Care Across America
"Care Across America, an Approved Senior Network® Podcast"—your go-to source for engaging conversations and practical insights from home care and senior care experts across the United States. Each episode will spotlight industry professionals, and their referral networks, sharing impactful stories, proven strategies, and innovative solutions in senior care. This podcast is perfect for professionals, adult children of aging parents, and family members struggling with senior care choices and care.
Care Across America
Valerie Darling with Home Care Matters & Home Care Quote Interviewed on Care Across America
When most families reach out for home care, they're already in crisis mode. They need help immediately, but have no idea what services actually cost or why. This fundamental disconnect has plagued the home care industry for years – until now.
Valerie Darling, owner of Home Care Matters in Georgia, developed an innovative solution called "Home Care Quote" that's revolutionizing how agencies price services and communicate with families. Born from necessity during COVID when in-home assessments became impossible, this data-driven tool creates transparent, customized quotes based on specific care needs rather than vague hourly rates.
What makes this approach truly transformative is the visual "care spectrum" that shows families exactly where their loved one's needs fall on a continuum from basic/independent to acute care. "When you're helping your mom out of the car, that's just you helping your mom. When we do it, that's a transfer assist – that's personal care," explains Darling. This visualization bridges the terminology gap between professionals and families while justifying why certain care costs more.
But pricing transparency is just the beginning. Darling leveraged the data collected through Home Care Quote to create meaningful career pathways for caregivers – addressing the industry's persistent recruitment and retention challenges. By developing training modules for specific conditions like dementia or stroke care, caregivers can earn certification "stars" that increase their base pay rate. The company recognizes "learning leaders" with incentives and advancement opportunities, acknowledging that caregivers are "the face of my company."
As the tool evolves to integrate with major scheduling software platforms, it's becoming a comprehensive system for agencies to manage leads, create service plans, coordinate with other providers, and protect margins. In an increasingly competitive market, Home Care Quote offers agencies a way to differentiate through professionalism, transparency, and data-driven operations – while giving families the education and clarity they desperately need during difficult transitions. Isn't it time we transformed how we approach pricing and staffing in home care?
View More at HomeCareMarketingNews.com
My name is Valerie Darling.
Speaker 1:I'm the owner and managing director I guess operator for Home Care Matters in Flowery Branch, georgia, which is a little sleepy lake suburb northeast of Atlanta, are an active agency and are in the throes of everyday clients and calls and intakes and care and recruiting, which is a big one these days.
Speaker 1:That's pretty much how we got started. How it got started was just like most people have a story which was taking care of my mom and that kind of led me down this path from a corporate career and pivoted and got into this and it's probably the hardest job I've ever had but the most rewarding job I've ever had. And I really don't think of it as a job. I say job because that's what everybody knows, but it's really. It really is a, I think, a calling and you have to have a special heart and temperament and soul to be able to do it and do it for a long time and stick with it because it's hard. It's heart and temperament and soul to be able to do it and do it for a long time and stick with it because it's hard, it's a hard, it's a hard industry.
Speaker 2:Yes, I would agree. A lot of people say that and I would agree All of you. We talk to pretty much everybody, not only because they have a story, but because they stay with it, because it's it feeds their soul and otherwise the hard days would have had them out of here a long time ago. Yeah true, really hard, and there's all kinds of any job you have. There can be hard things, but we're also talking about a very emotional job or business to be in dealing with families who are overwhelmed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, usually you get them in a 911, in a crisis mode, because one of the challenges that we have as an industry is obviously education and getting people to recognize that one day, sooner or later, that day will come when somebody in their family or themselves are going to need help, and they're usually not educated on it and really don't know that any of the different entities whether it's home health or hospice or home care. We get them and it's quite emotional and it's very they're tired and they're afraid and they really don't know what they need.
Speaker 2:I see a lot of consumers and families out there who are searching around.
