You wouldn’t choose your next new car based solely on a gut feeling.
So why risk it when running a business?
This year, leaders in the long-term and post-acute care industry are transforming their business decisions by relying on industry data to guide them.
The 2024 Activated Insights Benchmarking Report (formerly the HCP Benchmarking Report) is forecasting the patterns, trends, opportunities, and threats facing in industry this year with top findings in sales and marketing, recruitment and retention, training, finance, operations, and customer and employee experience.
As customer and employee satisfaction rises, training strategies are tested, and industry median revenue reaches the highest increase in five years, benchmark your performance against industry standards to make the best business decisions you’ve made yet.
- Sales & Marketing
Finding: Priorities for long-term and post-acute care providers have primarily remained centered on employee recruitment and retention…until this year.
Now, providers are putting their focus more towards creating and strengthening their relationships with referral sources—a strategy that is reaping its rewards with the highest customer growth rate in five years.
This may be because word of mouth referrals ranks as the top marketing source for providers in home care, home health, and hospice, generating almost one third of all revenue.
Threat & Opportunity: But at what cost? Customer acquisition costs are also the highest they’ve been in five years, rising by $208 in the last year to a total of $800 per customer.
However, those who tracked every inquiry made about their services saw almost a million dollar increase in revenue compared to those who only tracked some or most inquiries.
Application: It’s never been more important to build up and manage your reputation in the industry. If you’re not already taking advantage of reputation management software to solicit and collect positive reviews, you’re the last of the 1/3 of providers who aren’t.
- Recruitment & Retention
Finding: Over the last two years, the home-based care turnover rate has increased by over 12% to reach a total of 79.2%.
Threat & Opportunity: This industry-wide retention issue may begin with recruitment, as only 12.8% of home-based care applicants were hired.
Although Indeed continues to be the most popular recruitment source used by providers, it’s producing the highest turnover rate of 88%, ultimately producing a short-lived “quick win” for recruitment numbers but a devastating retention rate.
Application: Instead, allocate your recruitment resources and efforts towards employee word of mouth referrals as they produce the lowest turnover rate for the lowest acquisition cost.
Regardless, the ever-climbing staff turnover rate indicates that providers’ current recruitment & retention strategies are not working. Solve this issue at the source by optimizing your hiring process to attract the kind of candidates who will stay.
- Training
Finding: While establishing a clear career path is one of the top strategies to retaining long-term employees, only 39.3% of providers have one.
Which is unfortunate because although in-person training initially costs the highest in employee acquisition expenses, it produces the most revenue per care employee at $17,071. Proving training to be a benefit for employee retention, customer satisfaction, and revenue rates.
Threat & Opportunity: As a result, only 43.8% of home-based care staff feel completely prepared to take care of new clients. Which means, providers must start catering their training programs to fit their employees’ needs.
But it’s not just your employees who are affected by the training you offer, your customers are most satisfied in the ability of your employees. 83.1% of businesses now offer specialty training with 96.4% offering dementia training.
With positive feedback like this, providers should start tracking hospital readmission rates to prove their quality care outcomes—a crucial industry KPI that only 24.1% of providers are doing.
Application: The average home-based care employee receives five hours of orientation training and eight hours of ongoing. However, adding just seven more hours of training per employee could increase your revenue by over a million dollars.
See an increase of $1,103,291 in revenue by offering at least eight orientation hours and 12 hours of ongoing training.
- Finance
Finding: Providers are doing better financially than they have been for half a decade as median revenue rose by $292,723 in the last year, marking the largest annual increase in the past five years.
This may be attributed to the 23% increase in weekly billable hours for hourly care in the last year which comprised 85.6% of all service offerings—making it imperative for providers to recruit and retain hourly care staff to keep up with the demand.
Threat & Opportunity: However, revenue from hourly care is also the lowest it’s been in the last three years, dropping by almost 10% in the last year. Which may be why providers are also diversifying their top five payer sources: private pay, long-term insurance, Veteran Administration programs, Medicaid Waiver program, and direct Medicaid billing.
Application: To make up the difference, an untapped market lies in billing based on skill level needed as 61.6% of providers are billing solely on length of visit, while only 29% of providers are billing for duration combined with level of skill.
- Operations
Finding: Requests made by family contribute to over half of all customers, but less than a third of care plans meet the family’s goals for their loved one.
Which is why reputation in the industry is everything.
Because as only one in ten customers request their own long-term and post-acute care, over half of all business comes from family members requesting care for their loved ones. This is proving to be positive because the customer length of service increased by two months and the median customer lifetime value increased by $1,465 in the last year, the highest it’s been in the last four years.
Providers who invested in enhancing the care experience to increase customer satisfaction, like Activated Insights, saw three times the average customer lifetime value.
Threat & Opportunity: However, although 94.9% of providers involve their customer’s family in their care plan, only 26.7% completely met the family’s care goals. This may be why 50% of customers find themselves stopping services to look for another provider who could offer them a higher level of care.
As a result, the reputation of your company within the long-term and post-acute care market affects both your employees, customers, and their loved ones.
Application: Ensure you’re living up to your customers’ and employees’ expectations. Find out what else your customers and employees wish you would start, or stop, doing by conducting satisfaction surveys to become the company that employees recommend to their friends and customers recommend to their loved ones.
- Customer & Employee Experience
Finding: Your dedication to providing quality care and employment is apparent, and it’s paying off.
Because the Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and Employee Net Promoter Scores (eNPS) are back to prepandemic satisfaction levels! Customers are more satisfied than they have been in the last three years, while overall employee satisfaction is the highest it’s been in five years.
Lack of adequate training was a top complaint from both customers and employees for years. Which is why this year’s highest satisfaction scores are worth celebrating! Customers reported being most satisfied with their caregiver’s ability, and likewise, employees are most satisfied with their customer/client’s care plan matching.
Threat & Opportunity: However, both customers and employees can attest to feeling the least satisfied in their relationship with their provider/employer.
Customers admitted to being least satisfied with the level of communication they receive from their provider to the point where they would not recommend their provider to friends. Likewise, employees are least satisfied with the recognition they receive for their work.
Application: Spend time getting to know your employees’ and customers’ professional love language. Communicate your customers’ positive feedback to your employees so they can see that their hard work is making a difference. According to Great Place to Work, employee retention in aging services is two to three times higher when a sense of purpose is high.
Transform Your Quality of Care
Benchmarking your performance against key metrics like these will be the difference between those who see accelerated business growth by next year, versus those who stay stagnant. To order your own copy of the 2024 Activated Insights Benchmarking Report, visit activatedinsights.com/benchmarking. To learn more about how Activated Insights can help you make data-driven business decisions to see tangible results in your company, visit activatedinsights.com.