Steve Everhart, Founder and President of Hallmark Homecare discusses

A little bit about our history here at Hallmark Homecare, we just started in early 2012, we’re running this business out of our Southern California Corporate Office. But Hallmark Homecare is an affiliated company with The Senior’s Choice. And the Hallmark Team, the executives of Hallmark, are also the same executives, long time seasoned veteran executives of the Senior’s Choice.

 I’m very proud of The Senior’s Choice, it’s the largest membership network of senior care providers in the world. We were founded in 1999, again we’re corporate headquarter in Irvine,California. And we’ve trained and supported over 500 individuals over the last 12 years in establishing their own successful senior care companies and we’ve taught them how to operate and build and promote these businesses in the most profitable and effective way. So my team, they really know what they’re doing.

 A little bit about the industry of senior care, when you think of senior care it involves several different sectors within that industry. Senior care could be assisted living facilities, it could be nursing homes, it could be home health care companies. There’s a whole number of different businesses within that industry.

The industry that we’re talking about is what I call the private-duty, non-medical, in-home care industry. We’re an important part of the continuum of care, but we’re not a health care company. We’re not health care providers. And I’ll get into the details of what we offer in terms of our service in just a little bit.

But there’s largely two different models of private duty, non-medical, in-home senior care. There’s two opportunities for folks. So, right now the traditional models of care, on the left you’ll see the agency model of care. That’s what we do at the Senior’s Choice.

The agency model of care is essentially a situation where we hire care givers that become employees of ours. They’re employees of the agencies. We hire them, we train them, we manage them, we teach them how to behave, we hold them accountable, we tell them what clients to go to, what clients not to go to, what time to show up, what time to leave. These care givers are our employees and the agency model of care has, is directly with the client.

So we’ll find the client, we’ll find care givers. So what we do is we enter into a contract.  “We” meaning the agency. We enter into a contract with the client, to perform certain services for them using our employee care givers. So that caregiver’s under our direct control and supervision.

This is the beautiful model of care. I’ve embraced it for the past 13 or 14 years. It’s a wonderful model of care. It’s the one I’m religiously devoted to.

The other model of care that’s been around even longer than the agency model of care, in fact it’s been around since the late 60′s. The agency model of care wasn’t really in the market until about 20 years ago. So although you would say a maturing industry, it’s still relatively new.

The registry model, on the other hand, these are companies that often masquerade as agencies. And they do what our member agencies do, but their service and model of care is vastly different. And let me tell you why.

These registries are essentially brokers. They match up clients with care givers and what the care giver is, is an independent contractor as opposed to an employee. That’s a significant difference. Essentially, the broker is the caregiver, this independent contractor into the home of the client and is absolutely in most cases no betting process, no background checks, no insurance, there’s no worker’s compensation.

And we argue, and so do a whole host of others in the agency model, that for the most part, the registry model of care is illegal in most states. I believe that it is. Illegal in the sense that it violates employment related laws. It also violates tax related laws.

So, again, the care givers of these independent registries, or independent contractors assume no liability in the way of protecting the client. But they do typically charge a few dollars less per hour. And so, those are the two main models of care.

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