Speaker 2:They're looking at stuff because they know, yeah, maybe something's up, something's coming, things aren't going quite as well as they were before. We just saw mom at Easter, or we just saw her on the 4th of July or Christmas, and the house wasn't the way we thought it was going to be, or maybe the bills haven't been paid or something is not quite right, the yard's not being taken care of, and then there's what we call the straw that breaks the camel's back, and that's usually some hospitalization or an ambulance issue or a fall or just getting forgetting to turn off the stove, forgetting to where you parked the car. Yeah, it is an emotional time and a lot of education, and you've done a great job with all of this, with Home Care Matters, and I want to also talk to you about something that is unique to you guys. It's not just to you, but you developed and you use in your business that I think not only consumers can really benefit from, but also other home care agencies. So let's talk about that.
Speaker 1:Okay, thank you, and it is a. It has been a journey, for sure, and one of the things, as you were saying, when people come to us and they're overwhelmed and you start talking to them about care needs, they are usually in complete denial about what care they really need or their loved one needs, and they don't really think of it in terms like we do. When you're helping your mom out of the car, that's you helping your mom out of the car. When it's us helping your mom out of the car, that's a transfer assist, so that's an ambulation assist, so that's personal care. To try and explain those terminologies and the acronyms that we use in the industry, it becomes just very abstract to people and they have a very hard time comprehending what that means or how it affects them, or how do we derive at a price, right? So COVID was the turning point for us, especially because we couldn't go into somebody's living room. Nobody was allowing anybody to go outside their own homes alone coming into theirs, and especially if they had somebody that they didn't, it was maybe compromised or could be, and especially if they had somebody that they didn't, it was maybe compromised or could be. So we had this on the drawing board for a while and it was just that was the moment that made us birth it.
Speaker 1:So we have a product that we call Home Care Quote, and what that product does is it allows us to do a very individualized, custom and personalized quote on the care needs for that particular person, and we ask very specific questions about the care, the transfers and the assisting and the bathing and all those types of questions that usually, yes, they can walk. All of a sudden you get there and they have to be hoisted up and they have to use a walker or wheelchair, depending on how far it is. So this gets very specific into the detail and then, once we get all that information, we use AI A lot of it's AI. It helps us with pricing and as well as care rates, because we have labor factors and labor rates based on where it's being applied in the country and then it calculates a quote and on that quote it's a PDF and it's shareable and it's a breakdown of all the information that family or person has given us and it also includes a color-coded care spectrum. We call it the care spectrum and basically it's like a weather map. It's a pie chart weather map that has percentages where the needs are, if they're basic or independent, getting into caution care, notable care or acute care, and that is a really it's a very impactful visual tool. So two things you're giving them a quote, a written quote, which has never really been done before that we know of. We didn't do it and then it has all the information that they provided us. It's not guessing, it's not just we think it'll be this or it's a range. We start at this rate and we go up to here.
Speaker 1:How do you change and how do you express those changes when you do a reassessment or if something notable happens or maybe even something slight? And then you have the care spectrum, which we give definitions of what that means in relative to the care community. So you're basic. You pretty much can do a lot of your stuff. You're pretty independent. You're in a caution care. You're going in, you're trending to notable care and trending to maybe acute care.
Speaker 1:Our goal is to focus on that care spectrum and help that family understand that our goal. They're not probably going to be independent again, but we can keep them in that caution care with a lot of help from us, support from the family or whatever other support they have and that person needs. Whatever the recommended number of hours are Maybe it's a six hour minimum or 12 hours, or maybe it's constant care. If there's somebody that has severe dementia, with some other things, maybe they wander, so they've got to have somebody taking care of them. So we started using that and that is for us, it's a differentiator, it's a game changer, and there's been a lot of talk and I know this is an old subject, but it's been revisited again. I just was speaking to an industry icon, aaron Markham, not too long ago, and he's doing the red ocean blue oceans comparisons and trying especially home care.
