The right partnership can be a powerful tool for businesses looking to expand their service offerings, enhance their internal operations or even gain an edge over competitors.
Over the years, home care providers have gone beyond just forming relationships with industry peers. These collaborations have yielded a significant return on investment (ROI) for agencies.
In general, home care organizations have partnered with food delivery companies, fitness companies and home-modification companies, just to name a few examples. For 24 Hour Home Care and Georgetown Home Care, collaborations with ride-share companies have driven key results.
24 Hour Home Care’s “Ride With 24” initiative is a partnership between the company, Uber (NYSE: UBER) and Lyft (Nasdaq: LYFT). It connects seniors with on-demand transportation. Instead of needing a smartphone, a senior can call a toll-free number and have a concierge-like individual help them book a ride over the phone.
Though partnerships between home-based care providers and ride-share companies have become more common over the years, 24 Hour Home Care was one of the first in the industry to team up with Uber, Ryan Iwamoto, president and co-founder of 24 Hour Home Care, told Home Health Care News.
“We were one of their beta partners for their Uber Health platform,” he said. “The idea for the partnership started because we saw one of our offices using Uber. When we drilled down, we found out the office was using Uber to get caregivers to clients in emergencies, or in situations where they weren’t able to transport themselves to the client’s home. We thought that leveraging these services was an amazing idea.”
Los Angeles-based 24 Hour Home Care is an independent, non-medical home care provider with 23 locations across California, Arizona and Texas.
24 Hour Home Care eventually began pursuing ride-share services for its clients and created Ride With 24.
“Not a lot of caregivers are comfortable driving clients, or they might not have access to transportation,” Iwamoto said. “Typically, the clients always want a caregiver with transportation. That created this imbalance of staffing.”
Utilizing these services allowed 24 Hour Home Care to solve some of its staffing challenges because it took away the need for caregivers to provide transportation to seniors.
The company saw even more ROI when it later began to leverage this partnership with hospitals as well.
“Historically, hospitals have used taxis to get patients out of the hospital and into the home,” Iwamoto said. “As we know, taxis can be costly and not always the best experience. We felt like, ‘Hey, can we bring this service over to the hospitals?’ For the same reasons that you and I probably use Uber or Lyft — why can’t the hospitals use that?”
24 Hour Home Care pitched the idea of managing on-demand transportation at hospitals. The first of these partnerships to come together was with UCLA Health.
Currently, 24 Hour Home Care has on-demand transportation partnerships with more than 160 health care organizations, and 80 of these organizations are hospitals and health systems.
Iwamoto pointed out that what began as a partnership formed to improve operations within 24 Hour Home Care has progressed into a much larger opportunity to become a value-add for hospitals, health systems and other health care organizations.
“We saw this big opportunity, not just with our clients and the caregivers, but also with the hospitals,” he said. “Throughput has been one of the biggest challenges for hospitals for some time. Usually, the reason why there are throughput challenges is because they can’t get the patient out of the hospital because there’s not adequate transportation to get them back home. Working with us allowed them to do this in a seamless way.”
Ubers fuels staffing
Georgetown Home Care — a home care agency that provides personal care, respite care and senior companionship services — is another organization that began working with ride-share companies before most of its industry peers.
“We had reached out to Uber years ago, asking if there was any way to set up a system where we could order multiple cars during the day from our desktops,” John Bradshaw, CEO of Georgetown Home Care, told HHCN. “At the time, they politely said no, but after a couple of years, they came back to us. They were setting up this program for doctors’ offices, and since we had reached out in the past, they wondered if we might beta test it for.”
Georgetown Home operates in the D.C. metro area as well as Montgomery County, Prince George’s County and Northern Virginia.
Uber reaching out kicked off the partnership between the two companies, and Georgetown Home Care now had the ability to order multiple cars a day, at the same time, for both caregivers and clients.
Similar to 24 Hour Home Care, this partnership addressed staffing challenges.
On Georgetown Home Care’s end, it dramatically changed the company’s hiring practices, opening up a larger pool of potential caregivers in the process.
“Prior to that, we didn’t hire caregivers who didn’t have a driver’s license or access to a car,” Bradshaw said. “If they couldn’t get to and from assignments, and weren’t able to drive our clients to appointments, it was highly unlikely we would be able to use them. Clients want a caregiver who can drive them to, for example, doctor’s appointments and the grocery store.”
Currently, Georgetown Home Care has roughly 500 caregivers on staff. About one-third of these caregivers don’t have drivers licenses or access to reliable transportation, according to Bradshaw.
“That’s a third more caregivers that we have working for us that we wouldn’t normally have,” he said. “That makes a huge difference. It solidified our bench of potential caregivers so much more.”
Looking ahead, Bradshaw believes that it’s important for home care providers to branch out and embrace crossover industry partnerships.
“We genuinely need good home improvement companies to work with, we need good mortgage provider partners to help families who are struggling with the cost of home care, we need good food providers,” he said.
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