Home care provider Best of Care is building out its preferred provider partnership roster, recently sealing its fifth relationship with an independent living community.

Last week, independent living community Freestyle Living, located in South Yarmouth, Massachusetts, selected Best of Care as its preferred provider of home care, care management, private pay nursing and move management. Preferred provider relationships create “captive audiences” to whom Best of Care can present a set of high-quality services in one location while offering employees an attractive workplace, Kevin Smith, the company’s CEO told Home Health Care News. 

“Finding these types of communities and partnering with them is a more efficient way of positioning all the great services we can provide in one place,” Smith said. “People can take advantage of these services at varying times in their life and know that those services will be available to them when they need them, because they’re literally right on site. We have an office right in the building where they can come and talk to a representative from our company.”

Quincy, Massachusetts-based Best of Care offers in-home care, care management, move management and private nursing to 1,500 clients.

Best of Care’s care management director, Erin Lynch, spearheaded the relationship with Freestyle Living. She learned that a new independent living community was opening and met with Freestyle Living’s general manager to discuss Best of Care’s existing preferred provider relationships.

From there, the conversation “accelerated” to create a tailored approach for Freestyle Living, using some of the most successful elements from Best of Care’s other preferred provider relationships.

The company’s customized, flexible approach to care was one of the factors that attracted Freestyle Living to build a preferred relationship with Best of Care.

“Best of Care is focused on providing individuals with opportunities for choice in how their care is delivered, and the services that they provide are varied,” Sandra West, general manager of Freestyle Living, told HHCN. “For residents who are living in independent living and have different needs that change over the course of time, it’s really flexible to be able to add or subtract services. With a company like Best of Care, which is experienced in providing in-community care as well as providing in-home care, it’s just a great fit.”

Part of Best of Care’s flexible approach to care includes the option for short-hour visits, some as brief as 15 minutes, for “light touch” assistance. This may involve a caregiver checking if a client has taken their medication or conducting a socialization check.

On-site staffing early in the relationship was also a plus for West.

Having an office with a Best of Care staff member creates name recognition and makes it easy for patients to ask questions, Smith said. It also allows Freestyle Living to share information with prospective residents or family members during community tours.

The “real benefit” of preferred provider relationships for Best of Care, Smith said, is that independent living communities are attractive workplaces for employees. The communities are often “fresh, vibrant and well-maintained,” and offer more regularity than visiting clients in their homes, which can sometimes come with challenges like finding a place to park.

Best of Care currently works with close to 150 clients through two of its preferred provider relationships. As its newer relationships progress, the company’s CEO hopes to double that number and have up to 300 active clients across all five communities it works with within a year and a half.

With five preferred provider partnerships under its belt, Best of Care now has momentum that eases the process of building preferred provider relationships.

“When we only had one or two, it took more convincing,” Smith said. “Now, five communities have gotten behind this concept. It’s made those conversations a bit more natural and conversational, as opposed to anything that might have felt like we had to come in with something to prove, and work hard to prove something.”

For independent living operators, preferred provider relationships allow them to “excuse themselves of that business dynamic,” and let Best of Care solve problems on their behalf, according to Smith. This is especially important for care management, Smith said, because it can be tricky to determine how to support residents as they age or as their disease states progress.

For in-home care providers, tracking new independent living developments offers valuable partnership opportunities, Smith said.

“The benefit for us is by establishing that relationship from the jump, when residents move into that community, there is not some long period of their residency where we don’t exist,” Smith said. “Their resident experience will have always included us in it.”