Miriam Allred (00:00)
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Home Care Strategy Lab. I'm your host, Miriam Allred. It's great to be back with you this week. Hope everyone is doing well. Today in the lab, I am joined by Debbie Miller, the owner of Senior Helpers in Nashville, Tennessee, and also the founder of 52 Weeks Marketing and Helper Heroes. Debbie, welcome back to the lab.

Debbie Miller (00:18)
Thank you, Miriam. It's great to be with you.

Miriam Allred (00:21)
I think you might be my first repeat guest on this show actually and there's just too many good things for us to talk about. So why not? So I want to introduce you in the way that I introduce you to other people, which is she talks the talk and she walks the walk. You are one of the sharpest operators that I know and also one of the most tactical speakers that I know. And that is a dual accomplishment because oftentimes people are one and maybe not the other.

Debbie Miller (00:29)
Glad to be here.

Miriam Allred (00:49)
There's only a handful of people that I truly believe are both and you are one of them. So I absolutely love talking to you.

Debbie Miller (00:56)
Thank you, Miriam. I appreciate that.

Miriam Allred (00:59)
I think most people know you, but maybe in your own words, if you can even summarize your background, your history, and really just where you're at today and why you're there, what would you tell people?

Debbie Miller (01:11)
Well, first and foremost, I am a home care operator. Just like most of the people that are listening today, I've been doing this for 18 years. Started from scratch, we now have well over 500 caregivers. And so it's been, it's definitely been a life long journey. And, but before that I was in pharmaceutical marketing, which has really helped me to

developed the 52 weeks model of course, which is something that we still use to this day to continue to grow our business. And it's through the hands-on experience of running an agency where we've had the opportunity to see gaps, real needs for other agency owners and have been able to bring solutions to help them because we've kind of been through it ourselves.

And so, you know, GUIDE is just one other opportunity where I had to figure it out and created a model that we can now replicate for other agency owners to help them really capitalize on it. So being in the grind and doing this on a daily basis has helped us create the solutions that we have over time. Even Helper Heroes is another one. We had to use virtual assistants. I've got eight in my operation. And so now we've scaled that. So it's all about just figuring it out and then

scaling it across the country.

Miriam Allred (02:40)
I absolutely love it. You're in the trenches right alongside of everyone and you see the problem and you're just a savvy businesswoman. You see a problem, you solve it and then you replicate it and scale it for other people and I just think that's really incredible. let's talk about GUIDE. I think I told you I talked about this a couple of weeks ago with another guest and the attention on this program is massive. The program is two years old at this point but I think more and more people are getting on the bandwagon. They're learning about it, understanding it.

But I think what's still really lacking is the implementation and the execution. A lot of people are just sitting back waiting for referrals and wondering, what's going on and what they need to actually do about this. And that's where I wanted to have you on because you've literally gone through this process the last six to eight months and are doing something about it and seeing massive results and other people need to understand why they can't just be sitting back at this point. So again, I think most people understand what the program is, but in your own words, let's just kind of highlight the key points of what the program is.

and why this opportunity is huge for home care.

Debbie Miller (03:37)
For sure. And again, to your point, we actually started in 2024, as soon as the program launched. I was really excited about it. And it took us a minute to really wrap our head around the program. It really is a comprehensive program. A lot of people forget that. And we think we're just kind of waiting around for the referrals for respite care to come in. But if we can actually...

be out there educating the community about this very comprehensive care management model. So CMS, for the first time ever, has really put an emphasis around supporting the family caregiver. And that's what this program is all about. We've got somewhere between 35 and 50 million family caregivers out there, and they are very heavily burdened and stressed. And so this program was really designed to give them the support they need because God forbid they don't do this job.

