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HouseWorks announced earlier this week that it would be acquiring Associated Home Care (AHC), the personal care division of Amedisys Inc. (Nasdaq: AMED).
In addition to the two directly involved parties, HouseWorks CEO Michael Trigilio believes that the key winners from the deal are the caregivers and payers.
“The workforce is going to have great opportunities, from more training and supervision to a career ladder and increased wages — hopefully closer to $20 an hour,” Triglio told Home Health Care News. “With this scale, we can be really creative in trying to keep caregivers from leaving this industry, as they’ve been doing over the last few years.”
The second winner – payers, particularly in Massachusetts – will now have a major partner that can provide them with great information and data in the home through a larger network.
“Now there’s going to be data connectivity through such a large employee base that’s going to be consistent,” Trigilio said. “In Massachusetts, there are roughly 35 different types of payer contracts that are signed between Associated Home Care (AHC) and HouseWorks. Imagine a world where you have 4,000 to 5,000 caregivers delivering the same care, on the same platform, to all of those payers. There’s a great value in that data that we’re able to give to them.”
HouseWorks will take over the 13 care centers previously operated by Amedisys, adding to the company’s eight locations throughout Massachusetts, Southern New Hampshire, Southern Maine and the Greater Philadelphia area.
The makings of the deal
Near the end of 2022, HouseWorks — which also offers home-modification services — partnered with InTandem Capital Partners LLC, a health care services-focused private equity firm.
After that partnership was formed, Trigilio reached out to Amedisys.
Trigilio, who is also the CEO of eCaring, was formerly the president of the personal care division at Amedisys.
“With Amedisys indicating that they were focused more on their network versus operating personal care, we knew that there was an opportunity for us to go in and make this as easy as possible for all of their employees, their payers and, also, their corporate teams in Nashville and Baton Rouge,” Trigilio said.
Given the InTandem partnership and Trigilio’s familiarity with Amedisys, the deal – though competitive – was more seamless than it otherwise may have been.
“It was important for Amedisys, and for us, to ensure that we had the ability to announce this deal without a whole lot of strings attached,” Trigilio said. “Given the opportunity that we have with InTandem, we were able to walk them through what this would look like from Day One to Day 180. InTandem was well aware of how this would work if we were able to make the deal happen. It was important to have a partner that was going to be very comfortable going after something like AHC immediately.”
After about a month’s worth of talks, the deal became official. Earlier this week — in a reported $50 million deal — the home health and hospice giant Amedisys announced it would divest its personal care division to HouseWorks.
The personal care line of business HouseWorks will take over is primarily in the Northeast, Trigilio said, with an additional care center in Tennessee.
With the acquisition, HouseWorks will now have over 4,000 caregivers in Massachusetts serving over 15,000 clients. It will also become the largest provider of home care in the state, serving every zip code.
Further expansion
Looking ahead, Trigilio sees more opportunities for HouseWorks to build on its rapidly growing platform.
“With a partner like InTandem and the strong management team at HouseWorks — one that is growing pretty much daily — we fully anticipate having additional opportunities in adjacent states very soon,” Trigilio said. “It’s certainly our goal to continue to scale this business with our financial partner and the team that we have on board here.”
Continuity in the business and operations is something Trigilio is excited about. Just this week, he met with someone on the Amedisys team that he previously worked with for over two decades.
“Through this acquisition, we are acquiring a tremendous amount of personal care talent,” he said. “We’re going to use that talent to grow in Massachusetts, but also other states as well.”
Moving forward, Trigilio hopes that HouseWorks can close on at least a couple more deals in the next 12 to 24 months.
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