How Nurse Next Door Franchise Embraces Emerging Home Care Trends

Caregiver matching, monitoring, pre-medical care are opportunities for home care business

Our CEO, John DeHart, is respected as a progressive thinker in the home care industry and is often sought after for television interviews.

We pride ourselves on staying at the forefront of emerging trends that will shape the industry and society for years to come.

The combination of rising health care costs, the first Baby Boomers’ arrival at retirement age and rising life expectancies has created massive demands for home care services — and for innovations to improve their delivery. We’ve zeroed in on these main areas to offer or prepare to offer to the market:

Caregiver matching. This is something we already do with great results. In line with our core value of “admire people,” we recognize that each individual is unique, and that applies to both clients and caregivers. We carefully assess not only clients’ medical needs but their likes, pet peeves, hobbies and tastes, and try to match a caregiver’s skills to the client’s preferences. For instance, we have a very diverse community here in Vancouver, with hundreds of thousands of Asian immigrants who speak Cantonese, Taiwanese, Mandarin, Filipino, Hindi, Japanese; caregivers who speak our clients’ native tongues can do their jobs more effectively and make the home health care experience much more meaningful. Nurse Next Door takes the time to hire caregivers with the right mixes of skills.

Pre-medical emergency care earlier in life. Just because a client doesn’t have an immediate medical need doesn’t mean he or she doesn’t need care that addresses emotional needs. Did you know that an estimated 60 percent of seniors suffer from depression? And what happens when you get depressed and lonely, and your friends and family are gone? You stay in your house. You stop preparing healthy meals. You lose strength in your legs and hips, and you fall. Household falls send more seniors to the hospital than any other cause, and Nurse Next Door helps clients adopt more active lifestyles that can keep people healthier for longer.

Val Litwin is our vice president for operations, the man in charge of implementing the innovative practices he and our other administrators devise.

The shift in popular perception of seniors. It’s Betty White’s world; we just live in it. At 90, the actress and comedienne is as popular as ever. A couple of years back, fans started a Facebook campaign to have her host “Saturday Night Live” — and it worked! On May 8, 2010, White, at 88, became the oldest person to host the show in its 35-year history, and the episode drew the highest ratings for “SNL” in more than a year. Point is, nowadays, seniors are — dare we say it? — cool, an attitude we’ve always held at Nurse Next Door. And with married couples waiting until later and later in life to have children (if they have children at all) and an explosion in the number of seniors living ever longer, care for parents seems poised to take the place of raising children for successful adults in their 30s and 40s. “Women my age used to share kids’ stories,” says Judy Brooks, our chief of staff who hired Nurse Next Door to care for her mother. “Now we’re talking about parent care.”

Remote monitoring. This is the future of the home health care industry. Imagine a system that tracks a client’s vital signs and motion in their homes and alerts caregivers whenever something seems amiss — sudden immobility in the kitchen, for example, or a sudden drop in blood pressure. It would revolutionize the industry, automatically transforming the dynamic between caregiver and client and easing the emotional and financial burden on family members — not to mention allowing more seniors to stay in their homes. Nurse Next Door is developing a platform to incorporate remote monitoring technology, and we expect to roll it out soon.

The home health care industry has resisted big changes over generations. But it’s in the midst of some major disruption, and the companies that will thrive in the new world are those that embrace change. That’s the way we’ve always operated at Nurse Next Door, and we pride ourselves on not just staying ahead of trends but setting them.

Does this sound like the kind of franchise system you’d want to be part of — one that directly improves the lives of clients, that provides a great business opportunity for entrepreneurs who benefit from our proven systems and strategies? We’d like to hear from you. Fill out the form on this page and download our free franchise report with loads of information on investment costs, earnings potential and the business model. Then let’s start talking.