Speaker 1:Home care is a big red ocean. It's a big competitive dog-eat-dog kind of market. Right and creating a blue ocean where you're a different type of agency and a different kind of business. It doesn't have to be home care, but it really is. How are you going to differentiate yourself in a market that's become so competitive and that we all do the same thing? We all have to probably have license, we all have to have background checks and we only hire the best. Hospitals are hiring those same people, and so our hospice and home health has been. We all know that help is in a critical mode. We all have to be certified and we all have to do certain things to keep our licensing. Most of us use scheduling software and there's some really good ones out there. So what else can we do? What else can we do to differentiate and help ourselves, educate clients, educate families and keep everybody in the know about what's going on with that care and I think that we've done a pretty darn good job of doing that.
Speaker 1:And that quote stays with that client for the life of that client, with our agency, from the initial quote to every reassessment quote that we do. We're a licensed state here in Georgia so we're very regulated. We have to redo those every 90 days, so we're doing a new quote. Sometimes it doesn't change at all, sometimes it goes down and sometimes it will go up, but it shows us the comparison of what changed in that care and those needs so that I can physically and visually show a family. This is why the price changed and this is what it's going to be from this point on for the next 90 days at least, unless some life event or something else changes. So it's been received.
Speaker 1:At first people were like I just got a call down the street for $2 cheaper an hour and I'm like let's go through their quote. We'll go through my quote and we'll see where those differences are. And they're like I don't have a written quote for them and I said I can't really talk to that. I can only talk to you about what we've done and what we have here and and what your specific, actual individualized custom care is and what it's going to cost. And with that price I base what I can pay my caregiver on. I know that the higher the cost, the higher the care. So then the higher the rate. So I can't pay a caregiver the same rate for companion that I'm going to for somebody who may be bedbound and has a lot of care needs. They're not going to take those cases and that's what we were running into as well.
Speaker 1:So this has allowed us to be able to price and pay based on the needs of that specific person. And we've pivoted a little bit. We don't we do companion care, but mostly we do the higher acuity type cases because we have the care staff that is accredited and credentialed in that and we've used home care quote to help us identify the types of cases that we get that we've gotten for the last four years by type top diagnosis, and where our care inquiries are coming from, who's the number one caller, what those zip codes are, what our referral sources are. So we've been able to use the analytics from the quote and help us create career pathways for our caregivers that help them get credentialed to the types of cases that we specifically attract.
Speaker 2:And to the caregiver incentive which you hit on here. They can you have a nice career ladder that they can work their way through and get those more difficult cases and get paid more. And I think a lot of home care agencies are missing that. Everybody gets paid the same, no matter what case they get, no matter what, how hard it is. They aren't provided perhaps they're not provided training for that higher acuity. It's just like a on-the-job kind of training maybe, but you have a different way of approaching that, where folks that really want to move up in that career ladder can get the training that they need to take those cases where they get paid more. I think that's a huge incentive for caregivers.
Speaker 1:It is and it's helped us with recruiting and retention. Our best caregivers that we get are from the referrals of our current caregivers. So our pool of caregivers are people that have come to us, have either been with us for a while or have come to us by ways of other caregivers telling them about it. And what we've done is we created the career pathway and each year we come out with a module that has at least 30 to 40 hours of continuing ed in specific types of diagnosis, whether it's diabetes or stroke or CHF or dementia, and it could be just ways to prepare food, it could be being able to communicate effectively with somebody who has dementia, how to deactivate a highly agitated person with dementia there's all kinds. The curriculum is pretty intense and they have to go through about 30 to 40 hours. What we've done the first year we did it. We created five modules. It was about 40 hours and each module that got completed was eight hours each. They got a 25 cent an hour bump in their base rate. So say they were 14, they'd get 14.25 at the end of that year, or however long it took them to complete those courses. They were at 15.25 an hour, say. They would never make less than that on any case that they took for us. But the potential for making more and earning more was because they had certifications and credentialing for other types of care. We created care levels and there's you can do stars or ones or whatever. Ours were stars, one star, two stars, so you start out as a one star and you create, you complete these modules and then, once you get to a five star type caregiver, care professional, you can be a leader, a trainer, a mentor, a care coordinator, a scheduler or some other staff position. So there are other seats that you can now, as you progress through the company and I hope that they stay with me so far they have and as opportunities in the company become available. Those are the first people that I'm going to look at because those are people that have been with me. They understand, you know what our, you know what our focus is and that's on quality care and customer service and a really I like to say a hospice-centered environment because it's all about the care of that person for as long as they're in our care. Hopefully it's a long time, but it's really. It's so important and I've really been, and we have a newsletter, we have an employee newsletter that we send out every month and it highlights the leading learners or learning leaders we talk about. They get a gift card. They get paid for the stuff that they do, all the modules they go through. They get a bump in their hourly base rate. They get mentioned in the newsletter. They get a gift card for being that learning leader for that month.
