Home Health 360: Presented By AlayaCare

From Homegrown to High-Tech: Caring People's 20-Year EMR Transformation

• Erin Vallier • Season 1 • Episode 80

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Anthony Spero shares his experience transitioning Caring People from a 20-year-old proprietary software system to AlayaCare, resulting in improved caregiver satisfaction and more time for patient care.

Caring People developed their own software 20 years ago when few options existed for home care providers. The organization expanded from two states to six through acquisitions, revealing limitations in its proprietary system.

Since implementing AlayaCare, real-time data access has transformed operations, allowing immediate insights into missed visits, caregiver punctuality, and client satisfaction. Most importantly, caregivers now spend more time with clients rather than struggling with technology.

If you're considering a technology transition for your home care organization, remember that software development isn't your core business — focus on what you do best and partner with technology experts who understand the unique needs of home-based care.

Episode resources:

Brochure: Head to Head: Legacy Software vs Alayacare
Blog: How AlayaCare makes implementation work: A practical guide to rolling out home care software
Blog: Successful software implementation: The AlayaCare implementation approach
Podcast: Successful software implementation for organizational transformation in home-based care




If you liked this episode and want to learn more about all things home-based care, you can explore all our episodes at alayacare.com/homehealth360.

Anthony Spero:

I think everyone thinks about the efficiencies and cost savings, all those things that you want to drive with implementing new technology, but this is also giving our caregivers more time at the bedside and they're spending more time with our clients and not having to fumble through a technology that just isn't working in the way that they need it to today, and so that's another big piece. Think about the quality piece right that when you implement something like this, where they actually have more time to spend with their clients and their family members, they're trying to make sure that they're doing their ADLs, and so all those things are so much easier now as we've made the transition.

Erin Vallier:

Welcome to another episode of the Home Health 360 podcast, where we speak to home-based care professionals from around the globe. I'm your host, Erin Valliere, and today we are joined by Anthony Sparrow. Anthony is a senior executive with over 20 years of both healthcare operations and business development experience. His experience spans senior living, home health, hospice, pharmacy and personal care, and currently Anthony is leading a multi-state post-acute health care organization as CEO of Caring People. Welcome to the show, Anthony.

Anthony Spero:

Thanks for having me Appreciate it.

Erin Vallier:

I think you're the perfect person to have on the show today to talk about the topic, which is all about what happens when you decide to come off of a proprietary system. And for those who are like, what's a proprietary system? That's when you choose to develop your own EMR, your own software to support the business, rather than purchasing something that some people call off the shelf or like a more commercial product. That's just here you go. Here's the keys Before we dive into the question. So I'm curious. I know you haven't been with Caring People for 20 years, but do you know the story or anything about why you guys 20 years ago decided to be in the software business rather than buy a software for the company?

Anthony Spero:

Yeah, erin. Actually this week is my three-year anniversary with Caring People.

Erin Vallier:

Happy anniversary.

Anthony Spero:

Obviously I wasn't here 20 years ago, but there was not a lot of different systems or platforms out there that home care providers could use, and I think even back then there were so many organizations that were still doing things that were manual or on paper, and so I think the organization made a decision at that point to develop their own software system and for a long time it worked. It was a good billing software, it was a decent scheduling software. But I think, like many organizations, as the needs change and develop and I think things became a little bit more complex, there was a lot of different things that were put in place that were manual sort of processes that had to help fill some of the gaps in some of the systems. It was time when that was a challenge as we kept moving forward.

Erin Vallier:

Yeah, that makes sense. Boy, can I appreciate the fact that your software system can be the limiting factor? And you just create your whole world around it, you hire more admin staff, you do this thing on paper, all this stuff. So I imagine accumulative effects of that happening over and over across the 20 years influenced your decision to move away. But what was it? What was that thing, what was the straw that made you decide it was time to change and what ultimately led you to choose AlayaCare as your partner?

Anthony Spero:

We went through probably a two, three-year period of time where we did a number of acquisitions, we expanded out. So we went from two states primarily for the Northeast both New York and New Jersey and we expanded into Connecticut, massachusetts, texas, dallas and Houston. We expanded down the East Coast to Florida and we did this to a lot of acquisitions and bringing new folks into the Caring People family, and I think that was for us a big sort of push to really understand how do we effectively integrate these companies in, how do we have them become part of our culture relatively quickly? How do we start sharing information and best practices and all those things that we were having success with and really trying to share some of that with the new folks coming on board? And we didn't really have a platform that could accomplish that in the way that we needed to, and so that's why we look at AlayaCare and I think you and I have talked about this before, aaron, a little bit.

