In healthcare delivery sequence, home care services are situated downstream from acute and post-acute care (skilled nursing facilities.)  One of the primary goals of home care is to help patient transition back into home environment.  Nurses, Therapists, Home health aides and other interdisciplinary team members such as Social Workers, Nutritionists work together to coach patient and caregiver to adjust to their "new normal."  This interdisciplinary team also teaches patients and caregivers a very important skill of self-triage - Who to call when (nurse versus a physician or 911.) 

I believe that the value proposition of home health services is not highlighted sufficiently when patients are initially setup with home care services.  

I hypothesize that patients who discontinue home care services within the first week do not fully appreciate the value of home care services.  My advice for healthcare systems and home care agencies is to build...

There are over 10,000 skilled Medicare-Certified home care agencies in the United States employing over hundreds of thousands of skilled clinicians providing care to over 2.4 million elderlies annually. The annual turnover rate for an average home care agency is over 60 percent, with replacement costs estimated at $50k per nurse.

This means Industry is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to train tens of thousands of clinicians to keep up with their current patient needs. With Baby Boomers beginning to utilize Medicare resources, demand for skilled home care clinicians is expected to grow significantly (per BLS Data ~40%) over the next decade.

A robust orientation and meaningful mentorship program have been shown to be two important protective factors for nursing retention. A successful transition-to-practice helped new nurses become competent and confident in their roles and enabled organization to build a dedicated nursing staff to achieve their mission (Pennington, Gwen et....