HouseWorks Enters the Medicaid Personal Care Sector with Connected Home Care Acquisition

HouseWorks announced Thursday that it has signed an agreement to acquire Connected Home Care, a home care provider that operates in Eastern Massachusetts.

The Connected Home Care acquisition comes just one week after HouseWorks’ announced it purchased Atlantic Homelife Senior Care, a private home care provider that operates in Seacoast New Hampshire and Southern Maine.

As a company, Connected Home Care mainly serves Medicaid dual-eligible and private-pay clients. The deal will allow HouseWorks to enter the Medicaid personal care sector.

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“Connected Home Care offered HouseWorks the opportunity to diversify our business,” Michael Trigilio, CEO of HouseWorks, told Home Health Care News. “They were primarily a Medicaid business servicing what are called ‘ASAPs,’ or Aging Services Access Points. HouseWorks was almost entirely a private-pay business. It just made a ton of sense to bring the two companies together.”

Boston-based HouseWorks is one of the nation’s largest independent home care companies. Along with traditional home care services, HouseWorks also helps clients with certain home-modification needs.

While HouseWorks’ private-pay business remains a priority for the company, it was also important to build up a diverse-payer mix, according to Trigilio.

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“When you’re working with a diverse group of referrals, whether it’s a Medicaid referral, or a private-pay referral, or any other type of payer source, it just helps to balance the business,” he said. “We know that our team at HouseWorks and the Connected Home Care team all have an extensive background in the Medicaid business. We can absolutely expand that Medicaid business over the coming 12 months.”

The opportunity to further expand HouseWorks’ footprint in Massachusetts also made Connected Home Care an attractive acquisition target. Once the deal is complete, HouseWorks’ will have six additional offices in the state.

“As a strategy at HouseWorks, we believe that we need to be very deep in the states in which we operate,” Trigilio said. “This acquisition helps us get deeper in Massachusetts, and we see additional opportunities to continue to get deeper in there and in the other states we operate in.”

In addition to Massachusetts, HouseWorks offers services in Maine, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania.

HouseWorks’ purchase of Connected Home Care also enables the company to increase its caregiver workforce. Trigilio noted that the deal allowed HouseWorks to establish offices in places where the company had client opportunities, but didn’t always have caregivers.

Another upside for the company is the added options it gives HouseWorks caregivers, according to Trigilio.

“The geography mix makes so much sense,” he said. “Our caregivers that are coming from both organizations will have additional opportunities to work in the communities they live in instead of having to travel further.”

Looking ahead, HouseWorks is focused on the completion of the deal and then integrating the two companies. The acquisition is slated to close in December.

The company also remains bullish when it comes to M&A, according to Trigilio.

“We are actively working through our pipeline and expect to have some additional M&A activity between now and Q1,” he said.

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