Speaker 1:And this year we added attendance. We have perfect attendance and no call outs and kind of thing, and then they get a little monthly bonus for that and the person that is, or the people that are, the best attendance and no call outs or whatever at the end of the year will get a bigger bonus or check and just trying to create different opportunities for them to realize that they're a huge part of the organization. They're the face of my business. Basically. They're out there every day, thousands of hours a week, and they have to be the best representation of who we have in our company. It's not just walking in the office or listening to somebody on the phone. That's the face of my company are those caregivers and they are very special and I love them all. I know them all.
Speaker 2:So it sounds to me like if an organization wanted to use Home Care Quote, they can make it just the quote engine. They can do it online, they can do it in the living room, they can do it wherever they want to do it. Or they can also take that a step further and take that information from home care quote and change some of their operations for the better. So how caregivers get paid, how to incentivize, how to add, so you can take home care quote and use it strictly as a quote engine. In fact, if a consumer goes to your website, they can get their own quote right away. That's right. But if they want to take more time to make it part of their operations, they can add a lot more to that with the caregivers. And there's a whole suite of things that happen when you're paying accurately and you're charging accurately.
Speaker 1:That's right. That's right and, like I said, the tool I've said I've called it for years the Swiss Army knife for home care of a tool because there are a lot of different things that you can use it for. It just depends on how you or your agency want to use it and it can be there's a ton of stuff in it. You can get, from just a few quotes a month, all your reassessments. It does couples. It's service branded, it's branded to every agency, so it's customized to your agency with logo, friendly stuff. It's date and time stamped. It helps you identify your ideal client. People talk about ideal clients, right, maybe it's the type of clients that you want, maybe it's just a certain number of hours, or maybe it's the payer source, right. So it identifies all that. On that inquiry and intake.
Speaker 1:And people don't put enough emphasis on how important a phone call is because basically that's the first introduction to your company. Is that phone call and how it's handled? It might, it could be somebody walking in, it's the same thing. That person walking in is right there in front of you, so you know you making eye contact and you're able to engage with them in a on a different level. A phone takes a little bit more. That's somebody who has deliberately picked up the phone from whatever they've seen and called you and now do you want to just vomit all over them about everything that you've done for 14 years or 15 years or five years, or do you want to listen to them a little bit and say I understand you're in a critical situation and what's going on? What I'd like to do, if it's OK with you, is take a few minutes and let's get this, let's get dialed in so that we make sure, one, we're the right resource. Two, we can identify what those care needs are and that we have the care professional that's available to help you and maybe some other referral sources that you might need. Maybe they need they're coming home. They don't know that they need they can get a bed, a hospital bed or a wheelchair or oxygen or whatever. Maybe they need home health, whatever that is. So we're identifying all that. All the questions are all compiled in a data repository. It's all HIPAA compliant, obviously, all that stuff, but it that data is there.
Speaker 1:You can make it however, you can use it for however you want. If you don't want to give somebody a quote, you want to do it in the living room, make the living room visit. You can do that too. It's just, and you can customize your speech to get into that living room any way you want it. However, it works for you. We're going to come in and we're going to meet with you in your living room and we're going to talk about your individualized and customized care with our company and you bring that tool in and you then you go through it and you print it off or you email it to them right there and they have it to share with. Maybe they have siblings they've got to talk to that are in other states and instead of trying to remember everything that I'm telling you what's going on with your loved one, they can see it written and they have a color-coded visual map for it, and we can do couples. It can do all the reassessments. It's a pretty powerful tool. One of the really exciting things, val, that you probably don't know, is that we're getting ready to integrate with one of the major software companies home care scheduling software companies so that will be huge. Yeah, because it'll be integrated.
