Opening its doors in 2017, Oklahoma City-based Accentra Healthcare has experienced relatively quick growth. Offering services such as registered nurse-led home health and hospice care, the company went from zero to nearly 750 patients across its service lines throughout the state of Oklahoma in just seven years, according to CEO Trent Smith.
But growth brings about its own set of challenges. In the home health care sector, just like many other agencies, Accentra was struggling with high turnover rates. While the usual turnover rate in the industry is around 30%, Accentra was experiencing rates reaching nearly 35%. Smith realized that he needed to take action.
One of the major obstacles in retaining staff, as identified by Smith, was the increasing documentation requirements and stricter regulations.
“Medicare continues to add documentation requirements and regulations while cutting reimbursement,” Smith told Home Health Care News. “Fewer nurses are willing to work in home health, and turnover is so high due to the charting and documentation burden.”
So Smith created Apricot.
Apricot is a virtual personal assistant and scribe for home health care nurses. The app reduces the typical two-hour documentation process to about 15 minutes, giving caregivers more time to focus on patients, according to the company.
“We leverage the power of artificial intelligence built on large language models and massive data centers,” Smith said. “It can do more, faster, and better than traditional technology. It is not transcription, dictation or voice to text; it is a nurse telling the computer what it took to treat the patient and letting the AI do the documentation.”
Smith said that the nurses who choose to work in home health care do so because they are passionate about patient care. They are often burned out after a day of moving from one patient to another, and then being tasked with hours of documentation. Apricot technology aids in alleviating that burnout as well by removing impersonal technology barriers and bringing intimacy back to patient care.
“Simply having to look down while documenting removes the intimacy of caring for the patient. The provider cannot look the patient in the eye and make that connection,” Smith said.
Accentra attributes the increase in patient volume and caregiver job satisfaction to Apricot.
“Because the application produces a higher return on investment, we can say yes to lower revenue payer sources, which correlates to more people receiving the care they need,” Smith explained.
Smith told HHCN that Accentra’s turnover rate has dropped from 35% to zero in the first seven months of 2024. However, like all home health care agencies, the company faces additional challenges.
“Medicare Advantage is eating our industry,” Smith said. “MA comes with a subset of additional problems like a 40% to 50% reduction per visit in revenue in contrast to traditional Medicare. It also comes with an additional administrative burden of having to get pre-authorized to conduct a certain number of visits in the home.”
Smith maintains a focus on future growth despite these challenges.
“We have an aggressively aging population, and no one wants to go to hospitals or nursing homes,” he said. “They would prefer to have medical care delivered in their home. Right now, there are more people [needing care] than agencies, and we’re excited to expand our footprint, grow and spread our culture and ambition in the communities we serve.”
He mentioned that the company is currently exploring various expansion options and is seeking a partnership with another strategic operator that aligns with Accentra’s mission, vision and values.
“We’re too small to be big but too big to be small,” Smith said. “We have to get bigger so we can take the next step in providing more care to more patients.”
