00;00;01;15 – 00;00;14;16 

Jeff Howell 

Welcome to Home Health 360, a podcast presented by AlayaCare. I’m your host, Jeff Howell, and this is the show about learning from the best in home health care from around the globe. 

 

00;00;18;17 – 00;00;36;07 

Jeff Howell 

Welcome back. Home Health 360 fans. Our next guest is an Idaho born, highly coveted speaker in home care. The three time dad, bogey golfer and president and CEO of Home Care Pulse. Mr. Todd Austin, welcome to the show. 

 

00;00;36;28 – 00;00;58;28 

Todd Austin 

Oh, well, thank you for having me. I’ve been a fan of Home Health 360 and then begin to have to be on for a while. So we must have had some downtime in my lineups and just happy to be on here. Also exciting times, too, in the Austin household, because that’s about to be a four time date in our house, too, which was a big surprise. 

 

00;00;58;28 – 00;00;59;07 

Todd Austin 

Jeff. 

 

00;00;59;17 – 00;01;01;13 

Jeff Howell 

Wow. Congratulations. 

 

00;01;01;23 – 00;01;02;19 

Todd Austin 

Thank you. Thank you. 

 

00;01;03;04 – 00;01;05;07 

Jeff Howell 

So the three how many boys and girls do you have? 

 

00;01;05;12 – 00;01;07;21 

Todd Austin 

I’ve got three boys and one girl on the way. 

 

00;01;08;05 – 00;01;20;21 

Jeff Howell 

Okay. Okay. I’ve got two girls myself, so I’m wrong. Three times on every decision I make around the house. Well, your bride was the right amount, so welcome to the show. Why don’t you give us a little bit of background on home care pulse? 

 

00;01;20;28 – 00;02;00;05 

Todd Austin 

Yeah, for sure. So all your pulse has been around about 13 years now, and we’ve gone through different, different stages around how we think about supporting the industry and customers and our employees themselves. But overall, Home Care poll started as a survey company where our focus was really on measuring client patient, resident satisfaction and employee satisfaction. And since then, we’ve really broken down into doing industry reports on data aggregation, educational tracks and reputation management to help agencies really boost their online profiles. 

 

00;02;00;22 – 00;02;23;13 

Todd Austin 

And then on top of that, certifying as as great place to work organizations is some of our our newer adds to the to the product mix. But it’s great organization and filled with mission driven people just and our focus is really providing insights training tools to meaningfully improve care experiences across the globe. 

 

00;02;23;27 – 00;02;26;21 

Jeff Howell 

And when did you transitioned from a survey company? 

 

00;02;27;05 – 00;02;51;19 

Todd Austin 

That’s a great question on the timeline, But I would say really about four years ago, 2019, 2018 is when we started to say, you know, being a survey company is great. But what we noticed is we wanted to be able to actually help solve the problems that we were finding from the surveys. And what we talked about is completing the sentence. 

 

00;02;51;28 – 00;03;15;21 

Todd Austin 

And so that was about 2018 that we started to say, there’s a problem here. How do we fix it? And the first one was reputation management. You know that people were really struggling, managing their Google my business page or building their story and profiles or employment experiences and that that was the first one right at the end of 2017 for 2018. 

 

00;03;16;11 – 00;03;36;05 

Todd Austin 

And then in 2019 is when we added the educational piece through a merger with in the now and then shortly after that, we acquired an organization called Home Care Institute to broaden out our content library to one of the largest nurse led nurse instructor led training libraries in the space. 

 

00;03;36;27 – 00;04;02;19 

Jeff Howell 

Got it. So I didn’t know that. And I remember you and I having a conversation two Novembers ago in Chicago where the Home Care Pulse report is a bit of a blessing and a curse where you guys are so well-known for it. But also people know you in some ways only for that. Can you tell us a little bit more about what goes into it? 

 

00;04;02;19 – 00;04;12;13 

Jeff Howell 

How many surveys you’ve actually completed? Because I really think it’s the gold standard for benchmarking in the industry. And give us a little bit of background on how it’s evolved over time. 

