Well Care Health is divesting its personal home care division to Avid Health at Home.
For Well Care Health, it’s an opportunity to capitalize off of the demand for its well-established home care footprint, while also focusing on a new strategic direction moving forward.
“There’s a couple of drivers behind [the move],” Well Care Health CEO Zac Long told Home Health Care News. “I think this is such a positive step for both Well Care Health and for our home care team. On the Well Care side, it allows us to more deeply focus on our core service lines of certified home health and certified hospice. We see a tremendous amount of opportunity to grow responsibly through those two operating divisions.”
The Wilmington, North Carolina-based Well Care Health provides home health and hospice care to over 4,000 patients via its over 600 employees. It operates across 40 counties in North Carolina and South Carolina. The home care segment represented about 7% of its overall net revenue.
The two companies will continue to work closely with each other during and after the handoff, meaning Well Care won’t be losing the clinical value of home care for patients in its markets. All of Well Care Health’s employees are being retained by Avid Heath at Home.
On its end, Avid Health at Home is a new home care platform backed by Havencrest Capital. The company first kicked things off with the acquisition of the Chicago-based For Papa’s Sake Home Care. Its CEO, Jen Lentz, told HHCN in August that the company was primed and ready for immediate and significant expansion – specifically in the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic and Mountain West.
Since May, it has closed on three acquisitions. Overall, Avid Health at Home is providing personal care and private-duty nursing services across seven locations in the Chicagoland area and North Carolina.
“Knowing Well Care’s reputation for being a best-in-class provider was what initially attracted us to the opportunity,” Lentz told HHCN in an email. “When we really got going in the process, it became evident how strong the culture was. Zac and the Long family have built an incredible organization, and we are thankful they chose us to be stewards of the home care business after 35 years.”
Lentz previously told HHCN that Havencrest Capital – where she also serves as an operating partner – ultimately decided to go the platform route because it wanted the home care enterprise to be data-driven and technology-enabled. Ultimately, Havencrest believed rolling up smaller acquisition targets was the easier way to achieve that vision.
“The Well Care team is packed with talented clinicians and operators, and we are confident that we have acquired a group that can carry out Avid’s mission to be a data driven, tech-enabled home care company,” Lentz said.
Long added that he is happy that the home care team can now join an organization that is “fully dedicated and focused on home care services.”
“As we were evaluating the opportunity, we felt like that focus and that dedicated service model will be instrumental in allowing them to unlock their potential and their continued growth in home care,” he said.
Well Care Health wants to be on the cutting edge of the payment shift in home health care, moving more toward value- and risk-based contracting with payers.
“We’re really excited to deepen our focus on not only home health and hospice, but also our strategic priorities, which include improved payer relationships, value-based care positioning and taking a major step forward in terms of our hospice service line,” Long said.
As for Avid Health at Home, it plans to continue to be highly acquisitive over the next year.
“Avid’s near-term pipeline is full of some great companies both within our current footprint and in new markets in our existing states,” Lentz said. “As we look ahead to 2024, Avid will be expanding its operations into new states through additional M&A.”
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