Newsletter,Senior Care
Home Care Post Bulletin – June 2026
From Hamburger University to Home Care Excellence: How Kara Fairhurst Built a Powerhouse Business
In the competitive Illinois home care market, many agency owners struggle to gain traction. Yet Kara Fairhurst generated $1.2 million in revenue during her first year in business — an achievement never seen in the 20-plus-year history of Senior Helpers. She was also recognized as Rookie of the Year for her exceptional growth and performance.
Today, Senior Helpers of Bolingbrook and Southwest Suburbs, launched in 2022, employs 126 caregivers and seven office team members across two offices and two territories. Even more impressive is this: Bolingbrook and the Southwest Suburbs and is on track to generate $3.5 million this year.
Fairhurst’s business serves entirely private-pay clients or individuals with long term insurance and is also approved through the Veterans Administration, a milestone she describes as a major hurdle to overcome.
“The first year, it was only three of us, and I handled all of our social media marketing myself,” Fairhurst said, adding that she now has her sights set on reaching $4 million in annual revenue.
Even today, she remains deeply involved in marketing and believes local community outreach is essential.
“We highlight everything we do in our local community,” she said, noting that she and her team are heavily involved in volunteer work. “We truly believe that when you take care of your community, your community takes care of you.”
Her success did not come from a “magic formula,” but rather from a sophisticated combination of operational expertise, aggressive reinvestment and an unwavering focus on caregiver training.
Read her inspiring story on the Home Care Post.
Welton Hong Highlights the Digital Keys No One Thinks About Until It’s Too Late
It started, as these stories often do, with a phone call no one wanted to receive.
The owner of a successful home care agency had passed away unexpectedly.
Within days, his management team found themselves dealing with grief, staffing concerns, client needs and operational uncertainty. But they soon discovered another problem no one had anticipated:
Nobody could access the agency’s Facebook page.
The page had more than 15,000 followers. Families messaged it daily. Caregiver recruitment campaigns ran through it. Client success stories were posted there. Community education events were promoted there. Years of trust, engagement and brand recognition had accumulated there.
In many ways, it had become the digital front door of the agency.
And the only administrator was gone.
No one knew the password. The recovery email belonged to the deceased owner. Two-factor authentication codes were sent to a phone that was no longer accessible.
As a temporary solution, the agency created a new page. Unfortunately, it never regained the same audience. Prospective clients and caregivers became confused by multiple agency pages appearing online, and years of digital equity were effectively lost overnight.
Welton Hong, the founder and CEO of Senior Care Marketing Max, explores the hidden asset that many agency owners ignore — until it’s too late — in this article on the Home Care Post.
How CareCrown’s Elizabeth Moss Is Rewiring Caregiver Retention to Unlock Profitability
Before launching CareCrown, Elizabeth Moss wasn’t an outsider trying to “fix” home care from a distance. She was running a large home care agency that she started in 1997 to serve the greater Nashville area in Tennessee.
After the 2015 exemption law change, she found herself navigating last-minute callouts, missed shifts and an increasingly unstable caregiver workforce that seemed unmotivated by incremental wage increases.
Today, through CareCrown, she is helping home care agencies rethink caregiver performance by reinforcing the behaviors that drive revenue, retention, and growth. By turning everyday operational activity into a measurable, incentivized system of engagement, CareCrown gives agencies a clearer way to improve reliability, recognize strong performance and retain more caregivers.
It’s all done through the CareCrown app, which is compatible with many of the leading home care scheduling software solutions and can cost as little as $100 per month for a smaller agency.
Moss’s perspective is shaped by an unusually long arc in health care that spans nursing and assisted living roles, to private duty care to running her own agency.
That experience is central to CareCrown’s ability to provide agency owners an operational system that identifies the leaks in the budget and allows reallocation of those lost dollars toward the caregivers for recognition and incentives they deserve while helping agencies not only recover lost revenue but grow their business and improve culture and staffing relationships.
“Caregivers have been hugely underserved, underappreciated, underrecognized and undervalued,” she said.
The CareCrown system is built at the intersection of culture and cash flow — where retention is not treated as sentiment, but as measurable infrastructure.
Inside Contemporary Recruiting’s Virtual Assistant Model for Home Care
In home care, virtual staffing conversations have traditionally centered on cost, availability and speed.
However, as agencies continue to navigate persistent workforce shortages and rising operational demands, a quieter but increasingly important factor is coming into focus: alignment — not just in skills, but in time zones, communication style and culture.
That distinction is at the center of how Contemporary Recruiting is positioning its virtual assistant model for home care agencies. In a recent interview, Andres Cuellar, a partner with Contemporary Recruiting, emphasized that while many competitors rely on offshore staffing models in regions such as the Philippines or India, those arrangements often introduce structural friction that can impact day-to-day performance.
According to Cuellar, the issue is not only geographic distance, but operational timing. Many overseas teams are working when U.S. agencies are closed, effectively reversing the natural rhythm of care coordination and administrative workflows. That misalignment, he noted, can introduce fatigue-related performance risks and communication delays at moments when responsiveness is critical.
Equally important, Cuellar pointed to cultural alignment as a defining differentiator. Because Contemporary Recruiting’s virtual assistants are based in Colombia and operate within the Central Time Zone, they function on a schedule that mirrors U.S. agency operations. Many have also lived, studied, or spent time in the United States, which helps bridge communication norms and workplace expectations.
This proximity is not incidental — it is foundational to the model. Home care, he explained, is fundamentally a relationship-driven industry, where success depends on empathy, responsiveness, and trust between caregivers, clients, and agency staff.
Home Care Post recently caught up with Cuellar to learn how Contemporary Recruiting’s approach is designed to embed a homecare company’s DNA into its remote team members, ensuring they operate not as detached support staff, but as integrated extensions of the agencies they serve.
