At the Home Care Innovation Forum, three home care industry veterans tackled one of private pay home care's biggest challenges: how to stand out in what one called "a sea of sameness."
With rates climbing to $38+ per hour and an increasingly competitive landscape, differentiation has never been more critical — or more difficult to achieve.
Matt Kroll, President of Personal Care Services at Bayada, captured the industry's identity crisis perfectly: "We are perceived by referral sources and clients as a sea of the same. It is so hard for clients and referral sources to see the differences," he said.
The problem runs deeper than marketing. At a recent internal conference, Bayada displayed competitors' brochures side by side—all featured identical values like "compassion, excellence, and reliability." The visual was stark: every company was basically saying the same thing.
"The buying decision is all about who picks up the phone first and whether they make a connection," Kroll said. "To really prove differentiation, you have to get in the home first."
Ramzi Abdine, COO of Comfort Keepers, approaches differentiation through culture: "We bring it down to two things—culture and vision. This drives performance rather than performance driving culture." Their vision focuses on "possibility and positivity"—helping clients thrive at home rather than merely age there.
Panel moderator Neil Kursban, CEO of Family and Nursing Care, takes a different approach: "We do not like to identify ourselves as a home care company. We say we are in the service business and oh, by the way, happen to do home care." This mindset shapes every touchpoint, recognizing that when families pay $35-38 per hour, they expect a "wow experience."
Kroll's strategy centers on quality investment: "We don't have salespeople intentionally. We take that money and invest it in our office teams. We use RN clinical supervision even in states where it's not required."
All three leaders are implementing AI, but their approaches vary significantly. Abdine created a closed-loop "marketing GPT" trained on interviews with Comfort Keepers' fastest-growing franchises. Instead of reading documents, franchisees can now ask conversational questions like: "How do I build a radio campaign for my market?" and receive step-by-step guidance.
"I would encourage everybody here to play with that," he said, also highlighting conversational AI for call intake, wellness checks, and scheduling.
Kroll's AI implementation is innovative, partnering with vendors to develop predictive risk models: "We've taken all of our care documentation, married it up with our incident reporting system, and using large language models, we're finding predictors of adverse events—starting with falls and hospitalizations."
The results are transformative. Instead of standard 60-day nursing visits, high-risk clients might receive weekly visits based on their risk profile. When risk changes, the system triggers five interventions, from physician collaboration to immediate home visits.
"We've seen really positive results in reduction of falls with injury," Kroll said.
The traditional approach of relationship-building alone is no longer sufficient. "We can't rely just on word of mouth," Kroll emphasized. "We need to have two to four referral source relationships that call Bayada before they call anyone else."
His solution? Product development. The risk model becomes a differentiating product — something no competitor offers. "Instead of going in and sounding the exact same as everyone else, we can say 'we have this, no one else does.'"
Abdine focuses on franchise empowerment, noting a strong correlation between franchisees in Performance Management Groups and business growth. He's also exploring emerging opportunities like the GUIDE model and hospital-to-home partnerships.
Both Kroll and Abdine learned hard lessons about mixing service lines. "When we did multiple service lines out of one location, one service line tended to take over," Kroll said. "If we grew a good private pay business and added Medicaid, inevitably, the private pay business goes down."
Their current strategy: one service line per location in most markets, allowing teams to focus on growing that specific business rather than splitting attention.
Abdine agreed, but suggested repackaging existing services: "Take a service you're already doing—most of us care for patients with dementia—but how do you package it and brand it so it's getting out to the market as a specialized product?"
Despite all the technology and strategy discussions, the panel's final takeaways were remarkably traditional. Abdine emphasized basics: "Make sure you are taking care of your caregivers, that they are paid fairly and justly and feel well-prepared for their job."
Kroll agreed: "Consistency of execution trumps strategic ideas every time. Trying to get consistent execution of 'just say yes, try to help every caller' trumps all the AI solutions."
The message is crystal clear: while AI and innovative products can provide competitive advantages, success still depends on executing the fundamentals consistently across every location, every day. In an industry built on relationships and trust, technology amplifies good operations — it doesn't replace them.
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