If you are thinking on the lines of setting up a home health care service business, you will need to prepare yourself well before you start looking for clients. Remember, you will need a lot of preparatory tasks for it such as:
- From creating a proper business plan to your service plan
- From arranging for adequate funds to developing an efficient management system for your workforce.
While all other aspects may be well within your capability to create and manage, arranging for funds is something that will need a lot of effort, planning, time and concern. This is something that will keep your business running even at the times when there is a dearth of clients.
Well, you may have heard about PRN funding but that does not give you the authority neither does it provide you with the desired capital for running your home health care agency, especially you being a startup.
Therefore, you will need to know everything from the basics to the most intricate nuances of starting a home health care agency and doing a good business.
Meaning of home health care
As for the basics, you should start with knowing the actual meaning of “home health care,” which by itself is a very broad category. This is an industry that forms one of the basic parts of the entire healthcare system and typically different people have different notions of it and define it in a variety of ways such as:
- For some, home health care is a specific type of medical service provided to patients at home and
- For others, it is a kind of service that comprises of both skilled kinds of medicine as well as the non-medical type of home health care.
Well, both medical and non-medical home care service needs a special set of skills and training because both involve a lot of more varied tasks as it is apparent.
- As far as skilled Elder Care are concerned, it involves providing proper medication, wound dressing, nursing, and therapeutic services. These are those specific services that are typically provided at a nursing home, hospital, or medical clinic setting.
- The non-medical home health care services, on the other hand, involves providing support and assistance to the patients with day to day living activities, especially for the ailing and aging senior citizens who want to spend the rest of their lives staying in their homes. These non-medical home care services may include anything from meal preparation to helping in bathing and dressing, from light housekeeping to arranging for transportation to meet the doctor.
Now, that you know the actual meaning of home health care service, you can very well gauge that you will need a competent, skilled, and highly professional workforce to deal with the varied needs of the recipients of your care services.
Therefore, in order to ensure that you meet all the needs and expectations of the patients and their family, you must focus on creating a team of professionals who will be able to do a lot of varied things such as:
- Provide skilled nursing services
- Work as a nursing aide
- Do a lot of Home health care jobs that fall under social work and
- Provide physical, occupational, learning, and speech therapy.
In order to recruit the best health workers as well as raising the required capital for your business, you will need to conduct foolproof market research to know the extremely competitive landscape.
Importance of market research
A proper market analysis will be your greatest weapon. This will help you in ways more than one such as:
- It will help you to know about the needs of the clients that are not met currently by your competitors. You can build your service plan around it to stand apart and excel in your service.
- You will also know about the changing trends of this growing and ever-evolving industry both on a national and at the global level.
A competitive analysis will also help you to know and identify where your competitors have fallen short in their hiring and marketing strategies so that you can take the advantage of it and make successful attempts to penetrate into the market more easily.
Other steps to follow
Done with your market analysis, you must now use your PRN funding experience into invoice factoring, once you have it lined up. The steps you need to follow here involves:
- Creating a business plan that should essentially include an executive summary, description of your company, the services you intend to provide, a marketing plan, pricing policy, management and organizational plan, ownership structure, operational plan, supplies needed, financial plan along with a cash flow projection.
- Registering with the state is the next important step to receive Medicare and Medicaid payment and to acquire the license from the state, business incorporation and tax identification number, National Provider Identification number, and other requirements.
- You must also get Medicare and Medicaid certifications to provide other services such as nursing and physical therapy and for this, your state may need to take a jurisprudence exam.
- Lastly, recruit a professional and the best team who will provide direct and indirect care to the patients and their families. You may take help of the social media for that matter.
Interview them well and make sure that you conduct a thorough background check so that you stay away from any legal hassles should there be any issues with the care services provided by one of your employees.
Get going
Now that you are all set, it is time to get your clients. You must have a solid and effective marketing strategy designed for that. For this you will need to:
- Have an online presence through your professionally designed website
- Focus on SEO
- Make your differentiating factors clear and
- Join local organizations and forums to spread your name.
Finally, make a solid financing plan that will ensure growth. Use your accounts receivable factoring to deal with the slow imbursement periods of Medicare and Medicaid billing or receiving third-party insurance. Invoice factoring will allow you to have enough money for spending and continue growing your business.
