Are you looking ahead to 2015 and trying to strategize about how you can differentiate your company from your competition?

You’ve heard us say it many times that based on our research, creating specialty programs and services is a great way to do just that.  There are about 20,000 home care companies in the United States (independents, franchises and affiliates), so that means there’s a ton of competition out there for home care services.  However, not all home care companies take the time to develop a program that can serve a specific population, which allows you to then market those services to a specific set of referral sources.

Last week our live web conference featured Gary Skole and Andrew Dubler who have developed a specialty program to serve dementia and Alzheimer’s patients, called AlzBetter.  If you attended the webinar, you learned the specific steps you need to effectively create and launch a specialized program.  Ultimately, there’s a lot of planning and training that must happen before you can successfully start marketing specialty services.  We understand that when you initially come up with the idea you’re excited and want to run with it and get it off the ground as soon as possible.  But, if you haven’t planned out all of the steps and trained all of our people accordingly, you are setting yourself up for disappointment because you are likely to make promises of services that you can’t carry out.  For instance, if you have decided you are going to offer specialty care for those with dementia, but you don’t fully understand the disease, you may not be aware of some of the typical behaviors of dementia patients.  Therefore you cannot train your caregivers to understand what they’re care expectations will be on a daily basis and they’ll be stressed out and frustrated right along with your dementia client.  That is not a situation that will set you up for success.  You also need to train everyone in your office so that they can answer correctly questions and calls from family members of potential dementia clients.  The last thing you want to do is go out and market your dementia services and have someone call in that’s interested, but your office staff isn’t aware that you now offer dementia care so they either can’t answer the questions or they refer them to another company that does handle dementia care.

Gary and Andrew have been so successful with their AlzBetter program that they are looking to partner with other home care companies to offer the program within a semi-exclusive territory.  If you are the right fit, you receive all of the training needed to launch the program, license to the software, and access to the activities they have developed as well as the marketing materials.  Gary and Andrew have really done a great job of developing a program that can be duplicated with their training and support, which will allow you to successfully care for dementia and Alzheimer’s patients and also increase your income.  If you are interested in learning more about AlzBetter, check out their website and submit an inquiry to see if you are the right fit!