AccentCare is primed for further hospice growth, with both health system joint ventures and de novo activity as twin cornerstones of its strategy.

Dallas-headquartered AccentCare provides hospice, home health, personal and palliative care across 32 states and in the District of Columbia. The company has an average annual census of more than 200,000 patients. AccentCare also offers non-medical services, care management and veterans services. The company also focuses on staff training for culturally appropriate and LGBTQ+ inclusive care delivery.

AccentCare is a portfolio company of the private equity firm Advent International, which purchased the provider from Oak Hill Capital Partners in 2019 for an undisclosed sum. The company merged with Illinois-based Seasons Hospice & Palliative Care in 2020.

Hospice News sat down with AccentCare CEO Laura Tortorella to discuss the company’s priorities for 2025 and how it plans to execute on growth and an expanded continuum of care.

What are your top priorities for 2025 at AccentCare?

We are a national provider in the post-acute space, offering health care across a continuum of services, so everything from personal care to home health to palliative to hospice. It’s one of our differentiating factors that we both have and can operate across a continuum.

As we think through our top priorities for a 2025 year, along three main areas. The first is supporting our people and investing in our culture. The second is delivering excellence in patient care, and the third is to continue to grow across all of our business lines.

As we break those down a little bit, first, on the people and culture front, we really strive to provide an environment where people want to come and stay in today’s health care landscape. We recognize that it’s very competitive. Caregivers and team members have a lot of choices out there as to where they work and who they work for. It’s important for us to recruit, retain the right people. So with that, we’ve created a community really built on empowering people and fostering a purpose driven and collaborative culture focused on excellence, autonomy and flexibility.

Along with that, we think a lot about creating clinical capacity and where we can build on our community and our culture to recruit and retain excellent people as it relates to excellence in patient care. We are a health care provider. Our goal should be excellent in the quality of care we provide to our patients and the experience that they perceive the care that we’ve provided for them. We see ourselves as playing the role of a trusted guide.

We are in a unique position in that we are in the home, and we offer the continuum, and so we can bring in that deep expertise and compassion as we think about driving the best possible clinical outcomes and personalized care for our patients.

On the growth front, we are one of the few national providers in the post-acute space that offers comprehensive care across a continuum. We partner with payers, with health systems, with clinicians, to create value and drive sustainable growth.

We think about that by building on differentiated growth models, some of which are through our joint venture relationships, and continuing to tighten and grow the partnerships that we already have. We’re looking at new and expanded clinical partnerships with other health care providers out there, being a provider of choice for the payers, given the excellence that we’ve been able to demonstrate in our quality of care that we provide to our patients.

Our North Star is really clear. It comes down to prioritizing and improving patient and client quality and experience, creating a community where employees want to come and stay, and three, growing our volumes and continuing to improve the overall health of our organization.

Can you talk a little bit about the ways AccentCare is pursuing growth for its hospice program in particular?

We think about growth in quite a few different ways. Being in the home, we have an opportunity to help ensure that patients get the right care at the right time based on their unique clinical needs.

We have joint venture partnerships with multiple health systems across the country and work with those systems continuously on how we can continue to provide integrated, high quality care to those patients and their provider base as well.

We have de novos, where we think about new sites, where it makes sense to open new sites, in addition to expanding and growth of existing sites with our clinical JV and payer partners out there.

Do you anticipate any new JVs during 2025?

We are always looking for new ways of growing and partnering out there. What’s incredibly exciting about the post-acute area is that it continues to grow. More and more patients are aging into Medicare benefits, and more and more patients are opting to age in place, which, for many folks, means their home.

So for us, as we think through growth in the in the coming year, we look at all of our markets, all of our clinical partners, our joint venture partners and our payer partners out there, to think through how we can continue to expand our services, partner in a more integrated fashion with them and meet the growing needs in the communities that we serve.

Could you say a little more about how you’re developing that internal culture that you discussed?

Our people are incredibly important to all of us. We take their feedback very seriously. From an investment perspective, all of our executive team members, including myself, are in the field, constantly listening, actively listening to feedback from the team members. We conduct a lot of surveys annually to really get a good feel for what matters to our team members.

Some of the themes we hear and the investments we have made include competition. Compensation is competitive, so AccentCare is committed to doing annual merits. We have done those since I had been here. We will continue to do those. Second is listening to how we can make our caregivers’ time more efficient. So looking at the technology we use the workflows that we’ve built to try and make sure it is as streamlined and productive for them when they’re in the patient’s homes and fulfilling their documentation requirements, etc.

And third, we think a lot about developing employees within the AccentCare family. We have a very large learning and development department. We do a lot of promotions from within the organization. We take the professional development of our employees very seriously across all levels and all regions.

Where do you see the most significant headwinds facing hospices right now?

The ability to recruit and find qualified clinical caregivers and team members is probably the single biggest headwind out there for all health care companies and certainly those providing care in the hospice space as well.

How is AccentCare working to further build out the continuum of care the company offers?

We take our job as a trusted guide very seriously. We have an opportunity to provide care in a patient’s home, which gives us the visibility to see how they’re living their day to day lives, and what their home environment situation looks like, and how we can tailor our clinical care to meet their clinical needs and drive the best clinical outcomes.

But as we all know, health care status is not stagnant in any patient population, and so part of the responsibility we take as health care providers in the home is to truly understand how our patients health care status is changing and what services might be appropriate for them, and how we can help educate them to ensure that they get the right care at the right time, in the right place.