One of the largest independent home care companies in the Pacific Northwest is getting larger, and it’s doing so to position itself as a better partner to payers and health systems.
The Liberty Lake, Washington-based Family Resource Home Care announced Tuesday that it is acquiring two independent home care providers based in Oregon, bringing its overall network to 24 locations across three states: Washington, Oregon and Idaho.
“Our ultimate play is to try to create a real regional density,” Jeff Wiberg, CEO of Family Resource Home Care, told Home Health Care News. “That will give us the opportunity to truly be a valuable partner for those types of institutions.”
Family Resource provides personal care, memory care, medication management and light housekeeping, among other services. It has a daily census of around 1,500 clients.
It acquired Tigard, Oregon-based Adeo Home Care and Portland-based Helping Hands Home Care, which are two of the larger independent agencies in the state. That expands the company’s reach to a point where it can cover nearly 80% of the population in the Pacific Northwest.It hopes to get closer to 90% in the near future.
“We are excited to be joining the Family Resource team, as I believe we share best practices and the mission of enhancing the lives of Oregonians by providing compassionate, world-class care,” Toby Forsberg, owner of Helping Hands, said in a statement. “I believe together we can achieve bigger and broader goals that benefit all stakeholders involved. We wouldn’t be making this change otherwise.”
Wiberg’s vision is to be able to cover virtually all of the Pacific Northwest within the next two years. That will require more acquisitions in Oregon, Washington and Idaho, in addition to some de novo locations to fill any gaps.
That coverage will enable Family Resource to present a unique value proposition to potential partners in the region.
“The reason why we want to get that regional density is because of the way home care is evolving,” Wiberg said. “I feel like we need to be able to be responsive to the types of partnerships that are going to exist — with institutional payers, Medicare Advantage plans and others. They are going to see a lot of value in being able to partner with organizations that cover areas where their patients are and where their members are.”
Family Resource has already been pursuing MA opportunities for the past couple of years, so Wiberg’s vision of being a one-stop shop for payers and health systems comes as no surprise. Neither do the acquisitions.
In 2020, Family Resource entered into an investment partnership with Great Point Partners — a health-care focused private equity firm based in Connecticut — to further its expansion and accelerate growth plans.
While the recent acquisitions were made easier by personal relationships that Wiberg had made, Great Point Partners was a “huge help” during the diligence, legal and financing processes, he said.
Prior to its relationship with Great Points Partners, Family Resource merged with Family Home Care, a similar-sized home care provider based in Spokane, Washington, in 2018. At the time, Wiberg called it a “combination of equals,” offering an opportunity to scale the merged company more easily.
Ultimately, the provider hopes to be the dominant private-duty home care provider in the Pacific Northwest.
“We already know that there’s been a lot of consolidation across the health care continuum — in hospitals, home health, hospice and elsewhere,” Wiberg said. “From a partnership standpoint, payers are going to want to — instead of contracting with 40 different agencies to be able to cover a particular geography — pair with one system that really understands the value proposition that they need.”
“My goal is essentially to create that kind of infrastructure,” he added
Beyond Medicare Advantage, Family Resource sees itself as a worthwhile partner for health systems looking to improve their at-home care capabilities.
“I do think that you’ll see this as becoming more of a trend in the industry, as it truly matures, to head into the direction that it needs to go in order to be able to be a meaningful part of the health care continuum,” Wiberg said.
As for Adeo Home Care and Helping Hands Home Care, they’ll immediately be given the opportunity to be a part of those partnerships that Family Resource has made.
Each agency has multiple locations in Oregon, with Adeo Home Care employing around 100 workers across the state and Helping Hands Home Care employing close to 500.
That development won’t come right out of the gate, but it will be a priority of the transition process.
“It’ll be a process over time, but being the size that we are now, we have the capability of deploying certain resources and capabilities that smaller agencies just wouldn’t have the ability to,” Wiberg said. “So we’ve been able to make some of those investments, and we will be able to introduce some of those opportunities to smaller agencies that didn’t have the resources before.”