Altaris — a New York-based, health care-focused investment firm — recently acquired Sharecare, the owner of the home-based care company CareLinx.

Atlanta-based Sharecare is a digital health company that leverages a data-driven virtual health platform to manage patients’ health. It works with employers, health plans and government programs. CareLinx, meanwhile, coordinates personal care services and offers home-based clinical care services.

With the recent acquisition top of mind, Home Health Care News caught up with Tim Husted, who serves as senior vice president and general manager of Sharecare’s provider and CareLinx businesses.

Husted explained how the Altaris acquisition furthers Sharecare’s evolution, what CareLinx’s goals are around growth and much more.

HHCN: Let’s start with the Altaris acquisition. What does this mean for the company? What does it allow you to do that wasn’t possible before?

Husted: I think the move enables Sharecare’s continued evolution into a more agile, fortified kind of organization. Becoming a private company gives us additional operational flexibility to continue to innovate and push industry-leading solutions to our customers. I think it’s a very positive outcome for Sharecare.

Altaris wasn’t the only company interested in purchasing Sharecare. What made them, in particular, the right company?

We went through the process of sharing our strategies and views on the next phase of Sharecare. They connected, in a very direct and immediate way, with where we’re trying to go, and why we’re trying to go there.

I think there was a really good early respect for the purpose of what we were trying to do. They are health care-focused, that’s their space, and I think that made a lot of the conversations quicker and deeper. We could talk in real depth with them about not only what we wanted to do, but why we wanted to do it. And how we felt like it would be of benefit, both from a financial standpoint, but also from the purpose of being a leader in health care. They respected that in a way that made it advantageous to partner with them. They were tremendously curious throughout the process, and were really supportive of where we feel like Sharecare is going in its next evolution. 

In 2021, Sharecare purchased CareLinx. Can you give an update on the strategy direction Sharecare has in place for CareLinx?

CareLinx continues to evolve as a proven solution to helping close gaps in care. As we continue to focus on the core purpose, which will always be non-clinical caregivers in the home, we’re just finding so many ways to evolve those capabilities.

Not only to address isolation and loneliness, but really to help improve the outcome of that patient, or that member, depending on the environment in which we’re serving them. Health care has grown over that time in its appreciation for these types of solutions. I feel like we are moving in the direction where the health care community is moving, because more and more we see the industry aligning to the idea that in-home caregiving can not only identify and address social risk factors, but it also can potentially address clinical gaps, where engagement is the biggest risk or barrier to success.

What are some of CareLinx’s near-term growth goals and what’s the driving force behind those?

The most important and broad goal for me, and my leadership team, is continuing to ensure that the caregiver experience is a professional and best-in-class experience. Caregivers have a tremendously difficult job, and caregivers often come from a lot of different backgrounds. Many come to caregiving from a starting point of being a family caregiver — an unpaid, untrained caregiver — and then as their personal situation evolves, they move towards becoming a professional and trained caregiver. Others come into this profession from other kinds of inputs, whether it be clinical roles, whether it be educational roles, but the caregiver experience is a real opportunity that we take very seriously, because we want to make sure that caregivers are in a position to succeed.

As tech enablement opens up a world of opportunities in home care, the human is still going to be there. Making sure that human’s experience – when it comes to how they serve their patients – is the best possible experience that is enabled to be the most successful through technology, I think is a real goal today. And probably for the next five years.

Short-term, we have a couple of really key programs that we’re a part of that I think are real focuses for CareLinx. Over the last year, we’ve had the opportunity to be part of the VA’s TERHM program tech-enabled respite home care pilot. This pilot was driven by the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, and it’s really aimed at providing respite care to eligible veterans and their caregivers. It’s building on the success of a respite relief collaboration that they had with the Elizabeth Dole Foundation and the VA geriatrics and extending care program. They created a partnership with CareLinx and they launched this pilot, called the TERHM pilot, and it offers accessible and sustainable home care services to veterans. It utilizes the CareLinx model to enable veterans and caregivers to easily access each other, lower the cost of home care services, but also ensure that the caregivers are paid a fair range. We did the pilot in six markets, and it was incredibly successful. The satisfaction rates were like an 8.6 of 10, and likelihood to recommend was a 9.2 of 10. That program can expand now, it’s proven the pilot was successful. One of our goals is to partner with the VA, the administration, to really grow that program, because there’s a lot of veterans who will benefit tremendously from that.

Another goal — CMS has decided, rightfully so, that they want to take a very direct approach on addressing dementia. Dementia is an interesting condition, because most diagnosis is supported at home by family caregivers. There is the CMS GUIDE program that was rolled out. We’re partnering with provider organizations to provide respite care for these dementia families through the program. I’d like to not only master the way we’re doing that, providing that respite support, but also becoming a really strong partner to the family caregivers in those programs.

In 2023, Sharecare announced that it had expanded its home care offerings by bringing its care management and transitional care programs for high-risk populations to more than just Medicare Advantage beneficiaries. Can you give an update on how this is going? Are there any metrics you’d like to share?

When we talk to our partners in health systems, they estimate about 50% of hospital admissions are what are called social admissions. Social admission means that that person is being admitted simply because the provider in the emergency department does not have a reasonable belief that if they sent that person home, or to another place, that they would maintain or improve their condition.

Non-clinical caregivers as a point of release – supported by clinicians through telehealth, with a focus of getting that patient back to their primary care physician or back to their specialist – can have a profound impact on improving hospital readmission rates. That can be the difference in creating the availability for beds for other patients, and so we’ve made tremendous progress.

What other business opportunities are you seeing in the home-based care landscape?

We continue to see opportunities in the direct-to-consumer space. Families prefer to have their loved ones age in place. That continues to be a very valid business. What is evolving is that families are not just looking to buy that caregiver to come into the home, whether it be for more full-time care, or maybe respite care, they’re also looking to be empowered with care plans, so more tech-enabled care planning. Not only do you have the professional caregiver, but you have more of the nuanced, individualized plans that are aligned to that person’s health needs. We’re seeing a lot of melding of those two capabilities.

Another area that we continue to see growth, from a CareLinx standpoint, is we do have a clinical staffing business. Our clinical staffing business has a broad set of various licensed clinicians. Historically, we’ve served skilled nursing facilities, covering vacations or staffing gaps, but we see more opportunities with some of the CCRCs. They want to be able to not only support their in-house teams, but also potentially bring both clinical and non-clinical staffing together. We can do both, because in many CCRCs, you’re going to have independent living in the same facility as a memory wing, for example. That’s been an area of growth.

What are some of the challenges Sharecare is navigating?

One of the challenges in the last few years has been the challenge to find caregivers. The demographics are working against us here.

There’s a growing population of people who need caregiving, want to stay in the home. There’s limits in the number of beds available. There are waiting lists for skilled nursing facilities. There are bed challenges in hospitals, and there really is a higher demand than there is a supply of caregivers right now. Another challenge, along the lines, is those who pay for caregiving are struggling with some of the impacts that some of the inflation and costs have had on the industry. We have our most challenging conversations around, how do we continue to recruit and bring people to this awesome profession? We are good at it, but that is still a challenge that we shouldn’t have to be so good at. I wish it was easier, because it’s a really good profession, and it’s a really good opportunity. We just have to create the environment.