 

00;04;12;26 – 00;04;45;21 

Todd Austin 

Yeah, definitely. The first report was created by Aaron Marcum, who was the founder of Home Care Pulse. Great individual. He’s no longer involved in the business, but he actually was noticed a gap in his own business around how we were talking and advocating in our industry and that it wasn’t consistent and saw an opportunity to try and provide industry information around how we should systematize for advocacy and or just creating efficiencies in our business. 

 

00;04;46;07 – 00;05;22;01 

Todd Austin 

And the evolution of that went from about a 20 page report that covered mostly finance into now what it what is about 250 pages that covers pretty much any topic with inside your organization, whether that’s sales, marketing, market or efficiency plan and caregiver experience, finance and even technology is in that. So I know a lot of care has been in it multiple times around how you’re able to drive efficiency through adopting and supporting your EMR. 

 

00;05;23;27 – 00;05;37;07 

Jeff Howell 

And how many what’s the participation rate like how many people are, because this is going out to home care agencies and then they’re filling in all the answers and just trying to get a sense sense of the sample size every year. 

 

00;05;37;10 – 00;06;00;25 

Todd Austin 

Yeah. Yeah. It takes it takes about 2 to 3 hours to complete the survey. So it’s not it’s not a lot of ask by any means, but it’s a great opportunity to audit. And every year we have around 2000 organizations participate in the survey. And when you aggregate that data into revenue, it’s a little over $1,000,000,000 worth of data that is submitted. 

 

00;06;01;08 – 00;06;32;26 

Todd Austin 

So it’s no joke. Every year we see distribution of the study broadly into 10 to 30000 downloads, purchases, exports, etc.. So it’s turned into a massive project for us. We opened it up in January. So right now you can actually participate in the study and then we close it down here in about three weeks at the end of the month and we kick out the report about 30 to 45 days later. 

 

00;06;32;27 – 00;06;46;22 

Todd Austin 

So it’s crunch time around here from our Data science team, which is and then our marketing team who puts together the publication but it’s a great publication, allows you to really audit yourself against others. And you. 

 

00;06;47;21 – 00;07;15;19 

Jeff Howell 

Love it. I’m obsessed with data driven businesses and companies that lead with thought leadership where they’re known for one thing, which sort of ends up fueling the other things that they do. Right. So you guys recently acquired Activated Insights and Pinnacle quality insights. I didn’t do any homework on those. I just saw the announcement everywhere. Give us a sense of why those companies were strategic to watch what you guys are doing. 

 

00;07;15;27 – 00;07;49;26 

Todd Austin 

Yeah, absolutely. Obviously, they’re insights companies. So when we’re talking about data, insights and outcomes, they play a big part in the continuum. And what we saw is an opportunity here is both of those organizations did some very similar things to home care polls. But in the broader continuum so that that may be assisted living, skilled nursing facilities, crises, etc., or in home health and hospice and home care pools, although it really started in private duty home care. 

 

00;07;50;11 – 00;08;15;11 

Todd Austin 

When we go back to that 2018 timeline and we really started to get involved in health and home health and hospice and have customers across the entire continuum that we support. And so what these acquisitions did is really allow us to bolster some of our data outlooks and experience insights to where we now can look at the employment journey across the whole interview. 

 

00;08;15;11 – 00;08;34;26 

Todd Austin 

So we can now look at not just caregivers and private duty homecare, but we can look at employees, whether it’s in skilled nursing or home health or private duty home care, and start to measure what that journey looks like and really drive insights into some of the major pain points that we’re seeing around the employment market. 

 

00;08;35;25 – 00;08;42;14 

Jeff Howell 

You also have the HCP growth summit coming up. Is it is it the first one that you guys have done? This is the first year. 

