Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Welcome to Home Health Revealed where we share real stories from industry leaders about home health, palliative and hospice care. Brought to you by Velocity. Velocity's easy to read coding and revenue cycle dashboards let you grab your cup of coffee and quickly see the health of your organization.
Welcome to Home Health Revealed. We are here in New Orleans at the Alliance 2025 annual conference and I am Hannah Vail. I am hosting the show along with Ethan Schwartzbach from Fly Chain. Ethan, go ahead and say hello and tell bit about Flychain.
[00:00:33] Speaker B: Yeah. Hey everyone. Hannah, thanks for having me on Flychain. We are the financial operating system for home health, home care, hospice, little infusion, kind of handle all things financial. Think of us as really the healthcare HIPAA compliant replacement to QuickBooks. We handle all the bookkeeping, do taxes, tax strategy benchmarking, provide working capital and really just your almost like sidecar CFO if you will. And yeah, excited to pleasure to join you today.
[00:01:00] Speaker A: Yeah, thanks so much. And we are here with Kara Cox from Capitol Home Health. Kara, tell us a little bit about who you are and maybe a little bit about capital Home Health.
[00:01:08] Speaker C: Yes. Hi. Thank you for having me.
Capital Home Health is a family owned company and we have offices in Austin, San Antonio and then in Temple and Waco.
So we serve about 34 counties in Texas. We have a large service area and because of that large service area, we are super passionate about keeping our employees engaged and having that continuity of care with our clinicians so that we can take the best care of our patients.
[00:01:40] Speaker A: I love that. Clearly this is something that you feel super strongly about.
[00:01:44] Speaker C: I do.
[00:01:45] Speaker A: How did that maybe how did that come about? Or what are some things you're doing that you feel like are really impacting those metrics of retention?
[00:01:52] Speaker C: We make a big deal out of everything for our employees. So we celebrate birthdays, we celebrate workaversaries. We have a monthly birthday workaversary lunch for all of our employees.
We also take it on the road. So we go to certain areas where sometimes those clinicians are not able to come to the office and have lunch with us.
So we'll change the geographic area so that we make sure everybody can participate in the lunch.
We do workiversary gifts every year. The value gets higher based on the years of tenure.
And so we just really try to keep them engaged. We celebrate birthdays, we give them their birthday date off all the little things that maybe other companies aren't able to do.
We also have an employee engagement specialist and her entire job is to make sure that everyone Feels welcome a part of our family because we are a family owned company. So we try to treat our employees as such.
[00:02:54] Speaker A: Do you get feedback from your employees on what a difference this makes?
[00:03:00] Speaker C: Yes, we do.
We've been told it makes a difference. And we are also seeing that in our retention rate. So our retention rate has been anywhere from 55 to 70%, which is a lot higher than it used to be. So we are seeing that in the data as well.
[00:03:17] Speaker B: That's fantastic. It's an amazing rate. One question I had just to kind of double click on that as well, is coming from the flychain perspective, we, for better or worse, always kind of bring things down to financials. Just curious if, you know, understanding like the celebration of birthdays and things. Do you ever do any, like, financial kind of incentives or bonuses? Because, you know, again, not everyone can do that. But just curious if that's also part of the calculus on your end.
[00:03:42] Speaker C: Yes, thank you for asking. It is. We do a quarterly distribution bonus. So anytime the company profits and we have money to share, we share that with our employees. So that has also helped makes everybody feel like they have a stake in the game and that they have a say in what goes on in our company.
[00:04:03] Speaker A: Wow. That is. Yeah. I don't know of companies that do stuff like that. I mean, that says a lot about you and the way you truly appreciate your employees. Because not only are you doing things, going out of your way to celebrate things, and that is very personal to someone, which I'm sure is appreciated. It takes time, it takes effort. But financially you're backing up what you say as well. I just think that's really awesome.
[00:04:28] Speaker C: Yes. And we are so fortunate. Our owner, Jerry Schultz, this is all of how he believes the company should be run. So we definitely are so appreciative that he gives us the flexibility and the funds to create these moments and allows us to, you know, reach out to all of our employees and make sure that they're engaged and happy.
[00:04:52] Speaker A: Do you feel like in part of these conferences they have touched on retention as something? And what has the conversation around that been?
[00:05:01] Speaker C: It's funny because usually that is a big topic, but I haven't seen any of the sessions that are really focused on that at this particular conference. But it usually is always. I know, because there's always staff shortages.
[00:05:15] Speaker B: Yeah. One thing I can certainly chime in here about, the financial incentives, the impact it can actually have on that bottom line. I think we always talk about retention and wanting people to stay on board for the long haul. But, you know, the opportunity cost of having someone leave tends to be quite high. And so, like, there probably is some calculus. It's something that we've been really working on here. I'm not sure if you've done it yourself, but by increasing someone's wage by X amount or offering that bonus, like, it can really drive retention. And then you don't have those maybe like, indirect costs of then having to hire, find someone else, hire them, train them, et cetera. So it's just awesome that you're doing that. I don't know if you've ever done any version of that calculus, but perhaps we could find some more time later to discuss that because we're seeing a little bit of upfront investment. Actually pays dividends down the line.
[00:06:02] Speaker C: Yes. No, we fully believe in that and we have done a lot of studies on it ourselves. And there are. I know some of the sessions touched on that. Just the dollar amount that when you lose an employee and just the drained resources, from human resources to getting those people trained to actually. It takes a toll even on our patients. We really try to keep the same clinician with our patients. And so it affects everything in our company.
So we clearly believe very strongly in employee engagement and retention.
[00:06:35] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:06:35] Speaker B: Setting the culture from the top down. I love that.
[00:06:38] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:06:38] Speaker A: Yes.
Thank you so much for being willing to sit down and share with us. I really think this has been a great conversation. Something to think about with agencies who are looking for opportunities, whether that's things that are not so costly and maybe they don't have the opportunity to do some kind of distribution or profit share in some way or. But that there are things that can be done that don't really add dollars to your cost. Maybe take some time and thoughtfulness, but that actually goes a long way. Appreciation. Making someone feel like they truly are a part of a family or a team can boost morale overall, can make them feel like they are special to what's done. And ultimately, like you said, it does impact patient care and patients know when clinicians are happy.
[00:07:22] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:07:23] Speaker A: For so. And thank you, Ethan.
[00:07:25] Speaker B: Yeah, thanks for having me. This was fun.
[00:07:27] Speaker A: Thanks, everybody.
[00:07:28] Speaker C: Thank you.
