What could have happened in the home care industry didn’t. In 2012, based on interviews with the best and the brightest in and around the home care industry, an idea was born and documented. It was radical – the idea of a network for sharing relevant information across organizational boundaries about a home care recipient with stakeholders, family, health providers. In this vision, the care recipient was at the center of this information sharing across the stages and steps of living independently, senior housing, rehab, hospital, and home. Instead of this vision outlined in The Future of Home Care Technology 2012, we have today’s franchised and fragmented home care industry – regionally focused, achieving the most minimal advances in technology deployment.
Honor buys Home Instead: one of the newest acquires one of the oldest. Honor, a recipient of $255 million in total investment (Series D in October, 2020), has pivoted here and there since its $20 million-fueled launch in 2015, always intent on disrupting the home care industry. For a while, many in the industry were skeptical. They viewed it as a threat – see interviewee comments in 2017’s Tech-Enabled Home Care. Honor began as a home care company, then a home care tech platform company and buyer of smaller home care companies -- bulking up prior to Friday, when it acquired the largest home care company in both the US and UK– Home Instead.
SAN FRANCISCO and OMAHA, Neb., Aug. 6, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Honor and Home Instead announced today that Honor Technology, Inc. has acquired Home Instead, Inc., effective Aug. 6. The acquisition brings together the largest, highest-touch home care network and the leading home care technology and operations platform to transform the professional caregiver and client experience and revolutionize care for older adults.
The home care market is (still) a booming business opportunity. Home care of various types now augments and even enhances services that not long ago may have been provided by senior housing. Pre-pandemic forecasts indicate 34% annual job growth from 2019-2029, much faster than average, and demand has no doubt been exacerbated during 2020. Home care workers are also among the lowest paying and least trained occupations. Frail patients, according to insiders, are increasingly being discharged from hospitals directly to home, bypassing rehab nursing homes. At home, these individuals likely still require assistance with activities of dressing, bathing, medication management, food preparation and household tasks. And many already at home and in assisted living need the same care.