I mean, the whole house of cards come crumbling down if these family caregivers aren't providing this assistance to their family members. So the program itself is, there's several components to it. There's the comprehensive assessment and care plan, the caregiver training and education, care navigation and coordination, 24-7 access to a support line, and then the icing on the cake is up to $2,500 a year in respite care.

which is where the home care providers come in, right? This is the piece that we can partner and provide to these family caregivers. The whole comprehensive program, think about it as it's sort of similar to chronic care management model, if people are familiar with that. But this whole program, unlike chronic care where there's still co-pays, this is completely free. People can keep their primary care doctor, but this program is,

managed and it's there. It's a whole new layer of support that's never been available. And it's an incredible opportunity for home care providers, right? Because we can provide the respite care. So just as a reminder, those who are eligible to take advantage of the program are patients who have been diagnosed or have a suspected diagnosis. They do have to have traditional Medicare.

and be living in the community. And here's an interesting part about that. They can be living in a home, you know, in a neighborhood. They can be living in an independent living community, assisted living community, and even memory care. And they do need to have a family caregiver or someone that can help drive this process. So those are the key criteria. Those who cannot participate is anyone that is currently enrolled in hospice.

or a PACE program or any other special needs program. They cannot be a Medicare Advantage enrolling and they cannot live in a skilled nursing facility. All right, so those are the folks that unfortunately are not eligible. Now.

Miriam Allred (06:42)
One question on

that, can you explain the suspected diagnosis? It's obvious what a diagnosis is and isn't, but what do you mean by suspected diagnosis?

Debbie Miller (06:51)
Well,

when you consider the fact that I think the statistics are somewhere around only 5 % of people with dementia actually have a diagnosis. So as we are partnering, and I'm gonna get to this in a minute, because I don't wanna, it takes a bit of explaining, but long story short, there are so many folks that will actually be able to come into Guide and working with your credentialed Guide partner,

who think about them as a clinical office. So they're your clinical office partner, where they actually have the ability to diagnose these patients. So as we're out there educating the community, I think more and more people are going to actually come into the program, get a diagnosis, and then get the support of the GUIDE program, which creates another opportunity for home care providers. I'm really glad you brought that up.

⁓ don't necessarily think they don't have a diagnosis, they're disqualified. No, let's get them assessed and help them get that necessary diagnosis to take advantage of the program.

Miriam Allred (07:55)
Mm-hmm.

And that's a great point that this new partner, your GUIDE partner, program partner can help with that diagnosis. That alone is really impactful.

Debbie Miller (08:12)
Exactly, exactly.

Miriam Allred (08:13)
So you said to me, Debbie, you've been doing this for 18 years. This is the biggest opportunity that you have seen hit home care. Explain that to me.

Debbie Miller (08:21)
I'm so excited about this. But it's really unfortunate. So Dylan, my son-in-law, who's my partner in 52 Weeks Marketing, every day is talking to people about Guide. And they're all looking to grow their business, but no one is doing anything with Guide. They just don't know what to do with it. So, which is why we put together this program. But at the end of the day, we have to have a partner and the partners need home care, which is why this is such a huge opportunity.

And Miriam, how many times did we do presentations with Mastering Home Care Marketing 101 and 201? And I would say, this is an amazing time to be in home care. And I would say, we're going to see models, home-based models. This is the one that I've been waiting for. And here it is. So what we see is that these credential GUIDE providers do not have the ability to deliver the hands-on care.

that is required, that respite care piece, that component, they can't provide that. So they need home care partners like us to be able to satisfy that part of the GUIDE program. Because they're typically they're a virtual clinic. ⁓ They are, a lot of them are nationally based. And so they need local neighborhood providers like us. So that in itself is an incredible opportunity to.

Miriam Allred (09:46)
Yeah, essentially

they need us and we need them. And so we have to do this together. again, this program has been out for two years, and the partners are established, but now there's all these home care companies and it's teaming up with the right fit partners and doing the work alongside of them. So backtrack a little bit to your story. You became aware of this program two years ago and you learned about it you were excited, but you had kind of

the rocky experience that I think a lot of home care agencies do, which is, this is great, but what do we actually do about it? Who do I work with? What are the programs, the systems? How do I get out and get this in front of my community? So talk about your specific experience of what happened to you.

