Former Meridian COO Kang Named President of Amedisys Hospice

Kacy Kang, former chief operations officer for Meridian Senior Living, has been tapped as the new president of hospice at Amedisys (NASDAQ: AMED). While Amedisys has not yet announced Kang’s new role, updates to his LinkedIn page reflect his new title. 

Kang left Meridian amid a shake up of the company’s leadership team in which four members of their c-suite moved into other chief executive positions. He will continue to serve as a senior advisor to Meridian and remain on the board of its parent company, Griffin-American Healthcare REIT IV, Inc., according to Hospice News’ sister site Senior Housing News.

As president of Amedisys’ hospice business Kang will have a critical role in executing the company’s growth strategy for that segment. Amedisys has doubled down on hospice expansion in recent years, with an emphasis on acquisitions. 

“We feel good about what we’ve done in hospice,” said Amedisys CEO Paul Kusserow in a second quarter earnings call. “We went out about two years ago and started buying up hospices, going from the eighth-largest to the third-largest hospice and spending about $700 million to build up our presence.”

The company turned its focus on expanding its hospice footprint in part due to anticipated disruption in the home health arena resulting from the new Patient Driven Groupings Model (PDGM) payment structure for home health.

The company in May acquired the hospice and home health operations of the Nebraska-based nonprofit Visiting Nurse Association (VNA) for an undisclosed sum. 

Amedisys purchased Texas-based AseraCare Hospice for $235 million in the second quarter of 2020, expanding to the provider’s 190 locations in 35 states and reaching an additional 14,000 patients daily.

The AseraCare deal was part of the company’s three-pronged hospice growth strategy that includes large acquisitions, smaller tuck-in transactions and the building of de novo locations. The transaction followed the January 2020 purchase of Asana Hospice for an undisclosed amount.

Amedisys earned more than $564 million in the second quarter of 2021, up from $485 million during the prior year’s quarter. The company’s business accounted for $186.9 million of 2021 Q2 revenue.

“Our scale and cash flow generation, coupled with the fragmentation of both the home health and hospice industries, presents us with an exciting opportunity for continued inorganic growth and will position us as a major market consolidator,” Kusserow said in an earnings call.