the future might hold. The 800-pound gorilla was clearly the rise of Medicare Advantage and value-based care. In 2023, Medicare Advantage crossed the 50% threshold, accounting for more than half of Medicare-covered lives in the United States. And we know that Medicare has a stated goal of having all enrollees in some sort of value-based arrangement by the end of the decade. It’s clear that forward thinking home-based care agencies are going to have to adapt to these changes.

Against this backdrop, we discussed how providers might think about building resiliency for a future that increasingly includes value-based care. Perhaps it’s service diversification, or maybe it’s geographic expansion or new innovative partnerships. Whatever an organization decides, now is the time to invest in the competencies that Medicare Advantage and value-based care will require. That may mean data infrastructure, or it might mean investments in contracting expertise.

Overall, it was great to just sit down with a kindred spirit and talk shop. Stan and the rest of the Transcend team have been incredibly welcoming and it’s an honor to work here in this collaborative environment.

And collaborate we do! Transcend has deepened our expertise across policy, marketing, change management, employee engagement, sales and data analytics infrastructure. Just like the community we aim to serve, we’re adapting to new models and paradigms. If you have a tough problem related to sustainably growing your home-based care business, let’s have a conversation. Our mission-driven firm just might be able to help. Email us at hello@transcend-strategy.com, and we won’t just help you meet your goals, but Transcend them.