Debbie Miller (10:26)
Sure. And even then, when I first heard about the program, I knew this was an opportunity. And I did probably more than what most people were doing to take advantage of it in the sense that I was out educating the community about the program and that we had a partnership. So I will give credit to, I'm a Senior Helpers franchisee and Senior Helpers did a great job of ⁓ providing a partnership with a credential provider.

early on and so I just went gung-ho and had my marketing team out there and within a within a few months we had 40 to 50 GUIDE referrals that we were sending sending to them. We weren't necessarily getting any referrals from them and I think that's the mistake a lot of people make is they get these agreements with these providers and then they sit around and twiddle their thumbs waiting for the referrals to come to them.

Well, even then in the early days, I knew I wanted to get out in front of this and be a market leader in my community. So we generated all these referrals and put them, you know, sent them in. And unfortunately it was like they went into a black box. They didn't have the infrastructure and a lot of these, these credential providers do not have a tracking system. They have no way of collaborating with us.

because maybe they didn't have the staff that was necessary. So we were just bombarding them. They couldn't track it. And we had a lot of really disappointed, first of all, disappointed marketers, disappointed referral sources and disappointed families that we just got excited about the program. And so it was months of trying to track these folks down and get them back on track. And I think in all that time, we only started a couple of people of respite care.

So was really disappointing. Everything kind of stalled out. just, I guess it was maybe around January or February. I met with an owner who is a GUIDE ⁓ certified provider and ⁓ sat down with coffee with him. kind of explained my situation, what my experience has been. And, ⁓ you know, he said, well, I think that we could work together and we can do this better. He was already well-established.

model and he had a lot of infrastructure already in place. And so he was at least able to track both. And so I started working with him in, I guess, March or April. And we began to really fine tune the processes and collaborated really closely with his team and my senior helper's team. And he was already working on this very robust

a technology platform that gave us for the first time transparency into what happened when the referrals got put into the system or when we enrolled patients into the system, we could actually track their progress. And even better, we could see where they got bogged down in the process and actually intervene and help them through whatever the situation that was stalling that patient or that family member.

so that we could ultimately get to the point where they were approved for respite care. So it gave put us more in the driver's seat. And so since about August of last year, through 2025, we were able to generate about 25, or sorry, $500,000 in GUIDE related revenue. All right, and I'll walk you through what that looks like in here in just a second. We also put together a real scalable system.

⁓ that we are able to, and we actually piloted it. We just completed our pilot with about 30 other agencies across the network. And what we have now is this incredible vetted provider partner that we're bringing to agency owners. We have a referral platform that creates a collaboration like you've never seen before. When I said earlier,

It's like having your own clinical office as part of your organization. That's literally how we view this. They are true partners and they view us as partners. ⁓ And now we've created a turnkey model that we're rolling out across the country. So it was sort of like, you know, get out there. We fell down on our faces. We picked ourselves back up. Redid the system, found an incredible partner and work together to fine tune this.

Miriam Allred (15:06)
Yeah, and I think where you were is where a lot of providers are currently. They have a partner, they're trying, they're getting the referrals, but there's just a lot of complexity here and a lot of manual work of just keeping track of all of this, let alone being proactive and doing something with these leads and with this information. so a lot of people are just kind of bogged down in that early stage that you were in. And so you really sought out a partner and built a system for yourself and then were able to go and replicate it with other businesses.

So before we talk about part of the complexity is these referrals can be inbound, but also can be sought out. And so there's referrals coming from several different channels, but there's kind of like the short-term opportunity, which is there is free money on the table for these families to take advantage of. But also like you've shared with me, there's also the long-term opportunity of...

upselling these people to private pay hours, getting them involved in VA and LTC and just what this can turn into for every agency but also for home care in general. So talk a little bit more about why this benefits us in the short term and the long term.

Debbie Miller (16:09)
Yeah, the short term are those patients that currently have a diagnosis and CMS sent out millions of letters across the country to these patients who have a diagnosis. Now, the hard part about that is it went to the patients and they have dementia. So how many are actually reading their mail and figuring this out that there's this program, but CMS made an effort to educate these patients about the program.