Anthony Spero:

We looked at AlayaCare, I think probably about five or six years ago, even before my time, and we vetted a lot of different systems. We just didn't feel like the private duty home care platforms were in a place where they could meet the needs of our organization and then, all of a sudden, you had rapid development and you had really your platform, from our perspective went leaps and bounds in terms of the development, where it needed to be and when you all came back to us and I was with the organization. So for me it was the first time we were just so blown away at everything that LionCare offered and we wanted to become early adopters of this.

Erin Vallier:

Oh, we appreciate your leap of faith there. Five years ago I was with the company. I've been there for seven years and I'm thinking back five years ago. We still had a lot of growing to do. It's been exciting to watch the platform transform over the last five years and we continue to do so. I'm really excited to watch what we can do with you not for you, but with you as you continue to grow and scale your business.

Erin Vallier:

I want to talk about change management because that's the scary part, right, I talk to people on a daily basis and sometimes I run across somebody on a proprietary system and they're like I've been on here for 20 years and this is all my people know and they don't like change. And my rebuttal to that is, of course, we like change, we don't like the transition. We want to see how our clothes fit when we lose that five pounds, we want to feel good after we've learned this new skill or whatever. We just don't like that real, uncomfortable transition part. So I'm curious what did getting internal buy-in for such a major transformation look like for you guys, especially with that two decades?

Anthony Spero:

of use. Aaron, it's a really great question. Our organization is a little complex, right. We're in six states, we have 18 branches, we have different ends of the spectrum in terms of our teams and new acquisitions that have come on board, and things were a little bit different across the organization. I think for us it was a couple of things. One is we were using the technology right. So we had folks that were used to using a technology to clock in and clock out. We were doing that from a billing perspective, so there was an understanding that there was value in using technology. We could understand and the teams understood that, down to the caregiver level. So I think that's number one. Number two is we also understood that we had a lot of workarounds. We had a lot of manual processes that we had to integrate into the system. So, even though we had this proprietary automated system, we had to have so much sort of manual processes that were, along with that to fill a lot of the gaps in the information.

Anthony Spero:

By the time we made this decision to go with a Lyacure, there was a level of frustration in the organization that was impacting our ability to recruit folks, it was impacting our ability to retain top talent and so for us it was really kind of a natural transition.

Anthony Spero:

And I'll tell you, I think there was actually sort of a celebration as soon as we mentioned that we're going with AlayaCare. It was like, oh my God. Finally, it's interesting we had folks that I think that were on the sort of borderline a little bit Do I stay with this organization or do I leave? And other folks that we were in the process of recruiting. We started to use the fact that we were bringing a lot of care into the organization as a real recruiting tool for folks. So I think two things we kept people, retained them, knowing that we were moving to a new technology, and then we were able to recruit really high-level folks that wanted to be a part of this transition as we move forward. So the buy-in was not a challenge. I think they were starving for this type of technology Fantastic.

Erin Vallier:

Yeah, I always say that people change for one of two reasons. It's either they've experienced enough pain that they got to change, and it sounds like that's where you guys fell into, or you just love this thing so much that you can't help but change. But I don't know. Most people have fallen into that former category. It's like ouch, this hurts too bad. I got to do something different. Were there any particular strategies for those people who were on the fence and the folks that you decided were worth keeping? How did you tactically go about managing that change effectively and getting them to want to be there?

Anthony Spero:

We had one internal key stakeholder who really led this whole process and that was Amrisa Kornbu, who's our CFO.

Anthony Spero:

She worked very closely also, too, with Liz Brown, our VP of clinical and compliance.

Anthony Spero:

She worked with Christine DeLeo, our chief operating officer, and so the way that she approached this which I thought was genius and I think it helped us really get some really initial buy-in and traction out of the gate is that she set up these sort of different groups right, depending on discipline.

