On August 6, 2021 homecare technology company, Honor, announced it had acquired one of the largest non-medical homecare providers, Home Instead.

Upon learning about this surprising acquisition, my first thought was of the old idiom of the tail wagging the dog. Home Instead is a billion-dollar company with more than a thousand franchises while Honor, the Uber of private homecare, is still a bit of a high-tech startup, albeit a heavily funded one.

But as I thought about it more, it made perfect sense.

Home Instead was founded back when boomers were in their 30s and 40s. As part of the bottom of the population pyramid, there were plenty of boomers who could serve as caregivers, compared to the number of seniors to care for, so the business model of low-cost workers serving seniors at home made sense. 

Fast forward to 2021, when boomers are the seniors who will be requiring much care in the next decade, and the pyramid is flipped. The only answer to this is enabling technology. This is exactly the expertise that Honor brings to the table.

The challenge, of course, will be to convince the franchisees that a significant change in business process is the only way to meet the challenges of caring for boomers while maintaining a reasonable ROI.

I imagine that Honor will also expand the offerings of Home Instead to include medical care, such as legitimate medication management, telehealth and telemedicine. Why? Because seniors in the 65+ population are hospitalized at nearly three times the rate of those in the middle-age bracket of 45-64. And more than 85% suffer from one or more chronic conditions. Addressing daily activities plus healthcare is the only way to truly support our boomers and avoid bankrupting our next generations of children and grandchildren. 

If anyone has the vision and business acumen it’s Honor!

Godspeed Honor.

Written by Charlie Hillman, Founder & Chairman, GrandCare Systems

In 2005, Charlie founded GrandCare Systems alongside co-founders, Gaytha Traynor, Laura Mitchell and Nick Mitchell. For more information about GrandCare’s fully-featured telehealth, activity monitoring and social engagement technology, please visit: www.grandcare.com or contact GrandCare at sales@grandcare.com or 262-338-6147.