For AccentCare, a new leader at the helm of its home health business means a readjustment – or reaffirming – of the company’s priorities.
Last month, Chris Mayne stepped into the role of home health president at AccentCare. Mayne comes armed with industry experience from his previous roles at UnitedHealth Group’s (NYSE: UNH) Optum.
Now that Mayne is at AccentCare, his focus lies on high-quality care and ensuring that the company has a strong clinical team in place.
“In my experience in other parts of health care services, if you get quality and talent right then everything else falls in line from a business outcomes perspective,” Mayne told Home Health Care News in a recent conversation. “For me, the beautiful thing about quality and talent – and prioritizing that – is they’re totally interrelated.”
During the discussion, Mayne also talked about how the company was leaning into organic growth, lessons learned from Optum and how AccentCare is navigating contemporary home health challenges.
HHCN: What are some of your short-term goals for the home health segment of Accentcare, and what are some of your long-term goals?
Mayne: My top two goals are really around quality and talent, and that’s in the short term and the long term. Our goal is to be the employer of choice in the home health and the post-acute sector. I think we’re set up well to do that.
In my experience in other parts of health care services, if you get quality and talent right then everything else falls in line from a business outcomes perspective. For me, the beautiful thing about quality and talent – and prioritizing that – is they’re totally interrelated. If you emphasize and do well on quality, then you’ll retain talent. If we do a great job of developing, recruiting and retaining talent, then that leads to high-quality care as well, based on their experience.
I’ve been spending a lot of time over the last two months just listening, learning and building the relationships with the teams here. I’m going all across the country and into markets and understanding what we’re already doing, what we want to keep developing and improving. That’s been the big focus for me in the near term.
Before joining AccentCare you were the president of Optum’s California care delivery unit. What lessons are you bringing with you from your time at Optum?
I had an awesome experience with our Optum care delivery team. It was a team that I joined maybe 10 years ago when it was under a different company, and then Optum came in about five years ago, but with a similar business model throughout. What I experienced in that business model is the power of value-based care, and how that can really unlock what we’re all trying to do. That is the quadruple aim — high quality; high patient and provider satisfaction; and lower health care spend.
A lot of what I took away from Optum is the ways to do it, but also the fact that it can be done, and there’s some delivery models that are set up to do it successfully. Honestly, that’s one of the things that attracted me to AccentCare. I looked at home and post-acute care as one of those models, and as the health care services that are similarly set up for success to deliver the quadruple aim.
This is a place where not only can I do that, but I can do it at scale thanks to what’s been developed at AccentCare over the years. I’ve taken away from some of my past experiences, wanting to be connected to a culture and a team that had a commitment to what I call the culture of caring, caring for each other, caring for our patients. That’s the No. 1 thing. I’ve already seen that in spades my first couple months here, which has been fantastic.
What are some of the key growth drivers that you’re focused on for home health care at AccentCare?
As I mentioned earlier, the best way to drive volume is to grow your talent.
Just as important as a growth driver for me is our relationship with our referral partners. That’s a lot of what I’m also doing as I’m visiting with those partners, with our teams. What are the ways that we already provide service excellence, and what are the things that we can do in addition to what we’re already doing?
How important is M&A to the growth of home health care at the company? What makes an attractive acquisition target for AccentCare?
M&A has, obviously, been a big part of the growth story for AccentCare and a lot of other players in this space over the last several years.
For a lot of reasons, it’s not going to happen at the pace that we’ve done it in the past years. Our biggest focus right now is on organic growth. When we look at where the biggest opportunities are, it’s almost all on the organic side. If there’s a unique opportunity for us to do some additional acquisitions, we’re certainly going to investigate and see if they makes sense.
This has some advantages. We can spend a lot of time really focused on the care delivery and keep enhancing and improving that, and maybe a little bit less time than we have in the past on integration activities, which is needed when you do a lot of acquisitions.
In the past, joint venture partnerships have been a big part of AccentCare’s strategy. Moving forward, how big of a role will these partnerships play and what kinds of organizations is the company looking to partner with?
The joint venture partners that we have are super exciting for me. They’re a real differentiator for us and our partners. It’ll play a big role — that’s the short answer. We’re absolutely continuing to look for opportunities to do more joint ventures.
We look at organizations that are interested in new ways of driving quality results across that continuum of care. I mean, that’s where the magic happens.
What home health challenges are top of mind at AccentCare, and what are some of the creative strategies you’re looking to implement to address them?
One of the biggest challenges that is top of mind for me in my first few months here is, of course, the talent shortage, which is an industry-wide challenge.
There’s a lot of appetite to invest here. That starts with listening to our teams about what’s needed to help improve. That’s a lot of what I’ve been doing, as well as addressing those barriers as I’m hearing them. The input from the frontline teams is super valuable when it comes to talent, and then also looking at opportunities to improve our programs. The things that don’t get solved branch by branch, but that we need to systematically take what we have, and keep improving on. We’re doing that across all the normal channels, training and development, recruiting funnels, total rewards, all of the above.
Another challenge I’d throw out is, ways that we can continue to streamline the admin burden for our clinicians. We’re continuing to look at that with our tech partners.
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