Now, there are many caregivers there, you somewhere just if you just look at that six to seven million, there's at least 12 million caregivers who are the target for this program, right? They're going to make the decision. They're going to do the work to help their parents get involved and get enrolled and so on. So that's kind of like the short term opportunity. The long term opportunity are all the people that do not have a diagnosis. And my partner,

I've been doing this long time. He thinks that just those folks who have mild cognitive impairment are around 30 million people. Not to mention the people that just don't have a diagnosis. So the short term are all the current patients of the diagnosis. The long term opportunity are all these people who are starting to recognize, there's some support. All right, this makes sense to do the work to get mom diagnosed so that I can take advantage of this incredible support system.

So this is about, it's estimated about a hundred billion dollar support program here. And at any given time, right now, Miriam, in any community across this country, right now, there are thousands of patients who qualify. Just if we look at those six to seven million that have a diagnosis. So that is an incredible opportunity.

One that we don't just want to sit around and wait for referrals, right? So there's two paths, like you said, there are two paths. There's the patient direct path that is happening, which is directly related right now to these letters going out. So these family members are seeing, there's the program. I'm going to call the number on the back and they listed the GUIDE ⁓ credential providers.

And there's some big names out there now that they'll call them and ⁓ they've reached this provider, they get enrolled and they go through that whole process with the provider. And then once the respite care is ⁓ authorized, they are looking for providers like us to provide that hands-on respite care. So we do wanna have agreements with as many providers as we want, right? You're going to receive referrals.

And as more and more education is happening out there, that will increase. Right now, honestly, back when I first started this, maybe we got one referral. So we don't want to just rest on the laurels that we've got these agreements with these providers. We wanna take control and go out there and get in front of this opportunity, which is going to take community outreach on our

⁓ on our end, right? To get out there, train your community providers. And by the way, patients right now are walking into the doctor's office and saying, I got this letter, what does this mean? Doctors have no idea or other healthcare providers have no idea. So if we can get out there in front, which we're doing right now, and you know, mean, on Friday, we had five, five referrals came in just on Friday from one provider. ⁓ And so,

Miriam Allred (19:38)
Yeah.

Debbie Miller (19:55)
So what we're doing is we're educating them about this whole program and we're directing them to contact us. So we're putting ourselves in the middle and then we can control the referrals, submit them to our partner and then ultimately lock down that respite care once that's authorized. So we are in the driver's seat of generating these referrals. In addition to that, we have an incredible

opportunity which is the low hanging fruit is with our current client base. Even the providers that we talk to every single day through 52 weeks marketing aren't taking advantage of their current clients. So if you've got clients right now and the statistics are high and you know we know who we when we did the assessment who is either diagnosed or suspected of dementia when you go to that family and say hey I'm a

a GUIDE provider and I think that your mom would qualify for this program, let me enroll her and if so, I can add an additional $2,500 in care. So we don't want to replace the care, we want to add the care, right? The rest of the care. And you look like a star to this family because they had no idea about this program. So those are the two key paths. And I know this is something you want to focus on is

Miriam Allred (21:05)
Mm-hmm.

Heh.

Debbie Miller (21:19)
really taking advantage of that community outreach.

Miriam Allred (21:24)
Let

me ask a couple of questions there though. So you had your patient census and like you said, you knew on your current census who has a dementia diagnosis and who doesn't. What exactly did you do to go out and get in front of your current clients? Did you send out an email? How did you communicate them to your current clients about the program?

Debbie Miller (21:41)
We

called them, we sent them a letter, I mean, of course to the family, right? So we're communicating to the family and then educating them. This is what it's all about and helping them understand it's not just the respite care, right? It's this whole layer of support that they've never had. our partner is incredible. It's basically a neurological office. And by the way,

Some of these folks, wait, Jim was telling me that he had a patient the other day that didn't have an appointment set until 2028. It's very hard, especially in these rural areas, it's very difficult for them to get an appointment. Well, we could get an appointment within weeks with this whole clinical team. It's incredible. So they've got a level of support that they've never had. So you want to really emphasize that with the families as well as the additional hours.

