By most measures, 2021 was a resounding success for home health company PathWell.
Now, CEO Raman Brar has even bigger plans for 2022.
“I would say our goals [for the next year] is doubling down on what we did in 2021,” Brar told Home Health Care News. “And some of that we’ve already done.”
Based in Fairfield, Connecticut, PathWell has around 100 employees, split evenly between its back-end workers and caregivers in the field. Overall, its patient census is around 400.
PathWell began as a technology company aiming to help other operators with back-end issues. But when COVID-19 hit, it changed direction to become a provider itself, equipped with the capabilities it once exclusively sought to give to others.
PathWell has now grown into a multi-state provider through expansion and acquisitions. As part of its growth, Brar said PathWell has at least one and possibly multiple acquisitions in the works that should come to fruition over the next eight months.
“There are a couple of deals that we’re pretty actively working on,” Brar said. “There are two that, sitting here in April, I have very good visibility into and we might even be able to get another one done towards the end of the year.”
PathWell doubled its census from around 200 to close to 400 from 2020 to 2021. Brar expects PathWell will be able to double that again, and even possibly reach the 1,000 patient mark.
He also expects the company to double its earnings from year to year.
“Keeping the numbers round, we entered the year around $5.5 million, and we would imagine this year, assuming our acquisition targets are met, we’ll be well north of $10 million,” he said.
In order to do that, Brar said solidifying the company’s foundation by hiring key members of the leadership team was a focus in 2021. Bringing on folks like Kelly Federle as chief clinical cfficer and Vik Shanbhag as the VP of rehabilitation services helped give the team more stability.
Streamlining recruitment and engaging with candidates in a more proactive fashion was another key to PathWell’s 2021 growth, Brar said.
Additionally, another key aspect to PathWell’s early success is its clinical quality assurance (QA) process, whose back-end team is based in India. Brar said the two doctors that lead the QA team help streamline the training process and get employees up to speed a lot quicker than normal.
“[Employees] are properly trained going in. They know the expectations,” Brar said. “Naturally, they’re doing all their own charts, all their admissions, discharges, all those doctors are being QA’d by our clinical QA team. Then they already have a relationship because they were there from day one.”
In September, PathWell acquired Caring Angels Home Health, a business with a significant presence in both Virginia and West Virginia. At the time, Brar told HHCN the focus for the company was to push volume through the company’s solid foundation.
In 2020, PathWell acquired Shamrock, a home health care provider based in Southern Connecticut. Its acquisition of Caring Angels, which was advised by the M&A firm Agenda Health, extended its reach further down the East Coast.
Looking ahead, being able to offer larger and legacy agencies something valuable as partners is on the table as well still.
“We know that we have something to offer to those agencies,” he said. “They might have great brand and community relationships, but we could go in and improve their clinical QA, their communication systems between clinicians. That’s exciting.”
Moving forward, it will be important to stay transparent to the rest of the team and to new clinicians joining PathWell through acquisitions, Brar said.
“We’re very crisp and clear with our strategy,” he said. “Everybody knows what we’re doing. We’re doing a roll up. This is not some secret. We lead with it and we lead with the value proposition of a scaled company.”
The home health care industry is stressful enough, Brar said. That’s why it’s important to be on the same page with clinicians and other members of the staff as they continue on the journey together.
“At the end of the day, we’re in an industry which has just a crazy amount of regulation coming down the pike,” Brar said. “Reimbursement pressure is at an all-time high, the labor challenges are tough. So anything we can do to build processes in place and build a foundation to make their job easier, it makes everybody happy.”
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