 

00;08;42;25 – 00;09;35;01 

Todd Austin 

This is this is year three of the ACP Girls Summit. It’s a great opportunity to bring together industry leaders and experts and talk through virtually some of the opportunities, whether to drive revenue and create efficiencies or overall just improve our outlook and understanding of what’s happening in the continuum of care. And that’s a two day we’ve got keynote speakers like Lonnie Main, who as Rhoda wrote great book that will help all of us as operators, owners or managers think through and processes and overall just improve our positive mentality around the challenges that we face every day. 

 

00;09;35;13 – 00;09;44;18 

Todd Austin 

Great. You know, I think we actually kicked off with him on day one, and then we flow through to some great industry experts on our specific subjects after. 

 

00;09;45;20 – 00;09;58;12 

Jeff Howell 

Your marketing is incredible. I love how it just feels fun. And the thing that I noticed on your website is that you have real heads with like their bodies are kind of cartoon-ized. 

 

00;09;59;00 – 00;10;26;22 

Todd Austin 

Yeah, I think we’re super fortunate. Jeff. We’ve got a we’ve got a very talented marketing team. I always wanted to bring an element of fun and excitement into the space and improve once again as an experience organization. We put we get a lot of feedback from our customers and that’s something that has always been very positive attribute is the content that we create. 

 

00;10;27;05 – 00;10;37;29 

Todd Austin 

All of it is free, so there’s a lot of resources of tools for people to access that are free. But just overall how we speak to the industry from a positive perspective. 

 

00;10;38;05 – 00;11;02;27 

Jeff Howell 

Yeah, sure. And what would you say that your corner of the world looks like today? Like how many agencies are using an LMS? How many agencies are using the insights in your benchmarking report and would you say that there’s a size of agency that where you know, alums is table stakes or what’s your sense on how people are doing training for caregivers today? 

 

00;11;03;07 – 00;11;45;13 

Todd Austin 

Yeah, Yeah, that’s a that’s a great question. When you think about training specifically, there’s a lot of compliance components connected to it. And so when we think about training, we want to enable an agency owner to efficiently create an r y in a compliance motion. And that’s probably resonates with a lot of what life does too. When you think about EVP and other aspects of, of businesses, like how do we make this compliance motion seamless as possible while at the same time elevating the level of care and supporting the employee in an area that has always been identified as a deficiency, which is training. 

 

00;11;45;27 – 00;12;29;29 

Todd Austin 

And so we’ve approached training from that three pronged approach. Our unique advantage at home care pools with inside training is more revolving around how we enable blended learning. We’re the only blended learning platform where you can take courses online, but we also support instructor LED courses so that if you want to bring your team in-house, there is material for you to come in and have a one day training on infection control and you can manage that electronically but still do it person to person so you can create that in-person contact while still, if you want to assign the course out and have them do it in their own time on the commute or set 

 

00;12;29;29 – 00;13;00;15 

Todd Austin 

up training days, you can do that through the learning management system also. So we’ve tried to approach it through a two pronged approach based on feedback from people across the industry. And then of course, our team is 100% made up of friends that write the content that have actually had field experience and so it’s coming from someone that has conducted this training before or tried to solve this problem before, which is really important to a lot of a lot of the customers. 

 

00;13;00;15 – 00;13;18;07 

Todd Austin 

So we’ve got about a 100,000 learners at any given time within inside our learning management system. And then from an insights perspective at this point and probably support about 67,000 locations across the continuum. 

 

00;13;18;29 – 00;13;31;09 

Jeff Howell 

Do you notice a difference in what these agencies are looking for with respect to how big they are? Like, is there a difference between the smaller the mom and pop shops, the medium agencies and the enterprise? Well, not a whole lot. 

 

00;13;31;10 – 00;14;03;07 

Todd Austin 

I think from a reporting perspective, you’ll see our enterprise customers wanting to drill down and make sure that districts or specific locations are meeting the compliance requirements and they’re doing it efficiently. And the employee journey is supported. But overall, from a learning perspective, it’s a day one initiative. We’ve got to enable employees and support them because in many cases work. 