And so I'll highlight here, these are sort of when you look at the revenue opportunities, I kind of broke it down into three pockets, okay? So the first one is from that respite care, what I call the GUIDE dollars, all right? So each patient, if they qualify, and there's three levels, and not everybody that is enrolled in GUIDE will...

will have access to the respite care, but a good majority of them are based on our experience. And so this program provides $2,500 in respite care and ⁓ then it renews in July. That's what's incredible. So we know right now of our client base ⁓ who has dollars that they haven't utilized. So between now and July, we'll be encouraging them to use those dollars before they lose them.

but it does refresh. if say somebody, if you enrolled somebody in the program right now and they had $2,500 to use through June, and then they wanted to take advantage of another $2,500 between July and December of 2026, that's $5,000 that you never would have had, right? So those are the GUIDE dollars. Then in addition to that, so many of those people had no idea about home care.

Miriam Allred (23:54)
Mm-hmm.

Debbie Miller (24:03)
So we are getting exposed to people that had never heard of home care, that maybe were unresistant, that maybe didn't, that couldn't afford it. But now we have exposure to people where we can explore either adding hours or extending care once they've had a taste of it and it goes away because they've run out of GUIDE dollars. my goodness, I still want to have my freedom on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

or whatever it is. So they may decide I'm going to pay private pay. Or you as the agency owner and care manager can explore other payer options. ⁓ Are they eligible for Medicaid if you're a Medicaid provider? VA benefits, long-term care insurance. We have a client didn't even know that they could use their long-term care insurance ⁓ policy to pay for care.

So this is an incredible opportunity to convert them to these other either payer sources or private pick. And in my shop, we're seeing about a 30 % conversion. All right, so hang on to that number and then I'm help quantify the opportunity here. And then of course the low hanging fruit is your current client base where you can literally add on an additional potential $5,000 this year in GUIDE dollars.

So lots of opportunities to grow your clients, increase hours, increase private pay or other pay resources, and ultimately increase overall revenue.

Miriam Allred (25:41)
Yeah, this next, so for those listening, Debbie's got slides up here, so you might need to watch this on YouTube or that will link to the slides in the show notes. But this next slide is where this really gets interesting. Debbie is going to share exactly what revenue this has equated to in her business from all of these sources, the GUIDE dollars, the additional hours and services provided, and also the upselling to current clients.

Debbie Miller (26:04)
Right, so, you know, I've been saying this is the million dollar opportunity sitting under our noses that nobody's taking advantage of. I really, you know, like you said, I'm walking the talk here and we're seeing this play out. if you, and I'm going to show you the model where if you were able to, each month, and this is really easy guys, you know, I'm using very conservative number here. So if we were just,

generating 10 new clients, new GUIDE clients a month between now and June and then from July and of course they refresh and then you add on and you keep going and adding on 10 new clients. So it's like you're looking at about 100 new clients between now and the end of the year in 2026. That's about a $400,000 just in GUIDE dollars, right? If everybody uses it 2026.

If you convert 30 % of those clients to just 12 hours a week in additional care hours or they continue or whatever, however that looks. In our case, I told you about this long-term care client, which is big hours. ⁓ That could be an additional $655,000. So this, it truly is a million dollar opportunity. And by the way, it refreshes every year.

and you're building on the momentum. And when I say building on the momentum, I am not kidding. We've been out there since, like as I said, August. Right now we're processing about, ⁓ if I look at my, ⁓ and I'll talk about the harmonic platform, we're processing over 100 referrals right now that are in process. All right, so when I say it's easy to generate, but it takes work.

Right.

Miriam Allred (28:02)
Can you quantify how many of your current referral base have been given to you from partners versus how many you've sought out yourself?

Debbie Miller (28:11)
I would say 95 % are the ones that we're generating ourselves. Very few are coming to us.

Miriam Allred (28:17)
Bye.

And that's the mindset shift as everyone's sitting waiting for referrals to come into them. But what you're saying is you've gone out and sought out and created this demand.

Debbie Miller (28:21)
Yes.

