Recover Health: Managing Home Health Care from Afar During Covid-19

Recovering from a serious health event often requires professional assistance. But many patients prefer to recover in the comfort of their own homes.

Luckily, that’s exactly what Recover Health offers. The company takes a mission driven approach to home health care. Read about how the company has built a strong niche and navigated a turbulent year below.

What the Business Does

Provides home health care services for those in recovery.

Recover Health CIO John Fraser told Small Business Trends, “Recover Health offers post-acute health care to clients in their homes. This means we offer services to people who have recently discharged from the ER or Hospital or are trying to prevent a hospitalization while benefiting from the comfort of their own home.”

Business Niche

The Mission.

“What got me excited about Recover Health was their focus on serving as many clients as possible, regardless of their ability to pay or if their insurance company didn’t pay as much as others.”

How the Business Got Started

To turn industry experience into a strong mission.

The company started back in 2009 and has grown from $11M to $70M in revenue while expanding into 31 branches and 6 states. Greg Von Arx and Kara Von Arx set out to take their prior experience in post-acute health care with a focus on their mission and guiding principles.”

Biggest Win

Navigating 2020.

“It started with a change to how our services are reimbursed by the government from a model called PPS to PDGM. This put more focus on quality and outcomes over number of visits. Recover Health utilized 10 years of data combined with tools and products from Zoho to ready our company and create KPIs to more easily manage the business. Recover Health came out on top of competitors, in part due to this preparation and BI tool usage.”

Biggest Risk

Also, the Year 2020.

“COVID-19 exposes our employees and clients to a life-threatening illness with long term effects that are not yet known. At the same time, our services are more important than ever as people choose to stay at home longer versus going to assisted living or skilled nursing facilities.”

Lesson Learned

Make the most of business intelligence tools and documented processes.

“We have a highly talented team that put much of the success on their own shoulders. While I admire the efforts, I also recognize that creating mini versions of our leaders through consistently documented process and oversight through business intelligence tools, we might have been even more ready for faster growth.”

Secret Weapon

Zoho.

“My first introduction to Zoho was Zoho CRM which I found to be just as powerful as Salesforce at a fraction of the cost. We used it both to track leads for our private pay business and as a tool for our sales team to track their in person sales activities with referral sources. Prior to Zoho we had no way to track activities or create smooth transitions when turnover occurred. Now we have entire dashboards of metrics used to track activities and their impact on downstream referral success.

“After Zoho CRM we found Zoho Recruit. While we had an HRIS and Applicant Tracking System (ATS) for when people had applied, we didn’t have anything to track potential candidates or leads that had not yet applied. Our market is extremely competitive and the only way to grow rapidly is to seek out passive candidates and explain why Recover Health is a great place to work. This system allowed us to track all activities on early employee leads. Later we integrated Zoho Campaigns. Today we use Zoho Recruit, Campaigns and partnerships with state licensing boards to reach a mass of more than 326,000 potential employees in 10 states.

“We added no less than 6 different Manage Engine products to our technology team including Service Desk Plus as a ticketing platform. Prior to Service Desk Plus, we had 1-2 people using email as a way to track IT or other corporate shared service requests. Today we have complete metrics and sophisticated queues with more than 40 technicians in the system.

“The biggest value created for Recover Health has been Zoho Analytics. It was the 2nd or 3rd product we got access to but it was not truly leveraged until 2020. We have turned more than 750 reports run by our 31 branches into 7 dashboards for our branches and executive team to stay on top of the business. Instead of 1000+ people spending hours running these reports weekly, they are now automated and broken down by region branch or employee with the click of a button. This has saved us 1000’s of labor hours and has improved client care, margins, turnover and profitability. With COVID, being able to manage a business from afar has also given us the flexibility to support more work from home and less travel between branches.”

How They’d Spend an Extra $100,000

Rewarding and protecting team members.

“If it was entirely up to me, I would give 50% to our direct care staff that are putting their lives on the line to keep people healthy. The other 50% would be used to improve our remote monitoring capabilities to allow us to manage care from afar, reducing the amount of in person time needed without sacrificing quality of care.”

Special Program

Supporting employees through a non-profit.

We also have a non-profit called “Heart of Recover.” It helps provide services and scholarships for employees at Recover Health to further their education/careers. Through career paths we have several people in leadership today who have started as a direct caregiver with no post high school experience and now are Regional Directors with help from the program.”

Images: Recover Health