How April Anthony, Investors Built New Home Health and Hospice Company VitalCaring

VitalCaring Group CEO April Anthony has a track record of building home-based care powerhouses, making her newest venture a company to watch as its emerging brand comes together.

The gestation of Texas-based VitalCaring has been years in the works, but it built its clinical foundation around July 2021, when its three principal owners — Anthony and the private equity firms Vistria Group and Nautic Partners — purchased an undisclosed home health agency in Louisiana.

More transactions followed, with an emphasis on home health. Currently, nine of the company’s locations are hospices, with more expected in the coming years.

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“Hospice is a smaller part of what we have today, but we’re excited to make that a bigger part and bring hospice into our other operating states. Certainly, Texas and Louisiana are places that we think we will expand in the hospice space,” Anthony told Hospice News. “My roots are in home care. I started in home care back in 1992, but I’ve always found that when we can companion home health and hospice together, it’s really a win-win for the community, for the patients and for the referral sources.”

Anthony has come a long way since entering the space in 1992. Just six years later, she became owner and CEO of Liberty Healthcare Services. In 1999, she also established and led the health care tech firm Homecare Homebase.

She went on to found Encompass Health’s (NYSE: EHC) home health and hospice business as its CEO. Anthony stepped down in 2021 as Encompass proceeded with its spin-off of that segment, which last year became Enhabit, Inc. (NYSE: EHAB).

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As an engine for growth, acquisitions will continue to give VitalCaring a lot of its horsepower. The company, which also offers pediatric and companion care, has also opened a few de novos and has more planned for this year.

But VitalCaring President Luke James expects that a “three-pronged” strategy will generate the biggest bang for the company’s bucks.

“We absolutely intend to be very active in the M&A space. We intend to be very intentional about our de novo expansion,” James told Hospice News. “And then we intend to be very honed in on just true organic growth, through building out our resources within the organization to support that, including both frontline salespeople and making sure that we’ve got the back office and clinical field staff to support that growth organically. It’s really looking at all three options in every market and trying to figure out if there’s a way that we can bring all three to bear at one time in order to reach a market effectively.”

James is also a veteran of Encompass Health, where he worked for more than 17 years. He joined the company as a financial analyst in 2004 and was president of its home-based care segment by the time he left the company in August of 2021.

For now, expanding its “bread and butter” home health and hospice business takes priority, according to Anthony, but VitalCaring will likely consider additional service lines as the years progress — including palliative care.

“We’ll definitely see expansion. Palliative care is a great example. I think as the payment models begin to evolve to better support that service line, there is certainly going to be opportunities to grow and expand there,” Anthony said. “Physician-based services that complement what we do in home health and hospice is an area for future opportunity. We’re still assessing the role that those other service lines are going to play in our future.”

In 2023, a key initiative will be solidifying VitalCaring’s identity, both internally and among the public.

Anthony and James have been on the road in recent months, visiting its acquired operations to foster the organizational culture they envision. The two executives expect to have their home health and hospice services unified under the VitalCaring brand by June 1, and its pediatrics and community care business by the end of the year.

“If you don’t have a common identity, it’s really hard to say, ‘This is who we are. This is what we’re about. This is what we stand for.’ And it’s hard to get people to rally,” Anthony said. “Really getting everybody into a common brand, a common identity, a common vision, a common mission and a common set of values that we’re all working toward, it sort of sounds easy. But that’s really heavy-lifting work to get that done, especially when you’re coming from so many disparate views of who we are.”

One thing that is not on VitalCarings’s near-term agenda is an initial public offering. After more than a decade at publicly traded Encompass Health, both Anthony and James are ready to take a different approach.

In years to come, this could mean bringing on additional backers or moving forward with new investors should their current private equity partners eventually decide the sell their stakes. For now, the ability to operate independently — outside of the stock market — gives them the freedom to executive their vision for the business.

“Where we’re at right now, and what the ownership structure looks like, it just provides more latitude for us to spend more time doing that and less time on some of the things that are necessary for certain organizations, depending on whether they are privately held or publicly traded,” James told Hospice News.

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