Back Where It Started: HCHB Founder April Anthony on Curate: Scribe

About This Episode

Vital Caring Group Chairman and CEO April Anthony, a former HCHB CEO, reflects on two decades of the conference, cautiously rolling out Curate Scribe, and getting back into acquisitions.

Transcript

Tom: All right, welcome to the next edition of the Last Visit First Podcast. My guest today is April Anthony, Chairman and CEO of VitalCaring Group.

April: Good to be here.

Tom: Thank you for coming. We're live at the Homecare Homebase Users Conference in Orlando, and it's been twenty years of this. I remember the first one we did, back in Fort Lauderdale, so we're back in Florida twenty years later. It's been wild.

April: It's been wild. It feels like it was forty years ago and forty months ago, in some respects.

Tom: It does. What have you learned since you've been here? What have you seen that you're focused on?

April: You know, I think it's been six years since I was last at a Homecare Homebase Users Conference. I took a little bit of a gap after I stopped being CEO and didn't come for a while. It's great to reconnect with people. I remember back in the early days sort of dreading these events, like, gosh, we're gonna get lambasted by unhappy customers. And it's just been good to interact with so many people who are really seeing the solution work for them and make an impact on their organization. It's a really exciting time, I think, in the home care industry. I've been in it 34 years, and you would think at some point I would become desensitized to it. But the reality is, it feels like right now there's just so many transformative things happening, whether it's the ambient listening tools to make the clinician experience better, the way that can make the patient experience better, the ways we can really guide clinical decision-making at the point of care to drive better clinical outcomes for patients and families, and the way we can communicate with families so much easier. There's a lot of things that I think are gonna make the next ten years of home health care more effective, more efficient, more impactful. It's good to feel that energy and to see that happening broadly across agencies and providers across the nation. So it's been energizing.

Tom: Yeah, I think so too. We're in the exhibit hall, so if you hear background noise, that's why. But this room's really buzzing, and it's nice. So you guys are adopting the Curate product. How's that going?

April: We are. We're super excited. The stage we're in right now is still fairly early. We've been, I would say, pretty cautious with our deployment, because you read so many things. If you look at the proposed rule, there's lots of language in there about concerns about compliance issues and other things with some of the AI-based tools. So we've been pretty cautious and really reviewing it tightly, working closely with Homecare Homebase to make sure that it does what we think the tool should do, what it should guide and what it should not guide, and all those components. So we've been moving pretty slowly through the process, but we're really starting to pick up pace over the last few months and seeing a lot of good progress. You have to train your nurses differently on how to use the tool. Not really on the logistics or the navigation of how to use it, that's all pretty intuitive and easy. It's really more about how to deliver the visit. Teaching them to narrate the visit is a new behavior. So what we're really doing, even for our clinicians that aren't yet using the Scribe product, is teaching them that practice, even though they're still using the old method for documentation. If we can change that behavior before the Scribe tool comes in, it makes it so much easier and so much faster to realize the benefits and really adopt the tool. So even for those that aren't using it, we're already pre-training to change some of those behaviors. I'm super excited about the holistic nature of what that can do, not only for scribing and the efficiency of the documentation time, but probably equally, if not more important, what it can do to help guide more accurate and more appropriate OASIS answers, and what it can do to provide coding assistance and some incremental value, so that the coding reviewers have better quality information and better feedback, and the clinician at the point of care has been guided to it. I think it's that "at the point of care" that's the biggest change, because there have been great tools on the market for years, the Medalogix tool and other things. They just weren't ever really at the right point at the right time. What Scribe is doing for us is bringing all of that information to bear when it needs to be brought to bear,

Tom: For sure.

April: before it's an argument with the nurse about why they should have said this instead of that, or coded this instead of that, or done this instead of that. It's bringing all of that to the moment of care, and instead of a battle, it's truly a guiding tool, where they're like, yeah, that makes a lot of sense, in the moment, in front of the patient. And I think that is going to result in not only more satisfaction from the clinician, but also more adoption of the desired outcomes, which is gonna lead to greater accuracy, more compliance, and ultimately better clinical results. So I think it's truly transformative, not just for the clinician experience, but for the whole care experience. Of all the things, it's really perhaps the most exciting thing I think Homecare Homebase will have done in the twenty-five years we've been working at this project.

Tom: Right. It's interesting too, 'cause we've been talking for the last ten years about defensible documentation, making sure our nurses are documenting everything they have to, homebound status, all the different puzzle pieces. And this is really gonna guide that. You can always go back and look at that transcript from the patient and say, this is exactly what the patient told me, this is why we did it this way. We had a homebound discussion with the patient. I like it. Super excited about it.

April: Yeah, and you know, we're not storing the transcripts for an extended period of time. We store them for literally a couple of days. It's a double-edged sword. It makes the clinicians, frankly, a little bit anxious. For us, the purpose is not to go back later and say you did or you didn't, or to defend. It's really there to make sure that the AI is properly interpreting, and once we've checked off on that, then the transcription is gone. Different agencies may choose to do that different ways, but for us, we don't feel like storing it is necessarily a value if you were to get brought into some sort of legal situation. Not that that happens very often in home health care, or at least it hasn't in my thirty-four years of home care, but it just feels like too much.

Tom: Yeah. You don't wanna be Big Brother. You just wanna get the documentation faster.

April: Yeah, you wanna make sure the documentation is reflective of what actually happened, and then you wanna toss that transcript out and destroy it, so that it doesn't live on. That's not the record. The record is the summation. You don't want all the detail back and forth living long-term.

Tom: That's real good. What's going on at VitalCaring nowadays?

April: Well, it's been an exciting few months. We've finally gotten a little bit back into acquisition mode. We completed an acquisition in December of a portion of the Traditions Home Health and Hospice business: we purchased all of their home health business and a chunk of their hospice business, down in the southern part of the U.S. So we're excited about that one. Now, almost nine months in, we're getting through the integration and implementation phases with them and now getting into the qualitative improvements. So it's been exciting to get that in the rearview mirror. And then just earlier this month, on the first of September, we purchased the remaining assets of Carter Healthcare. Carter's gone through a lot of transition over the last number of years, but there was still a core of business in the state of Oklahoma primarily, a little bit in Texas, a little bit in West Virginia and Ohio. So we're excited to have added those pieces, and we have a couple more deals that we're hoping to announce before the end of the year. So it's good to be back in the acquisition game, good to be growing inorganically in addition to organic growth. That creates energy in the organization.

Tom: You're the best at it. You've done it for so long.

April: I've done a few acquisitions over the years, for sure. I always say, I go back thirty-four years, and there's only one I wish I hadn't done. And I won't tell you what its name was. There's only one where I'm like, man, why'd I buy that thing? It's been a pretty good batting average in the end.

Tom: It's true. On my private equity side there's been a couple where we thought, why did we do that? And by the way, I think you told us not to buy one too. We still bought it, so there you go. How cool is it to see your history board outside when we walked in? I know you're a humble person, but your face is all over the place. And we saw the opening ceremony with all those pictures of all the old folks, and Guy and Celeste and Amy. It's pretty cool. It was humbling for me.

April: It is. I remember distinctly when the idea of Homecare Homebase came to be initially, back in the late nineties. I would have never imagined then that it would be the industry leader, that it would have forty-five percent of the industry's revenue running through our systems. And to look back and think about what the last twenty-six years have meant, not only to Homecare Homebase, but really what they've meant to the industry. I think we've set the standard for what quality care looks like, for what quality documentation looks like, for what efficient process looks like. That's exciting, to see the fingerprints, not individual fingerprints, but the fingerprints of our organization at Homecare Homebase, and what that's done for the industry. It'll never be the same because of the impact that Homecare Homebase has made on the industry. It's definitely something that, collectively, the team through all the twenty-six years can be really proud of.

Tom: It's been wild. For me to sit here and think about it, it gives me chills. That we were part of that, and we were really part of it for a long time, and now we're still part of it, from the outside or inside. It's really amazing. People used to compare us to Epic all the time, and I think we've surpassed what Epic's done, just in a smaller industry. It's pretty wild. They've got a great team over there, they're hiring and putting lots of puzzle pieces together to continue to push the organization in times of change, so it's good.

April: Yeah, exactly. It's exciting. I left the CEO role in 2019 and have stayed involved, but there were a few years after 2019 where my involvement was very minimal. Since Luke's been here now, a little over a year, I've been back involved in a much more routine way, and it's fun. It's fun to be reconnected to Homecare Homebase, it's fun to be generating thoughts and ideas, really speaking from the provider perspective. I go back to Homecare Homebase and think, why was this so successful? And I think the reason is because it was always such a provider-driven solution. It wasn't somebody who heard about a problem or was told about a problem. It was generated by people who were living a problem and trying to create a solution. And I think that's what Homecare Homebase, after perhaps a short departure from that, is getting back to: really being provider-centric and saying, not what do we think you need, but what do you think you need, and really being keen listeners to what the industry is saying and what's really needed. So I'm super excited about this next iteration for Homecare Homebase. I think it's going to be a really productive, successful time, not only for Homecare Homebase, but for all of our customers as well.

Tom: I'm excited for it too. Well, thank you for coming and joining us. How do people reach you if they want to get a hold of you, or if they want to come work for you? I know they do. How do they get a hold of you?

April: Yeah, April.Anthony@VitalCaring.com. You're welcome to reach out. It's exciting to be participating in the industry and to watch all the good things going on. Luke mentioned this morning that the youngest baby boomer turns sixty-five in 2030. I happen to be married to the youngest baby boomer, so that gave me a little bit of a stir when he said that, like, jeez. But you think about what's ahead. As that baby boom generation has hit 80... I read a statistic that in home health, the average patient age was 77 for a really long time, and then all of a sudden, the last few years since COVID, it's popped up to 80. The oldest baby boomer turned 80 last year, in 2025. It's crazy to think about what's still ahead, and the population dynamics and the way they're gonna come the way of home care. So we've got big work to do as an industry, and the opportunity is gonna be bigger than it's ever been for us in the next thirty years. It's exciting to think about what's gonna happen.

Tom: Yeah, that's wild. I can't believe Mark's gonna be the youngest baby boomer. He needs to listen to this. He still looks great.

April: I know. I can't believe I'm married to the youngest one. I'm not far behind him.

Tom: We're not far behind him either. All right, thank you, April. Bye-bye.