There are only two options when dealing with a staffing shortage: getting more people or making better use of current people.
Lee Teslik, the founder and CEO of Reverence, is particularly interested in the second option.
“Making better use of your existing people is a combination of deploying people in the most thoughtful possible way and also making it feel good for them,” Teslik said at Home Health Care News’ Capital + Strategy event. “You need to retain them better than most folks are currently retaining them. I think there’s a real opportunity to innovate on no. 2.”
Reverence is a New York-based digital home-based care coordination platform. The company’s core technology does what a scheduler would do and automates that work with a particular lens on filling difficult-to-cover shifts.
The company works with a number of different types of providers, including home health agencies, post-acute facilities and health systems.
“What we’ve seen over the last couple of years is that it’s felt like everyone has heavily anchored towards the, ‘Let’s go get more people,’” Teslik said. “Because of that, it feels like folks are seeing diminishing returns, either because they’re not finding the people or because finding them is preclusively expensive. They’re paying three to five times for a shift through a contract or workforce temp agency compared to what they would be paying for an internal person.”
Apart from obvious fixes like higher wages and better benefits, Teslik believes that workforce flexibility could be a way to better retention.
Years removed from the onset of the pandemic — when millions of caregivers left the workforce — it’s clear that many of them did not leave because they wanted to, but because they had to.
“A lot of folks who left the workforce did so because they’re a part-time family caregiver and they need to be doing other things,” Teslik said. “If you set up a per diem float pool, or an hourly float pool, where you’re giving these folks an on-ramp back into your business and giving them a way to work on their terms where they set the hours, it’s kind of a win-win.”
Technology plays a role in that. Target Global, a private equity firm and Reverance’s lead investor, recognizes that as well.
Target Global’s fit with Reverence came from — among other things — a mutual understanding of what the problems in home-based care were and how they should be fixed.
“With any of these things, it’s kind of about fit, right?” Teslik said. “We had a lot of shared values and shared ideas about what was possible within the space. We also had a shared understanding of problems within the space. I don’t want to put words in their mouth, but I also think they saw a big opportunity, in particular, around the workforce.”
The solutions, Teslik believes, are far beyond just finding new people.
“I love asking providers, ‘What is your staffing mix strategy?’ It’s remarkable how often it’s a very difficult question to answer,” he said. “Between full-time, on-staff folks, per diem on-staff folks, contract workforce, where do you want to land? And why? And then how do you set up technology that actually enables you to do that and enables you to seamlessly balance across these different pools of people? I think there’s a ton of opportunity to do more in that space.”
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