Since its inception in 2012, HealthFlex Home Health & Hospice has seen its business transform from a small Bay-area company to the fifth-largest privately-owned provider in California. As the company continues to grow, it has its sights set on becoming a fully comprehensive senior care provider.
As a business, HealthFlex Home Health & Hospice delivers various in-home services including home health, hospice, palliative care, social work and personal care.
Over the past nine years, HealthFlex Home Health & Hospice has grown to serve roughly 12 counties in Northern California. The company has gone from one location to four — with a new one on the way. Overall, the company serves about 10,000 clients and patients.
The key to this growth was identifying and going after strategic partnerships and building up a diverse payer mix, according to Alex Koshevatsky, co-CEO and co-founder of HealthFlex Home Health & Hospice.
“Our goal, in the beginning, was to really be a valuable partner to the large health care organizations and systems around Northern California,” he told Home Health Care News. “There were some [accountable care organizations] that we pursued and started working with closely, the hospitals, and we really wanted to make sure we had contracts with all the major [Medicare Advantage] players in our area. That really helped us grow fast.”
Some of the company’s partners, for example, include Brown & Toland, Sutter Health and Kaiser Permanente in Northern California.
In terms of payer mix, Medicare still makes up a big portion of HealthFlex Home Health & Hospice’s business — roughly 60% — but the company has worked to ensure that Medicare isn’t its sole payer.
“Every year in California, we see more and more traditional Medicare patients shift over to the MA plans,” Koshevatsky said. “We’ve kind of fallen in that same theme. I think it has been one of the biggest factors for us, in terms of spreading, growing and working with large networks. The hospitals would not be as appreciative if we were just accepting Medicare, so that’s why they’ve partnered with us.”
For HealthFlex Home Health & Hospice, care pathways and risk-sharing have become the focus of some of its current partnerships.
“Right now, we are working with some of the largest hospitals in Northern California, and it’s really cool that we actually get to work together on patient pathways,” Sofia Koshevatsky, co-CEO and co-founder of the company, told HHCN. “We’re sharing the risk. This means we’re focusing on our goals together, we’re improving programs for patients with [congestive heart failure], [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease] and other conditions.”
The company is also moving into the telehealth space, according to Sofia, who’s married to Alex.
“We are currently working with a few large physician groups on RPM, telehealth monitoring and bringing more of those devices into patients’ homes,” she said. “We’ve seen that this has helped with rehospitalization rates and diverting patients from going to the ER when appropriate.”
Alex believes that this move is happening at an opportune time.
“We were looking at it years ago when it was just in the early stages and we were hesitant because the reimbursement models were not there,” he said. “But we wanted to begin exploring it. Now, I’m excited about it because we’ve been working with physician groups that truly see the value in deploying these devices to high-risk patients that are coming from the hospital.”
Overall, HealthFlex Home Health & Hospice remains ambitious when it comes to growth goals.
So far, all of the company’s growth has been organic but future acquisitions aren’t off the table, according to Alex.
Looking ahead to 2022, HealthFlex Home Health & Hospice is looking to grow into new regions, such as Southern California.
“I think we’ve proven to ourselves and the communities that we serve that we have the right model in place,” Alex said. “The quality is there, so we want to continue growing and expanding, if it’s looking at acquiring, or just setting up new locations or branches, we will continue on that same path.”
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