Correct, correct. And now is the time and I'll get to that in a minute because of these letters. So we, you have to have a Medicare partner. You have to have a credential GUIDE Medicare partner. That's really, really, really important. And yet it's fine to have partnerships with many of them, but don't rest on your laurels that those referrals are going to come to you. And by the way, they have many partners also.

Right, so you're not the only game in town with them. So that's why you want to be out there driving the referrals now. So it's going to take this partnership. And by the way, ⁓ we don't want to be doing the GUIDE management piece. Like a lot of times I've heard people, or they're confused still, Miriam, believe it or not, people are still confused and they think, that's a Medicare program. That's not for me, because I'm a home care and I'm not Medicare credential.

You do not have to be Medicare credentialed. I stopped somebody from going down that track. I'm like, no, no, no, you don't have to do that. You do not want to manage this. This is so complex, this model. You have no idea what's involved in this. What we get to do is just the respite care piece, which is what we do every single day. And market the program. Be in the driver's seat of generating the referrals. And I can tell you right now, there is a sense of urgency.

Miriam Allred (29:31)
He

Mm-hmm.

Debbie Miller (29:55)
to be that market leader right now because the cat's out of the bag in the sense that these letters have gone out. CMS is gonna be doing more and more education, more healthcare providers are going to understand that. You don't want them just trying to find you on their own. You want them and you wanna be the one educating the providers yourself and directing them to you. Put yourself in the middle and you will make the

Miriam Allred (30:17)
Mm-hmm.

Debbie Miller (30:23)
process of enrollment easy for their patients and family members. You will drive, you'll hold their hands through that whole process. And now it's easier than ever to do that because we have a provider that's given us a portal and a platform to make it really, really, literally takes less than a minute to make a referral and to watch that person's progress and keep on top of it.

Miriam Allred (30:47)
So one question here about the referral partners, like you said, you want to be the one in control to go and educate the referral partners about this program. I'm curious between you and your marketers, what their receptivity has been. This is a net new program, you're educating them. How receptive to this program have they been in your experience?

Debbie Miller (31:07)
They are so receptive, we are getting meetings with folks that we could, that access was very limited. Your discharge planners at the hospitals, your, ⁓ and think about all of the referral sources that we call on. And as a matter of fact, I did a presentation to 37 hospital discharge planners that came from three different hospitals.

and I was doing a presentation and they were so excited about this because and I even confronted them in a very nice way. I I know you all have a bias. Well, first of all, I asked the question, said, how many of your patients, you're seeing your patients that are discharging from the hospital would benefit from home care? Give me numbers. I had them throw them out. And it was unanimous, 100 % of them would benefit from home care.

I said, but I can tell you, I am not getting 100 % of your referrals. In fact, I'm getting very few of your referrals. And I said, why? Why is that? What is keeping you from giving us referrals? And what do they say? Cost. Cost is the biggest barrier. And I said, and you all, I'm gonna be honest. said, coming from, know, I haven't been in this business 18 years, I can push the limit a little bit. And I'll say, sometimes we feel like the ugly step.

child on the sidelines saying, why aren't you thinking about home care? But you have a bias against home care in the sense that you don't think your clients can afford it. And they agree. Yes, yes, yes. So when cost is a barrier, all of a sudden, this is a free program. Their ears are open. They're extremely receptive. And my goodness, now they're taking meetings that they would never make time for. So the receptivity is incredible.

They want to hear about this, they want to know about it, because at the end of the day, they are tasked with reducing readmissions and hospitalization. And yet, they don't have any ⁓ control over what happens when those patients go home. This is a transition model. They could literally use the respite care all up in those first 10 days. It's incredible, you could be doing, it works out to almost 80 hours.

So you could do 10 hours for eight days or eight hours for 10 days. think about that. That is the transition plan. However, you've got to get me involved early while they're still in the hospital, while they're still in rehab. I'll get them through this process and I'll help them transition home. Oh my goodness.

