New Day Healthcare, a privately held home care firm, has been flying under the radar since it formed in July 2020. But with its seventh acquisition, AdvantageCare Home Health, last month, the firm, based in McKinney, TX, made its first public announcement.
While the company, which has 21 locations in four states, has maintained a low-profile, home care veterans are no stranger to its CEO and founder, G. Scott Herman, who previously served at the helm of several other large home care firms including Elara Caring and National Home Healthcare. He talked to McKnight’s Home Care Daily Pulse recently about his latest venture.
McKnight’s Home Care Daily Pulse: You launched your company during the pandemic. What is the mission of New Day?
Herman: We really wanted to burn the ships, which is our mantra. We wanted to just rethink healthcare and home care delivery, because the payer environment was changing so rapidly, literally the ground moving under our feet, with value-based care coming and pay-per-performance. So we chose in the middle of the pandemic, myself with some other seasoned home care professionals, that as operators, we would seek to develop something that was innovative, creative, and where we could do some things along some predictive analytics streams and do it in the middle of what seemed like a pretty tough time.
McKnight’s Home Care Daily Pulse: Give us an example of your innovations.
Herman: The first piece of innovations was not to have a corporate office so that I could continue to hire the best people in country, not just the best people in my geography. It results in a very low corporate overhead … and gives us the ability to put more dollars back into the bedside.
McKnight’s Home Care Daily Pulse: Tell us about your acquisition strategy.
Herman: We want companies that are good-level performers. Mostly, they have very high-quality outcomes, very stable reputations, good management teams in place and clinical care delivery at a very high level.
McKnight’s Home Care Daily Pulse: What were your first acquistions?
Herman: Our first acquisition was a small company in east Texas. And we bought a larger company that covers all of Texas. Then we grew our organization to buy a company based in Missouri to cover Missouri, Kansas and Illinois and have done smaller acquisitions along the way. Today we serve about 9,000 patients, on an average daily census, and we have 6,400 employees. We touch about 82,000 patients a year.
McKnight’s Home Care Daily Pulse: You have said you chose to keep a low profile because you were still building your proprietary platform, Carelytics. Tell us about this.
Herman: We take care of patients in the home care continuum from chronically ill seniors to acute intervention patients, and typical skilled home healthcare as well as hospice. We also have a very good size pediatric nursing program. Our key is to understand when patients have a problem, understand the indicators which are more environmental than diagnostic, or more environmental than clinical, which then say they’re about to have an incident and intervene. We had to have something that helps us understand where these patients were coming from, the different payers, the disparate transaction systems, so that we can get them into a database and begin to log events and Intervene. So we’ve got some data that really supports that. But what we’ve been able to do with that is significantly grow our business.
McKnight’s Home Care Daily Pulse: What else differentiates you?
Herman: The thing that really differentiates us is our ability to attract and retain staff. That’s gonna be what everybody says but how we do it is pretty systematic. We have an enterprisewide culture czar who works full-time with our head of culture development and team member retention. And we integrate our overall plans into every organization that we have and the initial teaching consists of who we are, what we do, what our principles are. We carry those into each organization that we transact with. We leave the local relationships intact. So we don’t rebrand everything, because we think that we know that healthcare is very, very local.
McKnight’s Home Care Daily Pulse: What particular aspects of your culture appeal to employees?
Herman: We’ve also set up some pretty unique remote models that we developed in the Texas market which allow clinicians the ability to be extremely flexible. We manage the entire state of Texas, which currently has about 2,400 on average daily census, from one office in Addison, Texas, and the folks in El Paso, they’re remote.
McKnight’s Home Care Daily Pulse: Any other features you want to highlight?
Herman: We’re able to offer every single part time or PRN employee and our entire organization full benefits: health Insurance, 401K, dental, life insurance, disability, They’re offered that. Who wouldn’t want that? In today’s day and age that’s phenomenal.
Editor’s note: Peer-to-Peer is a feature from McKnight’s Home Care Daily Pulse in which we talk to the leaders in home care, your peers, about their operational initiatives, efforts and ideas. If you think someone in home care would make a good subject for Peer-to-Peer, please email Liza Berger at [email protected].