Speaker 1:You can create your. If it's an inquiry or somebody does it off of your website, does a quote in the middle of the night, which happens a lot for us. Website does a quote in the middle of the night, which happens a lot for us. We come in and we have a quote there. It will create our potential client a lead. We can create drip campaigns based on wherever they are in their search. It's a huge tool. It gives us all this information. So it's a mailing Now you can add them to whatever mailing list that you want. So the tool itself is pretty powerful and very effective. We have some agencies that are using it. Now I have a couple, a few of them that are like I don't know how we even did this before. How?
Speaker 2:we operated without it.
Speaker 1:And it's a good training tool. It not only educates the client, but it educates your staff too. So if you have brand new people, they're answering the phone, they, but it educates your staff too. So if you have brand new people, they're answering the phone, they can just come up with their own little spiel. They can walk through the quote. You don't have to act like you're reading anything and it will deliver a price and a printout and a lead and all the stuff. And it's huge. It's just it's. I think it's a game changer. I really I'm excited about it. I love using it. I wish other people not maybe in my territory would use it, but across the US would use it.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, I think the getting the word out and I know you've been doing this for a few years now it's not like this is a brand new tool and it has evolved, it's become. I've watched it change over the years and I know that it's definitely evolved. And if you're able to connect the software with other scheduling softwares, that is huge, because a lot of folks will say I don't want to add another software to my thing or I don't want it to have to go from here to there or whatever. Totally get that If it will integrate and send the information to the primary software that you use in your home care agency. That takes a lot of hassle factor out of trying to move data from one place to another.
Speaker 1:So that's excellent it does, and that having multiple CRMs is always clumsy. But the CRM that we have for home care quote it'll allow you to take that quote. You can build a service plan from that. It takes all that information. We've already that's an iteration that we did several months ago. Even without the integration to the software, you're able to create your service plan and take the data you've already entered and put it on a service plan and then your nurse can go in and fill out the daily tasks as to what is needed on that in-home assessment. But yeah, the data, the ability to have and create so much information on an initial call and having it in software is, I think it's going to be really big. Because that's what a lot of people say. Can I integrate it right now? And it's coming, but hopefully sometime June we'll have that. We're working on it. Now. There's all the APIs and the integration. You know how that is. I know you're a tech geek, so you get that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I understand all that. It becomes not understandable at some point. It goes woo.
Speaker 1:But I do get it.
Speaker 2:It's a programmer kind of thing, so it takes a minute to get all the parts and pieces talking to each other correctly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and with our home care agency we're the lab for the testing and we have an amazing web hosting company you probably are familiar with them Proof Senior Network. They do a lot of our website stuff, and what we did late last year, early this year I can't remember was people were like, wow, we don't want to do the whole quote, I want to wait till I get to living room. What do we do then? So we created you can get a price, you get your whole quote, you can do an inquiry, and we have an opportunity on the inquiry. Or you can get started, which is a contact form. We put all that wherever it says on our website get a quote, get started, whatever. So it's three different forms. They're all very consistent in the logic, but they all add to our mailing list. They create documents for us. So if it's an inquiry, we'll have. It has the quote, which is date and timestamp, so it has a unique quote ID and then it has INQ in it. So that tells us it was just an inquiry. So they just got a base what are our ranges, or where we start, and so with a lot of disclaimers on the email that goes to them. But from there then we now we can follow up as a lead and we can say forever, however long. We're just starting because they're in the hospital or they're in rehab for six weeks, whatever. So we can take that and then when they're ready to come home, we can take the inquiry and convert it to a real quote. Then we take the quote and convert it to the service plan. Eventually, once we have it in the software, that's already going to all be in there and we just convert it. We convert it to a client from a lead and then all those documents stay with that client now and every time you update it it'll update it in the system. So it's a game changer. It's a very professional, elevated way to conduct business.
