<p>Brooks</p>

Brooks

PEMBROKE — The Pembroke-based health care service provider HealthKeeperz, is handing its home health division over to the nonprofit BAYADA Home Health Care with the goal of bettering its remaining services.

HealthKeeperz President Tim Brooks confirmed that the business founded nearly 60 years ago has signed an agreement to sell its home health division — which makes up about 25% of the company — to BAYADA.

“We’re wanting to scale back so that we can go forward and grow and offer new services and new products and certainly in this county we want to create new jobs,” Brooks said.

The Fayetteville and Laurinburg Home Health locations will transition to BAYADA locations through the agreement, which is expected to be finalized on March 27. The acquisition is expected to allow BAYADA to combine the HealthKeeperz Home Health workforce with BAYADA’s “management, expertise, operating platforms, and clinical excellence, to make a large impact on the local community.”

BAYADA, which transitioned to a nonprofit organization in 2018, is headquartered in the Philadelphia region and provides nursing, rehabilitative, therapeutic, hospice and assistive care services to children, adults and seniors in the comfort of their homes. The nonprofit provides community-based services from more than 50 locations across the state, including pediatrics, hospice and assistive care services.

“BAYADA is thrilled at the opportunity to partner with HealthKeeperz to continue their strong commitment to the North Carolina community and to continue to grow in this region,” said David Baiada, CEO of BAYADA Home Health Care. “We look forward to welcoming the HealthKeeperz Home Health staff and patients into the BAYADA family, and to working together to continue to improve health care outcomes in our region.

The move follows and was prompted by the merging of United Healthcare with the largest home health care provider, LHC Group, in February.

“We wanted to be very proactive in saying if that’s where the industry is going, let’s decide now the best path for HealthKeeperz,” Brooks said.

Medicare has contracted with insurance companies, which has caused HealthKeeperz to “struggle for a number of years,” he said.

“Being a regional-sized company, a relatively small regional-sized company, we’ve not had the ability to negotiate good reimbursement rates for those insurance companies so over the years it has become more and more of a struggle to be sure we can give people raises, to be sure we can provide great care rates to our patients,” Brooks said. “We don’t want to get to a place where that’s compromised.”

Three other divisions will continue to operate within HealthKeeperz. The healthcare company will continue to be a provider of hospice care, medical equipment and case management services.

“It’s just home health that is a part of this whole transaction,” Brooks said.

With the transition, Brooks said more attention will be available to better areas of health care where there are long-term strategies to scale and innovate, such as hospice care.

“What that means is that we can support that team more. We can give that team better technology, we can give that team better education, we can look at what that team could use to grow and develop and be able to provide those things,” Brooks said.

On the medical equipment side, HealthKeeperz will be able to explore and invest in more ground-breaking medical technologies, according to Brooks.

“On the case management, there’s a whole lot of training we want to be able to build and do,” Brooks said. “We provide case management across the state.”

Ultimately, the decision to sell the home health business is a move to limit but increase HealthKeeperz’s footprint in the southeastern region of North Carolina, Brooks said.

“BAYADA and HealthKeeperz, there was some synergy between the things that they value and the things that we value … I’m confident that they’re going to care for people as well as we cared for people,” he said.

Tomeka Sinclair is the features editor for The Robesonian. She can be reached at [email protected] or 910-416-5865.