 

00;14;03;08 – 00;14;31;02 

Todd Austin 

We’re doing 8 to 12 hours of orientation and then we’re putting them in the home. And without any training, we’re setting a lot of employees up for frustration when they don’t have a resource, when they run into a problem around something simple, like how do I cook poached eggs? I’ve got a client that really wants something cooked. The specific way our learning management system has a search quality that you can go and look up recipes. 

 

00;14;31;12 – 00;14;53;28 

Todd Austin 

So it’s basic things like that to complex things like how do we do a lift in transfer and how do I make sure that I properly support this client or patient with inside some of the activities. So it’s everything from basic components of cooking and cleaning to complex components around activities for infection control. 

 

00;14;54;16 – 00;14;59;22 

Jeff Howell 

Do you have any case studies on before and after how you guys are impacting turnover? 

 

00;15;00;05 – 00;15;34;27 

Todd Austin 

Yeah, absolutely. There’s quite a few on our on our website. www.homecarepulse.com. Sure. We can drop it a link somewhere in there too. But there’s a lot of case studies around not just turnover, but time saved by training managers and administrator. You know that that’s a that’s an area that we don’t talk enough about, in my opinion, Jeff, since we’re on the training track, is there’s a lot of training for caregivers, but what about your administrative track staff with inside your organization? 

 

00;15;35;18 – 00;16;05;15 

Todd Austin 

Do you look at schedulers or care coordinators? There’s that’s a 100,000 person workforce that gets very little training. So we have actually a lot of training for even the administrators on how to properly coordinate care, which is a schedule. Our success here is we actually have that for you on our website also that you can take. But there’s not just caregiver training, there’s soft skills training that needs to be administered for admins and caregivers. 

 

00;16;06;02 – 00;16;33;04 

Jeff Howell 

Yeah, we have data with respect to the impact a lost scheduler has, and it’s something like every scheduler that you lose, you would lose five or ten caregivers to go along with. It is what we’ve seen. And you know, certainly there the back office is really the unsung heroes as well, because everyone is so focused on attracting and retaining caregivers. 

 

00;16;33;18 – 00;16;40;03 

Jeff Howell 

What time trends do you see taking shape in your line of business over the next 2 to 5 years? 

 

00;16;41;02 – 00;17;06;00 

Todd Austin 

Yeah, I think I think we’re well aware of the employment trends, but what I’ve actually noticed, I would say in the last 12 months as we’ve focused a lot on the employment trends, is some improved employment trends. And we’re seeing turnover be reduced. We’re seeing the right metrics in the first 90 days, but return, we’ve actually started to lose a little bit of eyeball for our patients. 

 

00;17;06;00 – 00;17;41;24 

Todd Austin 

Clients and residents and we’re seeing an increased turnover in clients wasn’t. So we’re not seeing quite as long as a lifetime value per se to do that side of the business unit. And we’re starting to see a little bit of a trend of Brown disengagement from our from our customer customers, meaning patients, clients, residents. So big opportunity there that I would say as we’ve really focused on building out employment brands and reducing turnover employees, we’re not talking to our clients, patients and residents enough. 

 

00;17;42;00 – 00;18;07;10 

Todd Austin 

We can’t lose sight of either one of those because that’s where our revenue is coming from. I always talk about it kind of as the home care doubled. There is when we see turnover in both of those happen at the same time because our customer acquisition cost and our employee acquisition costs, we’ve got to be on different cycles in order to maintain a good margin with inside our businesses. 

 

00;18;07;19 – 00;18;16;02 

Todd Austin 

So it’s something that I would say we really need to caution everybody about is not losing focus on being your client patient centric. 

 

00;18;16;20 – 00;18;45;11 

Jeff Howell 

Interesting. You’re saying that on the whole, care givers are starting to come back and they’re starting to be happier. But I always have just been in the mindset that one out of three home health referrals doesn’t even get filled because there’s not enough staff to take it. But you’re saying that the even though there’s more caregivers coming back and they’re happier at their job, there’s a decline in the client patient satisfaction? 