Miriam Allred (33:50)
And talk about differentiation. Like you said, you are able to get into meetings that you haven't otherwise been able to because cost was the barrier. Taking these meetings, it's getting more more complex. There's more and more providers out there. And so if you can be the first to bring them this GUIDE program, that's going to set you apart as the expert in your market.

Debbie Miller (34:08)
Absolutely. This is the letter. I we're going in with the letter. This is the letter we are one of our clients showed us. And so we're going in and the doctors are saying, my goodness, yes, we explain it to them and tell them the route that they need to take. so even medical doctors who don't really pay attention to home care providers, all of a sudden, it's thank you for educating me and okay, here we go. We've got this whole process that we're putting in place to make it easy for them.

So you're talking about the partner.

Miriam Allred (34:43)
Yeah, let's jump in and explain

exactly what you've built because again, put your creator hat on and you think materials, we need the partner, we need the system, we need the materials because you have three marketers, four marketers in your own business and they are proactively going out and selling this and that's what's lacking. So talk about, we're going to kind walk through this process of the partner that you've identified and the system that you've built and then the materials that you've created and how people can take advantage of it.

Debbie Miller (35:05)
Right.

Yeah. And the training program that really helps

help. So this, this, call this a partnership, honestly made in heaven. ⁓ I, I, I just, you know, thank my lucky stars for the day that I met Jim. And I'm sure he feels the same way because we've been able to, our teams have meshed so well. And now we're, you know, brought in the whole 52 weeks team working with the harmonic health team.

So this is not Jim's first rodeo. So he's done several models, several Medicare models. ⁓ And so he comes with an incredible amount of experience. And then I've combined, you so we've got his incredible clinical team and then our marketing ⁓ experience. And so this has been a real joint adventure, our venture. And so we created a certified GUIDE ready respite provider program.

And so what we did is we had to have the partner, as I said, right, the Harmonic Health, and he has that care management model and that virtual clinic that we needed. And I just happened to have relationships with a whole bunch of care agencies, which he needs the partners, right? So he's bringing patients, we're bringing patients through all these agencies, but here's the game changer.

an incredible collaboration through a very advanced technology platform that allows us transparency that we've never had. So it makes it easy to refer and also watch the progress of in the workflows as these patients work through the authorization process. So it really was a match made in heaven and it just keeps getting better and better.

We literally have probably two to three meetings a week. And, you know, still with our senior helpers team that we're fine tuning our internal processes because we're managing a lot of referrals, Miriam. I mean, we had our team meeting yesterday and we've got about 20 that are just coming ready for respite. You know, so it's a lot, but we've been doing it in a minute and we're building on the momentum.

Miriam Allred (37:18)
Thank

Debbie Miller (37:33)
But what we've done is we created a turnkey model. this has been the difference, right? It's training agency owners how to capitalize on this million dollar opportunity. We're setting clear expectations on how you can do this. We're connecting you with this certified GUIDE provider who has extremely easy onboarding technology platform that makes it.

fast for you to make referrals and get to respite care faster. We've truncated the process. All right, because we continue to fine tune that process. You've got a tracking dashboard, simple billing process. I mean, you bill and you get paid. It's not like, know, it's huge weighting game. It's you get paid really quickly. We created a marketing starter kit with promotional materials and even access to a print shop. So we've got stuff that you can download.

and personalize it yourself or work with a legitimate print shop that we use for 52 weeks marketing. We just have a partnership with them. We didn't add in any up charges or anything like that because we wanted them to provide the most inexpensive way for them to print really good looking materials. And then we've got an ongoing marketing and support program. So it's just, you know, we've put it together, we've kind of packaged it up and here's what we always do 52 weeks.

we've systematized it. And that's been really the game changer. So let me talk about how important is fast processing it. And this is where we've really made such incredible progress with working with Jim. So typically what would happen and, you know, back to my experience, we would put a referral, make a referral to a provider, and then it sit around and wait and not really know what's happening.

And you know, weeks would go by and there was just no transparency into what was happening with the family, were the connections made, did the clinical meetings happen? Because there are a lot of things that the clinical team has to do on their end to submit it to CMS, they get the authorization, there's all these steps that happen. