Headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, with local clinicians in cities and towns throughout Ohio and Indiana, Summit Home Care provides specialty health care in the home and does so with world-class, concierge level service. Their nurses, home health aides, therapists, and social workers work closely with physicians to provide the highest level of care available … right in the comfort of the home. Summit has been a valued Trella Health customer since 2019, implementing Marketscape Insights into their strategic growth plan.
Brian Goedde and Konrod Morris share their experiences with leveraging Marketscape Insights in their day-to-day operations.
Customer Spotlight
How does your team leverage Trella Health’s Marketscape Insights?
Brian: Konrod, Tara, our VP of Operations over nursing, and I are the ones that typically use Trella the most because we are involved with where we take our business and how we expand it. We look at exactly what the geographic themes are, and what kind of information we can obtain from our referral sources or potential referral sources to figure out if this is somewhere we want to enter. Our big selling point is our clinical skillset and our ability to take on high acuity patients and create positive outcomes. Because of this, we like to see where we can best compete. Using Trella has been a huge help because we can see what the competition looks like. Knowing where your competition is in terms of referral sources has allowed us to be a lot more aggressive.
When purchasing the Trella data, what were you looking to accomplish?
Brian: Our goal was always to see where to go next. A lot of what we use Trella for is how to expand and grow our market share. We utilize Trella to find the providers that may not be able to match our clinical skillset or outcomes. If we’re able to understand where they’re struggling and then also figure out where the referrals are and where the referrals are coming from, that allows us to be a little more aggressive in going after those referral sources. With Trella, we get an idea of what we’re walking into before we walk into it. It gives us a picture of what we’re going to be going up against if we do decide to move into another territory.
How have you grown since using Trella’s Marketscape Insights?
Konrod: The most quantifiable lift would be from our increased percentage of episodic payer to total referrals. Trella, along with our clinical team making a focused effort to improve our payer mix, has helped to increase our episodic percentage by approximately 2-3%. For an agency our size, that is a major increase.
Konrod: We also speak more authoritatively because of the access we have to Trella’s data. From a sales team perspective, it also connects us with clinical folks and that’s one of the intangibles that I think people don’t really see or understand. For example, if we’re looking in Ohio at a specific county where we don’t have a big presence, we want to understand if there’s an opportunity for us there.
This is when we jump into the Trella solution to see who’s over there, and if they are sending patients to home health. We are also able to see who is getting the most referrals and why. From here we can say “I think we can do probably 10 a week over there. Our research from Trella shows that we have traditional Medicare adults. We can likely get 40-45% traditional Medicare and that will validate or legitimize us adding maybe a PT and a PTA, an RN, and an LPN to start.” Then, we see what it looks like from a financial side. It’s helped us to communicate more. That synergy sets us apart from our competition oftentimes.
When using Trella data, if we see a decline in referrals—especially to a competitor—we leverage our outcomes to start what I call a BDR conversation. Each quarter, we check in openly and honestly, saying, “We appreciate your support, but we’ve noticed a recent drop. Is there something we could improve?” We then share our outcomes data with them. While relationships are key in sales, numbers also matter. After all, if the contact we’ve built a relationship with leaves, our strong performance metrics help ensure continuity.
Have you noticed any surprising findings in your market when using Trella’s data?
Brian: One of my favorite pieces of data that I pulled from Trella is finding out that we are actually either number one or number two (depending on what month it is) unaffiliated home care agency in the state of Ohio, whereas most home care agencies are a part of or wholly owned by either a hospital system or a joint venture with a national home care provider. We are not, we are owned by a small private equity firm and are one of the top providers in the state. We didn’t know that until Konrod and I pulled total patient data from Trella over the course of a year and realized that we had more patients than a couple of the other unaffiliated competitors out there. Seeing that data really lit a fire under our team here that we were no longer the small, local agency we had been for close to a decade, and that we were moving in the right direction.
Competitive data is also a huge positive. This lets us know where our competitors are that are outside of our current coverage area and can tell us when they’re starting to move in on our map and where we’re going. Then, we’re going to try to meet them there, and compete with them directly.
How do you see Trella continuing to support your goals in the future?
Brian: One of the things Konrod and I love Trella for is we can really gather a lot of market data for a region, utilizing Trella to pull who’s sending to where, and then utilizing home health compare to look at what agencies are stationed in that area. We can get a nice picture of what we’re up against if we want to move into a completely different state. This is what we are currently looking into.
Konrod: As a home care agency, we must constantly look to grow because market share is being eroded every day. It’s an industry that’s heavily fragmented. We’re competing with hundreds of agencies. It’s hard to maintain the same amount of revenue if we stay the same size. Trella’s data will help us in determining where to best focus our time and efforts as we continue to expand.
Trella is thrilled to have Summit Home Care and Hospice as a trusted and valued partner who supports our mission towards smarter growth and healthier outcomes.
To learn more about Summit Home Care and Hospice, visit their website here.
