Healthview Home Health Services has grown dramatically in recent years, earning a spot on the Inc. 5000 list this year and planning to double in size by the end of 2025.

However, Healthview hasn’t made aggressive growth its main priority. Instead, the company has prioritized achieving growth at the right pace. One of the ways Healthview is maintaining this growth is by focusing on creating an environment that attracts and retains staff, especially in a competitive Southern California market.

While prioritizing strategic growth, the provider is also battling managed care plans. Healthview CEO Steven Gonzalez told Home Health Care News that home health and hospice providers should work to “try to get them out of our system.”

Gonzalez has also fully embraced AI and set its sights on empowering future leaders. HHCN recently caught up with Gonzalez to discuss his approach to growth, managed care’s role in health care and how Healthview is leveraging AI technology.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

HHCN: What are some of the biggest business opportunities you’re seeing in the home-based care space?

Gonzalez: The rate and speed of AI. The integration of AI [can relieve] a lot of mundane work that takes the clinician away from the patient. We’re seeing a ton of time given back to have real patient interaction, chart time is quicker, and there are a lot of those processes that are a lot faster and allow the human component to be more evident in the patient care side. At the rate and speed that’s happening in the next year, we’re going to be even more mindblown. We’re at the cutting edge of that.

Our big push right now is, culturally, we want everyone to be fluent in AI. We have paid enterprise subscriptions for every full-time person that we manage, and they can use it to impact their work. I really want them to be completely fluent in how that works.

What are some of the biggest financial challenges in the home-based care space right now? How has HealthView navigated those challenges?

I would say managed care is probably the biggest issue we’re dealing with.

[With the home health proposed payment rule], we were able to actually have a day on the Hill to talk to people that pay us and have a voice. We don’t have that with managed care. There is no day where we can go to all the managed care companies and plead our case of how ridiculous what they pay us is. The rate cuts of 6% are like child’s play versus what we get paid for managed care to do home health. What you’re seeing is a decrease in utilization. Providers cannot take a patient because we will lose money on every single patient that we take for managed care.

When you drive down the highway and you see big buildings with managed care companies’ names on the buildings, it goes to say, where’s that money going? As home care and home health providers, we have to step up and try to get them out of our system. I don’t think they belong in home health or hospice.

Your company earned a spot on Inc. 5000 this year. What have been Healthview’s main growth drivers in your view?

The driver for growth for us is a good employee experience because, at this point, we have more referrals than we can handle. It’s just having enough clinicians to be able to provide care. We have to be a differentiator — how our culture is, how we treat nurses, how we treat physical therapists, occupational therapists — to be able to drive our growth. It’s really hiring and creating a good experience.

We’re in LA County in Southern California, so we have Kaiser, Optum and health systems that have their own home health and hospice [segments]. We’re up against very big, big-bucks companies that provide different kinds of perks and job security. All those kinds of things that we provide, too.

You say that company culture has been a differentiator and growth driver for Healthview. Can you talk about what that looks like at your company?

A lot of it is just focusing on the actual employee. In terms of our leadership style, we do take a lot of pride in meeting people where they’re at, getting to know who they are and what their plans are for growth, those kinds of things.

I have a tech background, so we’ve relieved a lot of things like charting stress and boring tasks. We’ve been able to automate quite a bit with some oversight, to give people back time and flexibility.

With success comes a lot more margin. We’re still privately held. It’s just me and my two partners. We have no private equity backing. There are no other influences on how we want to run the company. There are no plans for us to ever sell the company. For us, our vision is long-term, so we’re not trying to flip the company. I think when you approach it that way, the staff feels like, ‘Okay, in three years, they’re not going to sell, and then I have to get another job.’ I think it’s just more human. Our leadership team is very available, including me. I’m very available to the whole entire team. That has a lot to do with it.

We’re also leader builders, and we don’t look at it as our most recent promotion. Our executive director for our hospice business, which is a fairly large business, she was a night runner prior to that, but she had potential. [It’s about] not looking at just the standard of what other companies look at. Because we’re so close to people, I think we identify certain talents and culture integration. We’re big on, ‘Are they going to fit within this culture?’ If they could do that, and they have the licensure and the motivation to do it, we have the platform for them to grow. We’re very big on pushing leaders to grow.

What are some new ways you anticipate achieving growth in 2026?

I’ve been a part of very high-growth companies, like 1000s of percent growth. That is a very dangerous proposition, especially when you’re dealing with care. Like I said, we are not in a bad spot for referrals. We get to grow at a pace that is healthy without burning out people and overworking people, but it’s healthy enough for us to make the Inc. 5000. This year, we will double again in size, but when you ask the team, it feels like a regular day. Every single day, we set goals, and the math ends up working out in the quarter for us to have grown. It’s really the daily dedication of consistency … hitting those goals every day.

What else does Healthview have in the works right now? Are there any programs, pilots, or interesting partnerships that you would like to share?

We take care of a population that, unfortunately, a lot of providers don’t want to take. We work with recuperative care, which we also own and manage, which is essentially a skilled homeless shelter. We work with assisted living [facilities] that provide housing for people who are unhoused. We provide housing, and then also skilled home health or hospice. We have a large managed medical hospice population that we take care of. In many instances, they would be homeless without the recuperative care, the shelters that we help get them placed in.

Our staff is taking care of one of the harder populations, so our goal is to find purpose-driven nurses. We do want to contribute to the cities’ overall success of helping [people in] the streets, too.

As CEO, what are your main areas of focus for the rest of the year?

I would say to continue to focus on employee experience and try to do that very well. If we can do that, we’ve proven that margins get better and growth happens. I just focus on that, and then I think a lot of the other things kind of follow. Also making sure [employees] feel safe, that these technologies aren’t going to put them out of work, and that it’s just going to amplify their work.