InHome Therapy wants to be the ultimate problem solver in home health care as the industry undergoes a number of regulatory and workforce-related challenges.
The company recently acquired Contract Therapy Services Inc., a provider of physical, occupational and speech therapy, as well as registered dietitian services.
The deal falls in line with InHome Therapy’s strategy: to grow its footprint through acquisitions. It allows the company to enter Western Florida and Los Angeles for the first time, according to a press statement.
NewSpring Capital-backed InHome Therapy is a King of Prussia, Pennsylvania-based provider of physical, occupational and speech therapy. The company functions as a full outsourcing partner for home health agencies.
“There are a lot of challenges that home health agency operators have today,” Matt Murphy, CEO of InHome Therapy, told Home Health Care News. “They are dealing with a nursing shortage and all the changes in reimbursement from PDGM. Providers have looming value-based pricing issues that they’re wrestling with. Obviously, quality is always something that is top of mind, so we wanted to enter a place where we could really solve problems for home health agencies.”
As a company, InHome Therapy’s value-add is allowing home health providers the space to focus on the above-mentioned challenges while it takes therapy off of their plates.
But Murphy doesn’t view InHome Therapy as a staffing company.
“We really think about it as being a partner to the home health agency operators in running their therapy departments,” he said. “The way our model works is that we handle every aspect of their therapy business.”
As part of the acquisition, Contract Therapy Services’ staff will become part of the InHome Therapy system.
Additionally, David Davis, co-founder of Contact Therapy Services, will take on a business development role within the InHome Therapy network.
“The InHome Therapy culture and the team’s vision for growth perfectly align with ours,” Davis said in a press statement. “Their primary goal is to offer high-quality care to more people across the country and provide therapists with the tools they need to do so.”
Moving forward, Murphy wants his company to cement itself in the home-based care space as the type of provider partner that can make things more seamless for home health care providers.
The Patient-Driven Groupings Model (PDGM) notoriously de-incentivized therapy. Or, at the very least, made it less of a focal point for providers, which did spark criticism over the model.
“What we’ve done is really lean into that,” Murphy said. “If we were a staffing business it would just be all about how many visits we can get, but because our model is set up as a partner, we track utilization, just like our agency partners do. What we really endeavored to do is provide the best outcome, given what the utilization matrix is going to dictate.”
Over the course of the next few years, InHome Therapy is honed in on making moves that directly correlate to growth.
“We’re looking at some selective acquisitions that will hopefully take us further into the Midwest this year,” Murphy said. “We’ve opened up in Indiana and Ohio with a key customer. There are a lot of great places for us to provide our services. The mission isn’t necessarily to be everywhere in the U.S., but we think there are probably 10 to 15 key markets where we will have established business.”
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