Visiting Nurse Service of New York (VNSNY) has adopted a new name as it enters a new era. The senior care provider, now rebranded as VNS Health, is ready for expansion.
The home health, hospice and palliative care provider is among the largest nonprofit home-based care providers in the nation, serving close to 40,000 patients and health plan members. VNS Health also offers mental health services.
The rebrand comes with a new motto: “The future of care. The comfort of home.”
“We’re 129 years old now,” VNS Health CEO Dan Savitt told Hospice News’ sister site Home Health Care News. “We started as a home care organization, and we’re excited about continuing that history through, but we’ve become an organization with a lot of additional products and services.”
Post-rebrand, the organization will continue with more service diversification, initially focused on its care management and professional services business. They launched a partnership last summer with the tech platform Healthify to help address patients’ and members’ social determinants of health
VNS Health’s current service area includes the entirety of New York City, in addition to Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester counties. But the removal of “New York” from their name is a signal that VNS Health will likely expand beyond their home state.
“We’re in growth mode,” Savitt told Home Health Care News last year. “We’re expanding both within and outside of New York. We’ve got a number of new areas that we’d like to partner with others around the country on.”
Their health plans may also undergo out-of-state expansion as opportunities present themselves.
Leaders at the former VNSNY began laying the groundwork for the rebrand in 2019, starting with internal focus groups and listening sessions with employees, clinicians and senior leaders.
A third impetus was a desire to reduce confusion among patients and families regarding the organization’s identity. As VNSNY, the company provided services through a number of different brands that are now unified under their new name. Their personal care business, for example, was formerly known as Partners in Care.
The company, founded in 1893, settled on the name VNS Health as a means of honoring their history while acknowledging the ways they have evolved, according to Catherine Callaway, senior vice president of marketing and development at VNS Health.
“The name VNS Health really captures our legacy, but it unites us under the word health,” she said. “It was important, from a patient and a member perspective, that people really have clarity around what it is that we as an organization do. The name, as it was prior, wasn’t necessarily capturing the totality of who we were and what we do.”
Home Health Care News Reporter Joyce Famakinwa contributed to this report.
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