How connectRN Is Assisting Home Health Providers Solve The Staffing Shortage

The marketplace for home health providers has become more complex as providers not only have to find and serve patients, but find and convince clinicians to work for them.

To do that, staffing companies like connectRN are helping home health providers navigate these new challenges.

“Home health agencies have to adapt to a world where the clinicians who they have traditionally relied on, who have experience and are comfortable going into their patients homes, now have more opportunities out there,” Ted Jeanloz, CEO of connectRN, told Home Health Care News. “What we’re seeing is that, for home health agencies, the marketplace for their services actually has become two-sided.”

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To date, Waltham, Massachusetts-based connectRN has raised over $95 million in funding. It just finished its fifth-consecutive year of 150% growth, according to Jeanloz.

Home health providers have played a large role in that success.

“It used to be that they had to find, sell and service patients,” Jeanloz continued. “Now, they also have to adopt a similar approach for clinicians. They really need to convince clinicians why working with them is the best path for their career.”

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What started as a platform built to find nurses and other health care professionals work, particularly in skilled nursing facilities (SNFs), has now grown into a much larger platform with a vested interest in home-based care.

About a year ago, Amedisys Inc. (Nasdaq: AMED) took part in connectRN’s $76 million funding round. So far, the partnership has been a learning experience for both parties.

“We’ve done a great job working with them to refit our platform for home health, and it’s been exciting to expand in their care centers, to grow with them and help them solve what is probably the biggest problem in health care right now,” Jeanloz said. “It’s certainly been a bilateral learning experience. I’m sure we’ve learned a lot more from them than they learned from us, but we’ve helped them with velocity, and I think we’ve helped them be willing to try new things.”

The mission for connectRN’s platform is to help improve client’s lives by giving them more access, opportunity and support.

As one of the giants in home health, Amedisys knows that it needs to lean on partnerships in order to thrive in the future.

“There’s been some good innovation around us on the idea of staffing,” Paul Kusserow, chairman and CEO of Amedisys, said this week at the BoA Home Care Conference. “Clearly it’s something we’re going to be taking some innovative and serious steps toward. Making the investments we’ve made, looking at other partnerships that are out there and learning from our friends out there, [it’s clear] we need to expand our thinking.”

Stakeholders are in a labor market where nothing can be taken for granted, Jeanloz said.

Home health agencies have historically operated with a surplus of labor. As a result, the standards for employment are high and requirements that need to be met are specific.

The team at connectRN understands those requirements can’t change, nor should they. But the path to get those requirements can be streamlined.

“We understand the requirements; those you can’t change,” Jeanloz said. “We need to maintain very high standards. But is there a different way that we can get there that helps us do this faster? That makes it less onerous for the nurse who is really looking for flexibility, looking for opportunity, but maybe is not as locked in as they once were? We need to take that as a new status quo and build around that.”

Looking ahead, Jeanloz is hoping against a worst-case scenario as the economy leans toward a recession. He hopes the labor market doesn’t take as big of a hit as it did in 2008 and 2009.

However, he’s not so sure that kind of economic outlook will affect connectRN the way it would other businesses.

“I don’t know how that will impact us,” he said. “Because I think that our business, the flexibility that we deliver clinicians in the model that we deliver, we may actually be counter cyclical. We may actually do better in a recession than than not. I think our big challenge remains: How do we find a way to help providers, health facilities and home health agencies build economically strong businesses?”

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