Anthony Spero:

So there was a clinical group, there was a financial group, there's an operational team. So, before we even dove into anything around implementation and this is what I would just recommend to anyone who's looking to move towards a light care is that we expose these folks in the very beginning of these work groups, these work sessions where they just could get exposed to it. They could see the processes, they could see how the system works, they could input data, they could understand the benefit of it, and then what we tried to do is spend time comparing it to what they were doing today. So they looked at the proprietary system, they looked at all the manual processes, rather than just telling them we would show them that and we would work through those sessions and we did that all on the front end and I think that really helped to accelerate adoption across the organization.

Erin Vallier:

Yeah, I think you're right. I had the pleasure of working very closely with Amarissa and the team and she is quite lovely and not everybody will allow us to get that intimate, if you will, in the conversation. We did have the opportunity to come on site. That was lovely and I think to your point, being able to observe what they were doing today and then show them, translate that to the new system. That got a lot of people excited and I'm glad that you guys were able to take advantage of that excitement and the buy-in. When people have an opportunity to weigh in, ask questions, try to break it something new, they feel empowered, like it was partly their decision.

Anthony Spero:

I'll even take it a step further. We did this at the board level. Honestly, we had tremendous support through our board and our organization about moving to a new technology and so one of our first board meetings we had as we were moving towards this implementation process.

Anthony Spero:

We had made the decision to go with AlayaCare. We actually had one of our regional directors of operations, brady Kopp, who runs New Jersey. He was one of our super users. He's a young leader doing great things for the organization. He really stepped in to be the sort of super user with AlayaCare. But we had him come in. It was classic. We had him come into the board meeting. He did a demonstration for the board and I think what was important for me, you know, I said, brady, let's show them how a lie care is going to work. More importantly, let's show them how we're doing it. Today I just remember them looking at oh my God, how fast can we get this thing implemented? Because they could see how cumbersome and how much work we were doing.

Erin Vallier:

That just wasn't productive, so yeah, that's very cool and it's something that made me excited, because this regional director could not have had a ton of experience on a light care. It's not like he was a super user for many years. It sounds like I'm a super user on this thing that I've been using for the last 20 years blah, blah, blah and I've been using this thing for five minutes and now look what I can do. That's very cool.

Anthony Spero:

We had just finished implementing New Jersey and I think it was probably a couple of weeks after that. We're asking Brady to do this and I was a little. I'll be honest with you. I was a little nervous of how that was going to go, but it was amazing. I do think to your point. I think that is also attributable to the technology and how user-friendly it is and how intuitive it is and relatively easy to work through.

Erin Vallier:

Super important, especially as you're onboarding new people. Get them hit the ground running. I want to talk a little bit about your implementation strategy. You had a complex project. You were on a proprietary system for 20 years.

Anthony Spero:

We're six states, but we have 18 branches, though, within those states.

Erin Vallier:

And you like the most regulated states for some reason. New York, New Jersey, Texas.

Anthony Spero:

I didn't choose those. I was just happy that we weren't in California.

Erin Vallier:

I don't know. The folks in California are probably happy they're not in New York.

Anthony Spero:

That's probably true.

Erin Vallier:

But you guys approach this differently than a lot of people. Some folks that are in large organizations like this just feel like I need contractors to come in and do this thing for me and I want the keys when the car is running, just teach me where the gas pedals and all the buttons are. But you did this differently. You didn't have any outside contractors. You had a very small internal team doing this. They fully owned it. Can you walk us through why you went that route and what are the benefits?

Anthony Spero:

I would say that there's not one size fits all, I think, in how to work through an implementation. I think this is a decision that I made in the organization after talking with the leadership team and thinking about how we wanted to do this. I think what I was trying to really get across to the leadership team is that I've done it both ways right. I've implemented technologies across different verticals within the post-acute, in different opportunities before, and I have brought outside consultants in, and so we weigh the pros and cons and there's no one way to do it. This is our preference. Sometimes, when you bring an outside contractor in, there's lack of ownership, right, and not that it's done purposefully, it's just they're dealing with it. There's a group that's focused on it. Yes, it's not necessarily a focus for the leadership team, right, they're doing the day-to-day, they're focusing on the business, all things that go along with that, but there's not that sort of ownership, not just the leadership level, but really down to the branch level, where the rubber hits the road and kind of, where all those things happen on a daily basis. And so for me, it was about how do we create ownership right, how do we get people excited about this? And so, yeah, we made a decision to 100% do it in-house. We did not add one FTE and our CFO was the internal stakeholder that led it. We identified folks that we thought would really be excited about learning a new technology. So, these super users, we identified those in the front end, and let me tell you, nothing's ever perfect from an implementation. I just want to say this. But we started with New Jersey, which is one of our biggest legacy markets, and we had made a ton of mistakes. I'm just going to tell you that We've made a bunch of mistakes, okay. And then we transitioned from New Jersey, we took a whole lessons learned and then we went to Florida Okay, we made a bunch of mistakes, but we made less mistakes. And then we went to one of we went to our largest market after that, which was New York, and that was we were a little concerned about that, because these types of implementing, these types of technologies, can be a disruption to the operations and what's happening. And the team was amazing and I'll tell you, I think that one probably between we did New York, connecticut, massachusetts and Texas, all within the next three or four months after that, and every time we did it, aaron.

