In-Home Care Provider Makes Bet on Medical Private-Pay Services

An in-home care provider is making a bet.

That bet is that while the amount of people needing care will rise over time, the percentage able to afford private-pay home care is going to dwindle. And in order to win out on that population, it needs to be hyper-focused on it.

That is – in part – why Family Tree In-Home Care is becoming Family Tree Private Care.

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The other reason is that the company has gone from what would be considered a mom-and-pop business – about $4 million in revenue in 2016 – to a point where it is in every major market in Texas and Colorado, sometimes with multiple locations. It was originally founded in 2011.

The rebrand is effective as of Tuesday in the North and Southeast Texas markets, and will be effective in the “coming months” in Central Texas and Colorado.

“We knew that the market was changing,” Daniel Gottschalk, the president of Family Tree Private Care, told Home Health Care News. “We started really transforming our business a few years ago to really differentiate ourselves from the market. We wanted our brand to reflect that differentiation.”

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Family Tree has acquired 14 companies in the last four years, and some of those companies were still operating under their legacy brands. Logos, location names and all other branding will now be under the Family Tree Private Care umbrella moving forward.

The company’s services include both non-medical and medical home care, but all on a private-pay basis, not through fee-for-service Medicare. In total, it has about 2,000 employees throughout its network.

“Changing our brand, for one, unites a variety of acquired companies,” Gottschalk said. “We needed to unite brands, and we also needed to unite systems. And we needed to have a shared vision that really showed the market exactly what we’re really all about.”

Family Tree started its acquisition spree by acquiring other home care companies, and then branched out into care management as well. What really changed things, though, was its recent acquisition of a private nursing agency. It had already been doing private-pay, at-home medical care, but hadn’t done it “quite as well as them,” according to Gottschalk.

Now those medical services in the home are a larger part of what the company does.

And though it does have medical and non-medical home care capabilities, plus care management, Family Tree does not want to be a jack of all trades. At the same time, it does.

It wants to provide the most all-encompassing private-pay services it can to the population that can afford it. Part of the reason for that is avoiding a diversification of payer sources, and thus a reliance on government-controlled reimbursement rate increases or decreases.

“We can privately provide for a family that wants really complex medical care in the home, or just a nurse doing a caregiving task,” Gottschalk said. “But for the most part, these are folks that have really complex needs, and they want you to bring medical services into their own home.”

There is inherent risk to that approach, but the rebranding shows that Gottschalk and Family Tree are willing to bet on themselves, on their direct care workers and their new brand.

It also allows them to raise wages for staff and be more competitive in the hiring market. Because the company is reliant on private pay – and traditionally wealthier customers – it’s able to tinker with those wages more seamlessly.

“Obviously, recruiting is still a struggle, as is finding high-caliber people. … We’re fighting the same battles as everyone else,” Gottschalk said. “But we have had the luxury of being able to pay pretty well for caregivers at the top of the market, because we are the top of the market for the clients. We’re not always the most expensive agency in town for clients, but we’re up there. We’re competitive, but in the top percentages.”

Moving forward, if the company can’t be that top-of-line, private-pay provider in a certain market, it’s not interested in that market, Gottschalk said. Plus, for now, the company wants to build out the markets it is already in under this unified brand.

At the same time, growing to more states down the line is not off the table in the longer-term future.

“We believe our community has long needed a leader in exceptional curated care to emerge, and for the past decade, our team has worked tirelessly to fill that void,” Alex Bonetti, the founder and CEO of Family Tree Private Care, said in a statement. “I could not be prouder to align our private nursing, caregiving and care management service lines with a single identity that emphasizes our commitment to high-quality private care and strongly represents our purpose of transforming the aging experience.”

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