Home healthcare worker performs clinical test on patient

What started as an experiment last spring led to the launch last week of Boost Home Healthcare by Best Life Brands. 

The Michigan senior services holding company already had a foothold in the home care industry with its ComforCare and At Your Side franchises. Then last March, Best Life Brands bought Los Angeles home healthcare agency ProHealth Home Care as a way to dip its toe into a new sector and expand opportunities down the road to its franchisees.

J.J. Sorrenti

“I’ve been in franchising for a long time and I love having a laboratory, if you will,” Best Life Brands CEO J.J. Sorrenti told McKnight’s Home Care Daily.  “It’s always hard if you have an idea or a concept to test that out with franchisees’ capital. I’ve felt that it’s always better to have a company and a location so that if you have an idea and you want to test something new with your own money and you screw it up, it’s your risk.”

Sorrenti said over the past few months Best Life Brands delved into the infrastructure required to run a home healthcare business — from billing and coding to recruiting professional talent. With that knowledge, the company is ready to offer the Boost franchise not only to its home care franchise owners, but to the owners of its other franchises: Blue Moon Estate Sales and CarePatrol, a senior placement service.

“There are a lot of things that we can bring from one business to another, even from the estate sale franchise at Blue Moon,” Sorrenti said. “Those are senior care services that allow for us to plan as we think about the families that are moving into the Care Patrols and community placement.”

Expanding territory and providing a continuum of care have quickly become a trend in the home care industry. Recently Baton Rouge, LA-based Amedisys announced it was expanding from home care and home healthcare into hospital-at-home. Larger companies are also exploring partnerships with providers of other services, including food and transportation.

Best Life Brands shouldn’t have difficulty rolling out Boost Home Healthcare; its existing franchises already operate in nearly 450 territories in the U.S. and Canada. Still, Sorrenti said the company is interested in talking to other agencies outside the Best Life Brands family.

“If they are an independent home care business, we would certainly have the conversation about converting them to a ComforCare franchisee, if the territory is available, and then allowing them to come to Boost,” Sorrenti said.