 

00;18;45;26 – 00;19;11;14 

Todd Austin 

Yeah. So the time that they stay on service is declining in number of months. And so we’re having to find clients at a faster rate than what we historically had to. And so when you pair that with the, you know, some of the other problems with finding employment, steady employment, going back to some of our employee concerns, a lot of that is matching and communication. 

 

00;19;11;28 – 00;19;35;11 

Todd Austin 

So as we have more moving parts in our business and we’re seeing client and patient turnover happening plus employment turnover, now we’ve got to drive both engines of acquisition, meeting, employee acquisition and patient acquisition and that’s what I call the double dip. That’s when we really see businesses struggle is when we’re trying to consume those acquisition costs at the same time. 

 

00;19;35;27 – 00;19;48;22 

Jeff Howell 

And any inclination as to why the clients are staying as clients for a short period of time, I’m assuming it’s not because they have no more needs. I’m assuming they’re deciding to switch to another agency. 

 

00;19;49;03 – 00;20;13;27 

Todd Austin 

Yeah, we’re seeing communication with patients being a dipping score and satisfaction, and then we’re also seeing matching and that’s a two way street. So if our patients or clients don’t feel like they’re properly matched, I’m sure our employees feel that way. Also, I think that that’s some of the compounding problem. I know there are some great solutions out there that that really actually support proper client action. 

 

00;20;14;09 – 00;20;15;24 

Todd Austin 

I believe you guys have a great one. 

 

00;20;16;13 – 00;20;39;27 

Jeff Howell 

Yeah, we have data around like so much of the time. We’re actually we’re speaking about the caregivers and not the clients. And we have data that obviously it’s not it’s no secret. But you know, some people call it the rule of seven where if you don’t ramp up your caregivers to a high utilization in the first week, they need to find you know, make a like a suitable paycheck. 

 

00;20;40;09 – 00;20;56;24 

Jeff Howell 

And yeah, what we found is, you know, it’s even the first three months like you’ve got to get a reliable, steady stream of shifts. But a lot of people don’t talk about the satisfaction score of the client with respect to how well-matched they are with their care team. 

 

00;20;57;09 – 00;21;22;27 

Todd Austin 

Yeah, we issue all the time right before we started to see, you know, employment being a leading indicator for 2017. It was very patient centric. I it even I would say that that’s where our reimbursement is coming from sometimes also in our caps ratings from you’ll see a massive year end home health hospice. So it’s something that has always been measured. 

 

00;21;22;27 – 00;21;42;15 

Todd Austin 

But what our bottleneck has been is employment. And that’s why I just bring it up as something I would urge, you know, providers to continue and think about is that that patient experience, because we can’t consume cost in both acquisition models at the same time, it really feels margins. 

 

00;21;42;27 – 00;21;47;24 

Jeff Howell 

And for sure. What are some tips you’d given an agency looking to get the most out of their training program? 

 

00;21;48;21 – 00;22;16;07 

Todd Austin 

Yeah, from a training program, you know, is tied to core values reward, recognize, you know, and hire based on making sure that educational tracks are included in it’s going to provide a better employment experience. It’s going to provide a better patient client experience. And overall, it does make an impact on turnover plans, statistics that show around employee engagement through training that supports it. 

 

00;22;17;03 – 00;22;20;01 

Jeff Howell 

So what’s the best way for an agency to knock on your door and learn more? 

 

00;22;20;11 – 00;22;51;15 

Todd Austin 

Yeah, you can. You can find me on LinkedIn or you can go to our website. Like I said, compare Pollster.com and learn more or, you know, like coaches mention some of our sister organizations today activated insights or clinical quality insights. I’ll have websites too. So as you’re looking to glean insights, qualify for great places to work with insight agent services, build your employment brand, or solve some of the problems that you’ve found through your surveys. 

 

00;22;51;15 – 00;22;53;17 

Todd Austin 

Hope your pulse is a great one. Stop shop. 

