Last April, Addus HomeCare Corporation (Nasdaq: ADUS), Homecare Homebase (HCHB) and CellTrak announced they were teaming up to build “the industry’s first integrated, enterprise-level solution for all types of home-based care.”
The next big step in that collaboration has come for two of those organizations. Hearst, the parent company of HCHB, has struck an agreement to acquire the Chicago-based CellTrak for an undisclosed sum.
While the deal stems from ongoing efforts to create a unified home-based care platform, it also reflects the growing demand for stronger personal care solutions, HCHB CEO Scott Decker told Home Health Care News.
“Our big clients that we’ve been talking to over 24 months just continue to tell us, ‘Hey, we really need more personal care capabilities at the enterprise level. We’d love for Homecare Homebase to do something,’” Decker said. “We obviously started down the path of building it out. We partnered with CellTrak, and as we dug further into it, [a deal] just kept making more and more sense to us.”
HCHB’s acquisition of CellTrak — announced Monday — is expected to close in the first quarter of 2022. At that point, CellTrak will become a wholly owned subsidiary of HCHB.
“This was kind of putting the icing on the cake of making sure we have all the pieces very tightly aligned,” Decker added.
Founded in 1999, HCHB works with over 200,000 users to service more than 800,000 patients daily, resulting in over 100 million visits per year. The Dallas-based company offers in-home care providers cloud-based solutions aimed at the operations, compliance and financial parts of their businesses.
CellTrak – founded in 2006 and led by CEO Dan Wacker – works with many of the largest providers of personal care services in the U.S. Broadly, its solutions are designed to increase staff productivity while also assisting with compliance, cost reduction and caregiver communication.
Electronic visit verification (EVV) is likewise a major focus of CellTrak.
“CellTrak has been an innovator in the space, meeting the complex needs of both partners and customers,” Wacker told HHCN in an email. “In recent years, CellTrak customers have often been limited as to their use of CellTrak due to interface limitations with EMR partners. While we intend to continue to meet the needs of other EMR partners, it is really exciting to have the opportunity to work with HCHB in such a way that interface limitations are eliminated and innovation accelerates.”
Wacker will serve as general manager of CellTrak moving forward.
“Combining HCHB’s longitudinal record for home health, home care and hospice with CellTrak’s powerful mobile point of care, EVV and communication platform while eliminating the interface limitations on that functionality should benefit agencies and financial intermediaries across the industry,” he continued.
While CellTrak and HCHB announced they were teaming up on the home-based care platform last year, they had already been working together for about a decade.
With that strong foundation and a common purpose, the two seriously began talking about becoming one company in the fall, signing a letter of intent sometime around late October or early November, according to Decker.
“The teams were so aligned,” he added. “We were able to wrap things up probably six to eight weeks after that, signing the deal on New Year’s Eve.”
Adding CellTrak gives HCHB new personal care capabilities, but the deal also comes with other inherent advantages for CellTrak, with the most obvious benefits being HCHB’s scale and resources.
And by joining HCHB, CellTrak now has an in-house partner that’s always accessible to help it execute its strategic vision.
“The demand for home- and community-based services continues to grow at a pace that has attracted the attention of home health and hospice providers, who are now demanding a single solution that provides a longitudinal patient record across [settings],” CellTrak founder and Chief Revenue Officer Andrew Kaboff told HHCN in an email. “With the merger of CellTrak and HCHB – and the continued development of the HCHB personal care platform integrated with the home health and hospice solution – providers will have one solution for the first time, instead of piecemealing technology together and calling it a solution.”
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