Speaker 1:And if I have a referral, if I do take an intake, and I see that somebody needs a DME or home health or a PT referral, I take that quote. I ask the client is it okay if you're going to need this, is it okay if I call or have somebody call you that we are partners with? And when they say yes, I say I'm going to send them the information. And here's a call, here's somebody you can expect a call from and I fax them over or email them over the quote and they have all the where the service is going to take place, who the contact is, what they're looking at, all the needs. It's a pretty professional way to. It's almost like going into the big hospital systems now where they have all the stuff in there and it's very operates on the same principle the Epic system or whatever one they're at the hospital but a little more consumer-friendly.
Speaker 1:We made it very consumer-friendly because we know that they don't know all our acronyms or what something might mean. So there's hovers and definitions and then the care spectrum. That is, I think, one of the most underrated tools on the whole thing. Personally, because that's the first thing I do when I see a quote come through, I look at that care spectrum and see what colors are most visible, and then I know I see the price and then I see that and I know that it's going to be more of a less care or it's going to be really a high care case and that's amazing. Yeah, it's very yeah we'll make.
Speaker 2:I'll make sure that we have. I'll do a, I'll do a home care quote for me or for, like, my dad or whatever, and then put that up there so everybody can see when we get done here. Everybody can see as we're talking, as you're talking. I'll just put those those up there. That's really cool. Yeah, that would be great, yeah.
Speaker 1:And if anybody wants more information they can let you know and then you can get in contact with me. I'll be glad to help anybody, even in the agency profile, because every agency is set up individually. It's not a, it's not a one size one model fits all your agency. You put in your agency specific information that has margin protection, because that's something that we really don't think about a lot either is how many times your staff has to touch something in the office eats at your margin. So if you're constantly calling somebody and re-engaging or you're having to keep faxing over to the long-term care insurance company the task sheets or the invoice or the assessment or whatever, there are factors that we can build in to help you offset some of those costs and those.
Speaker 1:You don't realize how expensive that is sending somebody to somebody's home not knowing if you're going to really get the business or what, maybe even what the care might be, going back and forth a couple times or keep touching the same piece of paper over and over again. Or somebody who only wants one hour a week of service. You can't. That's not almost non-existency anymore. Maybe there's somebody that can do it, in a building maybe, but not in a large community like we have. We're pretty spread out. Yeah, is it yeah?
Speaker 1:the dry, yeah, for in a large community like we have are pretty spread out. Yeah, is it?
Speaker 2:yeah the drive, yeah for in a rural, more rural community, yeah, it's. Even in in the city there are very few hunger agencies that have, uh, less than a four hour minimum. Just to drive from point a to point b is 25 minutes perhaps, or whatever.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, we really spread out to you but you're not going to pay somebody 12, 14, 15, 20 dollars now, whatever you're paying them for them.
Speaker 1:To pay somebody 12, 14, 15, $20 an hour, whatever you're paying them for them to drive one hour one way, to work two hours or an hour and then drive another hour home, when you know between gas and time and traffic, and they make $20 or $30 and they've spent 15 of it getting there and going home. It just it doesn't, it's just cost prohibitive and that's what we, that, that's what we tell people and that's why the care spectrum has definitions of where people are and what you put those in. If your hours are four hour minimums, then you can put that in and you can set those parameters to help people offset what the care needs actually are and how they can benefit from that. So it's, it really does take a lot of people. It takes us, and if you don't want to hire us for all the hours, that's fine. But here's what you need to do, because this person needs help. It's whether it's family or you hire private babysitters or care staff or whatever you do, you have to have care in place Big eye opener.
Speaker 2:Big eye opener for the family, I'm sure yeah, in many cases. I want to thank you for being on Care Across America and telling us all about home care quote and home care matters. Thank you, thank you, and we'll make sure this gets out to as many people as possible, thank you.
Speaker 1:I appreciate it. Thanks for your time and all your efforts in helping home care agencies help our seniors, because there's a bunch of them coming for the next 10 years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's not going to end right now. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:All right, all right. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:All.