Aveanna Healthcare Closes on $175M Acquisition of Family First
Aveanna Healthcare Holdings has completed its acquisition of Family First Homecare for $175.5 million in cash, expanding the company’s presence in the pediatric private-duty nursing market and strengthening its position in several key growth states.
The Atlanta-based home healthcare provider said the deal adds 27 Family First Homecare locations across seven states — Florida, Illinois, Iowa, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Texas — while increasing its scale in the specialized pediatric care segment. The acquisition was funded with cash on hand.
The transaction reflects ongoing consolidation in the home healthcare industry as providers seek greater geographic density, operational scale and access to high-acuity patient populations. Demand for in-home care services continues to grow as healthcare systems and payers increasingly favor lower-cost care settings for medically complex patients.
Ohio Attorney General: Eight Indicted in Medicaid Fraud, Nursing Home Theft Cases
Indictments filed in May by the office of Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost accuse five Medicaid providers of stealing a combined $542,176 from the government health-care program for the needy. Three additional people face charges for allegedly stealing from nursing home residents, according to a news release.
“Caregivers are meant to protect the vulnerable, not exploit them,” Yost said. “My office will never tolerate thieves who line their pockets at the expense of elderly, disabled and low-income Ohioans.”
The cases include two providers who billed for in-home services while traveling in the Caribbean, a home-health aide who billed while a client was hospitalized, and a Columbus man who allegedly stole money from a relative with dementia. One of the defendants alone accounts for more than $400,000 of the alleged fraud.
Integrated Home Care Services Acquires Dina
Integrated Home Care Services, a leading in-home benefit manager with more than 30 years of experience helping health plans and risk-bearing organizations unlock the full potential of care in the home, recently announced its acquisition of Dina Care, a leading AI-enabled care coordination and referral management platform.
As health care increasingly shifts into the home, health plans and risk-bearing organizations face mounting pressure to improve affordability, quality outcomes, member experience, and administrative efficiency. Yet despite the growing importance of home-based care, many organizations still struggle to harness the transformative potential of in-home benefits and care due to fragmented workflows, disconnected systems, provider network complexity, under-leveraged data insights and labor-intensive administrative processes.
The result is a significant gap between the promise of care in the home and the specialized operational infrastructure required to deliver it effectively and simply.
10 Local Search Insights Home Care Agency Owners Can’t Afford to Ignore in 2026
For home care agencies, local search is no longer just a marketing channel. It is often the very first point of contact between a family and a provider at a moment when urgent care decisions need to be made — sometimes within hours.
When someone searches “home care near me,” “in-home caregiver for dementia,” or “senior care services,” Google increasingly determines which agencies get considered—and which never enter the conversation. That dynamic has only intensified as AI reshapes how people search, compare, and choose care providers.
At the same time, many home care owners still underestimate how tightly connected Google Maps, reviews, AI-generated answers, local directories, and conversational search have become.
The fundamentals of trust and reputation remain unchanged. But the signals that define trust online are evolving quickly.
Welton Hong, the founder and CEO of Senior Care Marketing Max, revealed 10 local search insights home care agency owners should understand in 2026 and beyond.
Read the article on the Home Care Post.
Homecare Homebase Releases New Report on Responsible AI
Homecare Homebase, a leading provider of home-based care software and administrative services, announced the release of its new industry report, “AI in Clinical & Revenue Operations: A Responsible, Embedded Intelligence Strategy for the Future of Home-Based Care.”
The report is available now for download and provides an in-depth look at how artificial intelligence is shifting from standalone tools to embedded capabilities inside core workflows that facilitate care delivery, documentation, and financial performance.
This report comes as home-based care providers face higher patient acuity, workforce constraints, and tighter documentation and billing requirements. It outlines how AI embedded into the EHR can support documentation quality, clinical decision-making, and coordination across intake, care delivery, and billing.
“AI has the potential to unlock meaningful capacity for home-based care, but only if it is built around the realities of how care is delivered,” said Luke Rutledge, president of Homecare Homebase. “That means embedding intelligence into the workflows clinicians and agencies already use, maintaining clinician control and ensuring every efficiency gain is matched by trust, transparency and accountability.”
Read the full article and get a link to the report on the Home Care Post.
AARP Report Reveals Challenges and Opportunities for Home Care Agencies
A new report from AARP is shining a spotlight on one of the most overlooked forces in American healthcare: family caregivers.
The report, Exploring Utilization and Advancing Impact of Caregiver Training Services, examines the early rollout of Medicare’s new Caregiver Training Services reimbursement codes — a policy change that could significantly reshape how providers, including home care agencies, engage with families.
For home care agency owners, the report is more than policy analysis. It is a roadmap pointing toward where senior care is heading: a future where agencies that successfully educate, support, and collaborate with family caregivers may gain a major competitive advantage.
Read more and get a link to the full report on the Home Care Post.
A Place for Mom Recognized as a Most Trusted Brand by Senior Citizens
A Place for Mom, a leading platform guiding families through every stage of the aging journey, was recently recognized as one of USA TODAY’s Most Trusted Brands by Senior Citizens in 2026.
A Place for Mom received a 5-star rating based on feedback from more than 6,000 U.S. seniors, as well as additional analysis of consumer trust and reputation. The USA TODAY list includes 350 other widely recognized consumer brands across categories, including GoodRX, Advil, Amazon, Life Alert, and Dawn.
For A Place for Mom, this honor reinforces the value of being a trusted resource for families and a trusted partner to providers serving older adults. As the only brand in the senior living referral category recognized on this year’s list, this distinction reinforces the value of being part of a trusted network that families rely on during critical care decisions.
Read more on the Home Care Post.