Anthony Spero:

The implementation became much more effective, much more smooth. We had clients that were in the system, we had all of our caregivers in, people were clocking in and clocking out, we were dropping bills and everything was happening in the way that it needed to. And I also say this your implementation person was incredible, phenomenal. My team talks more and more about your whole implementation team and the support that they provided, and that's not always the case. Very often here and I know this you sign a dotted line, you're getting this new technology and then, all of of a sudden, the person who was your partner for the longest time in the process you don't see them again. That was not it, and that's what I loved about LionCare. Like you were with us, all of you, from beginning to end, and I think that really helped, too, with the implementation going smoothly across the board.

Erin Vallier:

Oh, thank you for that feedback. We do try to do things a little bit differently every step of the way for the life of the relationship, just to make sure you're maximizing the technology. So lessons learned here? Just to summarize pick the right team. You had to have good people and don't expect to get it right the first time. You guys rolled with it. You made the mistakes. It's like, oh crap, what can we learn from this and then apply it to the next wave? If you will, then you get a little bit better and by the time you guys were in your most complicated market, you'd learned enough that things just really started going smoothly.

Anthony Spero:

And Aaron, I would just say this too we took the folks like the Brady cops of the world and the people who went, the first adopters within the organization. We actually sent them to the other locations. So every time we had a super user who had more experience or went through the implementation, we actually sent them to the other location. So every time we had a super user who had more experience or went through the implementation, we actually physically had them travel to the next implementation and so they were there helping.

Anthony Spero:

And it wasn't just about implementing AlayaCare. It was about, okay, implementing AlayaCare, and then how does that affect your day-to-day operations? And that's where I think a lot of organizations miss it. When you bring an outside consultant and the thing they don't know is they don't know your operations. They may be focusing on getting AlayaCare implemented, but it's not being implemented and tying it into your day-to-day workflows. And that's when you have your team doing it. You have that ownership. That's where it becomes, I think, much more seamless. I'm using AlayaCare in the scheduling. It's that piece of it that makes the biggest help.

Erin Vallier:

Absolutely. Not only that, but that rock star, that super user that you're sending everywhere. That makes them feel more valuable, that makes them learn a lot more, and so you are increasing the value of your human capital, retaining them and building a really strong, cohesive workforce across your organization. That's very cool, and you mentioned something that inspired a question. It's about how do you incorporate all this stuff into your workflows. I know you guys now have access to some data and the ability to track, like you couldn't do with your proprietary system, so I'm curious. I know that you're still in the process of figuring out exactly what you want to track, because it's like a kid in the candy store. I could do all these things, but what's the primary focus? I want to hear more about that experience. What are some of the new KPIs you're experimenting with, and how did you arrive at the desire to track these things? Because I know you can build some of that reporting and automate it in a life care. How is doing some of that change the way you operate?

Anthony Spero:

Such a great question and we're right in the sort of throes of that. I just had a conversation yesterday with our VP of clinical and compliance and she is like chomping at the bit because we've got all this great data. Now that's in the system. We have all of our states that are rolling in. All the data is flowing through. So what we have within Caring People, we have a really robust compliance program and so we have all these high risk regulatory areas that we focus on. We track it on a monthly basis, quarterly basis. We do it down to the branch level, aaron, and this might be something like making sure the care plan is completed timely, making sure that our caregivers are providing exactly what's on that care plan, making sure that there's supervision from our nursing staff to our home health data. So things like that. We track just to make sure that those are happening and listen where we identify opportunities for improvement. We're putting plans of correction in place and we're CHAP accredited. This year We've had two deficiency-free surveys. So all that stuff flows down to that and we're at 85%. So when we put these in place two years ago, our goal was to get 85% or better in all those key metrics. Okay and we've done that. So now what we're looking at and we're rolling out for the second half of this year. So our whole quality assurance program is going to change. Okay, and it's going to change because of AlayaCare's implementation.