 

00;22;54;09 – 00;23;14;04 

Jeff Howell 

Yeah, I’m just on homecare pulse dot com right now. There’s plenty of calls to action. You can get a live demo. You guys are at almost 70,000 people on your email list and it would be worth it to subscribe even just to get some clever marketing ideas. So, Todd, we’re up against our time here. I’ll get you out of here on this. 

 

00;23;14;04 – 00;23;17;23 

Jeff Howell 

Give us a reason to be optimistic about the future of care in the home. 

 

00;23;18;09 – 00;23;53;11 

Todd Austin 

Yeah, I think we’re continue really seeing care move to the home and out of an acute setting and work. We’re supporting those patients or clients or residents more than ever and whatever they call home and feel comfortable being home or building technology and motions to support them and the environment that that we want to engage in. And the optimistic part is to me, Jeff, is that’s our future, your an eyes future and all the listeners future. 

 

00;23;53;17 – 00;24;11;26 

Todd Austin 

Someday we will be in this motion and we will be poorer and we are part of the aging journey and we all have to be optimistic and good to be optimistic because we’re improving that we’re we’re setting ourselves up for future success by being in the aging journey ourselves. 

 

00;24;12;21 – 00;24;38;18 

Jeff Howell 

All right. So let me see if I wrote down this accurately. Correct me where I’m wrong. When you finish the report, it’s going to be about 2000 organizations that put their input into the Home Care Pulse report. They’re going to be spending about 2 hours each to fill it out. It’s going to be around 250 pages. You’re going to get somewhere between 10,030 thousand downloads, which is insanely high, given the number of agencies in the business. 

 

00;24;38;18 – 00;24;46;06 

Jeff Howell 

So you have a lot of coverage there. It’s been open since January. Remind me when it closes and then when it’s going to be out for publishing. 

 

00;24;46;20 – 00;25;10;28 

Todd Austin 

Yeah, And a month is when it closes. If you if you participate in the study, it’s free to you. If you just want to purchase it, you can visit our store and purchase it. But but overall, you know, it’s a great time to audit. And the good thing about the study is it’s downloaded by advocacy groups and supported by advocacy groups. 

 

00;25;11;05 – 00;25;43;03 

Todd Austin 

It’s downloaded by investors, it’s downloaded by providers. So it’s used not just to support our business, but also to educate individuals around how to continue to support your business. And that that’s I think what we’re most proud about is that this this report, although it does take a lot of time to create and publish that it’s a great resource and great opportunity as you fill out the survey, too, you know, it’s a mini audit that you get to go through and say, what is my KPI here? 

 

00;25;43;03 – 00;25;51;15 

Todd Austin 

How did we think about that this year? So as you’re building your strategy, next thing you’re looking for opportunities to create efficiency. This is this is a great place to start. 

 

00;25;51;27 – 00;26;06;24 

Jeff Howell 

Yeah, for sure. Well, thanks for coming on today, Todd. I’ve learned a lot and after looking on your LinkedIn profile and seeing that you’re a former university basketball player, I might have to fly you in for our old versus young basketball sports date coming up in two weeks. 

 

00;26;06;24 – 00;26;14;17 

Todd Austin 

Yeah, I’m ready. Let me know. Although some of those hockey players might be a little bit of rough for me. Thanks, Bon said Jeff. 

 

00;26;14;20 – 00;26;47;01 

Jeff Howell 

Thanks to take care Home Health 360 is presented by life care. First off, we want to thank our amazing guests and listeners to get more episodes. You can go to it alayacare.com/homehealth360 that spell Home Health 360. Or Search Home Health 360, Any of your favorite podcasting platforms? The easiest way to stay up to date on our new shows is to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. 

 

00;26;47;19 – 00;27;10;20 

Jeff Howell 

We also have a newsletter you can sign up for on alayacare.com/homehealth360 To get alerts for new shows and more valuable content from a link here right into your inbox. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.