Family Tree Private Care wants to be more than just a home-based care agency — the company wants to be known as experts in aging.
This means delivering on a multi-service line approach, Alex Bonetti, the founder and CEO of Family Tree, told Home Health Care News.
“We still have some work to do to stand up that innovative model in the markets that we’re already in,” he said. “We do this really well in most of Texas. In Colorado, and we’re making the appropriate investments to make nursing there more robust. We think it’s a really attractive part of who we are as a company and the clients that we serve. In terms of care delivery, we want to get that right in all the markets we are in. We want to make sure that we can promise the clients that we serve the same continuum of services.”
In terms of progress, Bonetti sees Family Tree as 85% of the way there.
As a company, Family Tree offers concierge-level caregiving, private nursing and care management services in Texas and Colorado.
While innovation is vital to the advancement of a company, Bonetti believes that it’s also critical to get the “blocking and tackling” right.
“There are still so few companies in this private-pay space that have scaled, so I think figuring out the fundamentals and getting the basics right still have to be front and center,” he said.
That said, Family Tree is open to any innovation that will best support the company’s comprehensive care model.
Therefore, the increasingly clinical nature of home-based care is also top of mind.
“We saw this clinical need, as far back as 2014, I think we first got licensed to provide nursing services in Houston around that time,” Bonetti said. “We’ve only grown that part of the business since then. I think what we saw then is the same thing we’re seeing play out now. Older adults want to age at home, they still go to the hospital for reasons that are often preventable, and they still come back from the hospital, often in worse shape than when they went in. Nursing was our attempt to address that problem that our clients were having.”
Prior to implementing these services, Family Tree would see clients that needed services like medication administration, but were unable to step in.
“You could do one of two things, either turn a blind eye to it, and just know that that’s happening in the home,” Bonetti said. “Caregivers are going outside their scope all the time, and it’s really hard to monitor that. What we chose to do is just embrace it, and say, ‘We need to be able to do more in the home.’”
Bonetti called Family Tree’s nursing services an essential part of the company’s care delivery model.
“I don’t know how you successfully age at home, without medical support, in addition to non-medical support, beyond what government funding will provide for anyone, I just don’t know how you do it,” he said. “It’s hard in our country.”
Looking ahead, Family Tree has its sights set on the M&A efforts the company announced at the start of the year.
“We do deals of all shapes and sizes,” Bonetti said. “We’ll do deals that a lot of other people overlook, because they’re much smaller in size. When we go to bigger markets, or new markets, we’re looking for slightly larger providers that have some base of operations, a strong caregiver pool, and a good brand. That’s our entry point into that market. We are always talking to people inside our existing markets, and outside of our existing markets.”
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https://homehealthcarenews.com/2023/10/how-adding-clinical-services-has-benefited-family-tree-private-care/