Anthony Spero:

I don't want to be tracking sets of data just to track data. We should be using this to impact the organization and make decisions in the organization and provide insights into how we're operating, how we can continue to improve and we're revamping. So we're taking those things that we focus on I think you did a great job on and we're using all of the AlayaCare metrics and KPIs. So our leadership team right now is making decisions on those things or in terms of what we want to look at. But I think of things like within a minute, I can see how many missed visits there were. I can look at like this and see okay, was there a caregiver that was late? Our leadership called this morning at 10 am with the team and there was another report. I can send a sort of a service survey through AlayaCare. My super user in New Jersey is piloting this right now and he already has some really cool data coming out. But you're actually in the module. You're clicking on the client.

Anthony Spero:

There's a quick little service survey that's embedded into AlayaCare that we can push out and it's a score of I think 40 is the top score. There's different questions that we ask and then at the very end we ask would you recommend us to a family or a friend, aaron? The thing is this is that you're getting that feedback in real time. So we're already thinking what's a score that we're not comfortable with. Is it 30 or less? Is it 20?

Anthony Spero:

If we have clients that are having a great experience, how do we address those and how do we quantify those? But on the other side of that, I'm all about acknowledgement too, like when we're doing a great job and there's that great feedback, how do we acknowledge the caregiver? How do we acknowledge the nurse that went in? So it gives us an opportunity to acknowledge really great performance. But it also gives us an opportunity to see how we can improve. But it's all in real time. I'm not looking at things retrospectively anymore Three months ago. I'm trying to figure out what happened. I can look at it in real time, which is really beneficial.

Erin Vallier:

Absolutely. I love the real-time data. It allows you to make very smart decisions, not in arrears, when it's too late. It sounds like you're already looking at things that would improve your outcomes, like inpatient satisfaction. I'm curious do you have any other ideas Like what kinds of decisions are you looking forward to being able to make that you couldn't make before in other departments? I know you guys have like skilled and non-skilled components of your business.

Anthony Spero:

We have care management services. We have behavioral health services that are social worker-led. We're providing psychosocial services to seniors. There's a tremendous need for that in every one of the markets that we're in Skilled services. You mentioned that we're also providing a lot of Alzheimer's and dementia care in these memory care units that are through each of our states, and so right now, we're going to have the ability to look at certain diagnoses. We're going to be able to look at certain outcomes.

Anthony Spero:

Right now, we're in the process of implementing the family portal, which my team is so jazzed up about, aaron, right now, because that's a big missing piece, I think, in a lot of home care organizations.

Anthony Spero:

Listen, we're all in a situation where we're taking care of loved ones and family members. It might be mom or dad, it might be our grandparents, but it might be mom or dad, it might be our grandparents, but we're all doing that on a day-to-day basis. Just based on the aging demographics in the US, I want to know did my mom take her medication? Did the home health aide arrive? What's her care plan look like for this week? Is there any change of status? And I want to be able to go in and see this information without having to pick up the phone. So how do we make this easier for clients and their family members? And the family portal through Align Care is going to allow us to do that, so they're going to be able to see the care plan, the schedule, see if mom or dad took their medication. All of that information is going to be at their fingertips and we're excited about that. We think that's going to really enhance the experience for our clients and their family members.

Erin Vallier:

I'll have to have you back on the show to talk about the transformation in the client's experience if you will, the family's experience and learn a bit more about what you guys learned through the implementation of the family portal.

Anthony Spero:

Sure, I'd love to, of course.

Erin Vallier:

That'd be great. It sounds like a fun conversation. Now I'm going to switch gears a little bit. You did it brave, you didn't care. I'm going to implement a whole bunch of stuff. I'm not afraid of the surveys that are happening during the implementation. So for those of you listening out there, it is possible. It might not be comfortable, but it is possible. Anthony did it, call him and ask him how. But the impact on your business goes beyond just the EMR. That's my long approach to this question. Can you share how the switch to AlayaCare helped you transform other areas? I know you've implemented some external tools like HubSpot. How has that impacted you and how are you using data more purposefully in your workflows?

Anthony Spero:

Yeah, erin, that's a great point. I think one of the things that you helped us with in the beginning I have to remember this you connected me with other private duty home care companies in our space who had gone through the transformation, who implemented AlayaCare. At the same time we were doing AlayaCare, we were looking at which CRM to go with, and so we were looking at Salesforce. We were looking at HubSpot, other options as well. We were looking at who has API connections to AlayaCare. Where could we integrate? Where it was somewhat seamless? But we needed to become a much more metrics-driven organization, right? So we had a bunch of anecdotal information, we were tracking a bunch of stuff on spreadsheets, but it was all retrospective. I mean, it's all that stuff, right? So you're trying to scale, you're trying to do all these things, and it's sort of like you have one arm tied behind your back as you're trying to do this. So we did it all at once. One, so we did it all at once.

Anthony Spero:

One of the decisions we made, though, initially with implementing HubSpot we did this in April of this year, at the same time, I think we were through two to three states, I think, with the AlayaCare implementation is that I made the decision to implement HubSpot outside of AlayaCare. We have a large sales force, we have a sales leader. Let's get a clean database right. Let's create all of our accounts. Let's do it by market, let's do it by sales rep. Let's have us using HubSpot outside of AlayaCare so that we are looking at the compliance, the types of reports, the information that we can look at. How do we have deeper conversations with our sales folks in a way that really helps to coach them and make them more successful than looking at that territory management?

Anthony Spero:

We made a decision on how to do it outside of Alliant Care, and so that's how we're operating it now, and at some point we're going to integrate the two, but I just felt like there was no huge need to do that initially. We're still working through the Alliant Care implementation and let's do that separate, but our conversations are so much more metric driven. We're doing revenue forecasting calls, we're looking at types of clients that are coming on by diagnosis, all those things. We're looking at length of stay, which in every other post-acute industry is very easy to capture, and it was very hard for us to be able to do that, and now, with the push of a button we can look at how long are our clients staying with us and other opportunities there.

Erin Vallier:

Cool. I like the fact that you guys are in this crawl, walk run kind of phase. Some people want to just make sure that it's 100% when they go live, rip off the bandaid, but that's not always necessary in order to get the benefit, and you guys are seeing that now. When you do approach the integration piece. I'm curious what are your goals for that? What are your hopes? I know that it's going to be bi-directional. They'll have a trigger hey, this person's in HubSpot at some point. How is that going to improve your workflows once they're intimately connected?

Anthony Spero:

That's a great question, erin. Even with everything we've done, there's still a manual process on the intake side of it. Right now we're developing a phase sheet. We're looking at how do we integrate that into HubSpot. So for our sales folks, right, they're working with a client, the client's understanding what services we offer. We're understanding what needs they have from a care perspective and how do we help support that.

Anthony Spero:

Our whole goal is to get our clients home. It's where the client wants to be, it's where the family wants to be, it's where I believe folks can have the most benefit and comfort. And we're trying to work through how do we get the service agreement to that quickly? How do we walk through that process? So, for me, the thing I want to see when we integrate, which I think is going to have the biggest upside for us and our clients, is having that service agreement, having our front facing sales folks working with our clients, getting the face sheet done, getting the service agreement done and having that flow directly into AlayaCare. They're still separate as we've worked through that process, so to me, that's going to be one of the biggest benefits that we can do.

Erin Vallier:

Save you some time for sure, and eliminate that opportunity for human error as you. Double entry things. That'll be huge. That'll be huge. Final question for you. I know we've talked about a double entry things. That'll be huge. That'll be huge. Final question for you. I know we've talked about a lot of things. Is there anything else, any other words of wisdom that you can share to leaders, owners that are listening to the show, that are on our proprietary system today and they're thinking that at some point they want to get out of the software business because that's costly? Like when we looked at your infrastructure it's like the salaries of your developers that were on staff, and then the server maintenance and all this stuff. All of that adds up all the paper that you were having to use. That's costly.

Anthony Spero:

But, from your perspective, anything that you'd like to share that will help folks feel a little bit more comfortable with even just dipping their toe into the conversation with somebody is having our folks go out and provide best-in-class care. We're not a software development company and so that's not our expertise and that's not an ability for us to be able to scale that. So everything that we did over those number of years to try to get that proprietary system to work and it didn't meet our needs as we got a little bit more complex I would just say for anyone who's looking at this, just maybe you gotta have that realization. That's not your expertise, that's not your core business. Go to the experts, go to the folks that live and breathe and do this every day and really understand the private duty home care space. And I would say listen, the software has come a long way. The platform has come light years. I think I mentioned in the last five years, but even the last two years. You don't want to be left behind Some of the AI stuff that you have coming out as part of this system in the future, and if you are behind the eight ball and having access to this type of platform, this type of technology, then you're going to be left behind.

Anthony Spero:

In the private duty home care space in particular, there's so much consolidation that has to happen right. There's so many mom and pops. It's happened in the hospice space, where there's been a lot of mergers and acquisitions. It's happened in the nursing home assisted, all of that. But in private duty home care, there's a lot of consolidation and most of the folks that I know are moving towards a lie of care and you don't want to be left behind. Don't be afraid. You get the right people involved in your team. Listen, we're going to make mistakes and that's okay. We want to be transparent about those. We want to have those bubble up quickly and then we want to fix them and then, as we go through the implementation, we want to get better at that. So I would just say that Don't be afraid to do it. I guarantee you it's going to help your teams be more productive, be more efficient.

Erin Vallier:

They're going to enjoy their job a lot more, and that's what I would say for sure. Fantastic feedback. You definitely want to do things these days that make your employees very happy and make them more efficient, because we all know that reimbursement rates are not going up and we're expected to do more with less as the population continues to age and they want to be at home. So all great points I do. I think I'm going to ask even just one more question. It has to do with the security piece of it, because I know keeping up with the security standards that are required these days because healthcare has a target on their back what's the difference there in your security level and your comfort level with a proprietary system versus going with something more commercial that has to be tested and keep those standards?

Anthony Spero:

Well, I think, where Alicare is cloud-based, I think we looked at everything and the redundancy and backups and just making sure that, a we had access to the information. B there was a plan in terms of just hear all of these. I actually personally went through a ransomware attack in a different organization which was we were. It was a pharmacy organization. It was in 18 states and within 24 to 48 hours we lost visibility of medications going out. So my point is this that's another focus you have to make sure you don't. You know your servers are cloud-based.

Anthony Spero:

You have to make this just so much with cybersecurity. Cybersecurity insurance, like all of those things that you have to carry when you're a proprietary system, can be extremely costly and also, in addition to the staff piece of it, all of that, you get to move to AlayaCare. They just have so much more access to resources and TIPA compliant. It's the security side of it Protecting the information, making sure you don't have bad actors that can infiltrate some of that. We were just glad to move that over. It was really something that put us at ease.

Erin Vallier:

Yeah, take a load off. So it sounds like, overall, the switch to a light care was really positive. Not only are your operations becoming more efficient, you're able to make better decisions with the real-time data. Your people like it, the adoption rate is good and it is also secured. It sounds like it may be saving you guys some money as well Saving you some money and also enabling your growth without having to add overhead. Is that a fair synopsis there?

Anthony Spero:

I think so and I would say this too, aaron, I think for our caregivers, our proprietary system was always down or always issues, with people clocking in and out, and I don't want to lose sight of this. I think everyone thinks about the efficiencies and cost savings, all those things that you want to drive with implementing new technology, but this is also giving our caregivers more time at the bedside, and they're spending more time with our clients and not having to fumble through a technology that just isn't working in the way that they needed to today, and so that's another big piece. Think about the quality piece, right that when you implement something like this, where they actually have more time to spend with their clients and their family members, they're trying to make sure that they're doing their ADLs, and so all those things are so much easier now as we've made the transition.

Erin Vallier:

Gosh, you make me smile. This is a real success story, because our goal, our mission, is just to enable the care for the people that are aging in a place that they want to age and that is home, and, gosh, I love that. So thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom, sharing your story today. It has been a real pleasure, thanks so much for having me.

Anthony Spero:

It has been a real pleasure.

Erin Vallier:

Thanks so much for having me. Welcome to another episode of the Home Health 360 podcast, where we speak to home-based care professionals from around the globe. I'm your host, erin Valliere, and today we are joined by Anthony Sparrow. Anthony is a senior executive with over 20 years of both healthcare operations and business development experience. His experience spans senior living, home health, hospice, pharmacy and personal care, and currently Anthony is leading a multi-state post-acute health.