When Jim Kimzey — then the CEO of home-based care company Tender Rose Dementia Care — retired in 2022, he did so believing he’d completed his time in the industry. He was wrong.

In January, Kimzey announced the launch of his new company, Full Bloom Memory Care. The company is a dementia-focused home care agency that will serve the greater Chicago area.

“The main thing that caused me to come out of retirement is I kept interacting with families, friends of friends, and friends themselves that were dealing with a mom or a dad who had dementia,” Kimzey told Home Health Care News. “I just really realized that I missed helping families, and working with the team. The wheels started turning, like maybe I’m not retired, and what would this look like if I started over, and took everything I learned from Tender Rose, and do it even better this time. That’s what got me motivated.”

Founded by Kimzey, Andy Tysinger and Jennifer Muskat, Full Bloom Memory Care specializes in one-on-one memory care. Tysinger and Muskat were both executives at Delray, Florida-based home care company TheKey.

“Both of them still had a lot of energy, and both of them were pretty enamored with the Tender Rose model and were interested in helping build a company that focused on dementia care,” Kimzey said.

The Full Bloom model

Full Bloom Memory Care operates under a private-pay business structure. Kimzey explained that the company works with families who are looking for a long-term care solution for their loved one, but who want this care to take place in the home.

Compared to traditional home care, Full Bloom Memory Care will take on relatively fewer clients, who need more care over a longer period of time. This also means that the company works with a smaller number of caregivers, over a longer period of time.

“Since we have relatively fewer clients … we can spend more time on the care plan,” Kimzey said. “We can create a training program specific for the client and train up all of our caregivers, not just in Alzheimer’s care, but what are all the issues going on with this particular person.”

Kimzey described this as the company taking a customized approach to improving its clients quality of life, such as tailoring activities to each individual.

Another differentiator from traditional home care companies is Full Bloom’s precise focus on dementia care.

“What I’ve learned is, a lot of times when companies say they specialize in dementia care, they really specialize in what I would call dementia care light,” Kimzey said. “They’re able to handle the bread and butter, run of the mill cases. We have deep expertise, and we’re able to handle the hardest cases.”

Taking on these more challenging cases also helps Full Bloom Memory Care improve the quality of care overall, according to Kimzey.

Looking ahead

Full Bloom Memory Care launches at a time where the demand for dementia care continues to grow. Currently, about 6.7 million people in the U.S. are living with Alzheimer’s, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.

“As the population gets older, more people get dementia,” Kimzey said. “On the other side of that, we’re seeing there’s a shortage of caregivers. There’s high turnover of caregivers in both home care and in communities. What ends up happening is families really struggle to get consistent, reliable care, because, frankly, the home care agencies and the communities can’t really invest in the training of a caregiver who’s going to be gone in three months, and so the first thing that we do is really solve the turnover problem.”

Indeed, finding caregivers who are interested in working longer-term cases is a priority for Full Bloom Memory Care.

“If you take all of the short-term caregivers and clients out of the equation, you just really reduce the amount of chaos that goes on in home care, such as caregivers calling out on shifts on short notice, having to find a caregiver to cover a shift and getting them trained,” Kimzey said. “It really is about serving the right clients and onboarding them successfully, and serving the right caregivers and onboarding them successfully.” 

Looking ahead, Kimzey has a few goals for the company.

“The near-term goal is to get the Lake Forest office up to 30 clients and 60 memory care partners, what we call our caregivers, by the end of the year,” he said. “With that level of activity, we can really get into a good rhythm of hiring and training people, and then promoting them to the next level. We want to open our second market about this time next year, and that’s going to be in the Bay Area. Then our goal is to be in 10 markets within 10 years.”