In today’s episode of A Drink with The Hurricane, Steve “The Hurricane” discusses referral source development through the three-legged bar stool! What’s that? Watch and find out!
So, folks, I spent a lot of time visiting and training the members of the Home Care Elite Academy. And one of the things that I spend a lot of time on in helping these business owners scale their home care business is on referral source development. Now over the last 18 months, it has been extremely difficult to market the way that we used to because of the pandemic and most referral sources locking down or tightening up how they allowed marketers in. The good news, things are starting to return to some level of normalcy. However, for those of you that aren’t able to get into accounts, the easiest way to start developing referral source relationships is to properly develop what I call the three legged bar stool of home-based providers. Let me draw this out and show you.
So you have your bar stool top, right? And so this is your home base providers. Then you gotta imagine that each of these legs, this is a leg, this is a leg and then now this is a leg. This leg over here represents P.D which stands for private duty home care. This leg in the middle, we’re gonna call H.H, which stands for home health or your Medicare skilled agencies. And then finally you have hospice. All three of these make up this three legged bar stool. You take away one leg, what happens to that bar stool? Boom, it falls over. The reason why I mention this is because not only can these agencies refer each other but think about where all of these agencies get business from. They’re all going after the same referral sources for business as well.
So let me explain the relationship here. Private duty, private duty can refer home health. Whenever a patient goes to the hospital and your patient comes home from the hospital with your services continuing, it is in your best interest and your patient’s best interest to have a home health company coming in as well that you and your company have an exact business working relationship with. You know the nurses here, you know the therapist here, you know the executive director here, it is a smoother transition which makes things a lot easier to set up continuity of care for that patient. Now this home health can also refer the private duty.
Whenever they have a patient that gets readmitted to the hospital because Medicare wasn’t enough for that person, they should want to bring in the private duty to wrap around their Medicare benefit and improve their outcomes, improve their readmission rates so that they can then leverage good readmission rates to get more patients from their referral sources. So that’s our private duty and home health work together. Home health can also refer hospice. When somebody comes on services or they’ve come on services, probably should have been on hospice but decided not to for whatever reason and then the person continues to decline, they discharge off of home health and then they bring in the hospice.
Hospice on the flip side can refer home health whenever someone is recommended to go on hospice and the family decides we don’t want to go on hospice yet. That’s when they refer the home health. And so, therefore it goes back and forth. So this is just referring each other business. We’ll talk about marketing together in a minute.
Private duty can also refer hospice. You’re taking care of a patient for six months, a year, two years or more. And that patient finally starts to decline, the long-term caregiver in there says, you know what? Mrs. Smith isn’t as good as she used to be. I’m really worried about her. I don’t think she’s gonna live much longer. That’s when you call your hospice counterpart. We’re talking about continuity of care. You don’t wanna bring in some company that you don’t know or worse, a doctor make a recommendation to a company that you’re not familiar with and then they don’t even know how you’re working together. You wanna bring in your hospice, it’s in your best interest and of course the patient, that caregiver has been there for five years, three years, however long they’ve been together. She is now part of this person’s everyday life. You wanna bring in the hospice company that you work best with.
And on the flip side, a hospice can also refer the private duty. How? Whenever they have a patient who’s not eminently, actively dying, they’re on services but they need help more than what the hospice is allowed to cover, that’s when they wanna bring in their private duty and make the referrals. So every single part of this home based bar stool can all refer each other business. Now here’s the best part. Hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, assisted living facilities, oops, I did that wrong. Assisted living facilities, adult daycare, physicians, right? Doctors, all of these places feed all of these accounts.
Every single leg of this three-legged bar stool spends hundreds of thousands of dollars marketing to get referrals from the rest of the healthcare continuum. This is where these entities not only can refer you but you can create what I have called for the last decade now, power partnerships and work together to quickly expedite the process of getting referrals through the people that are already referring you and referring your power partners. I have been teaching people for a decade how to do this. If you need help, if you’re not doing this whole thing right here, pick up the phone, like right now, give us a call and we’re gonna teach you how to do this and so much more so that you can blow away the competition.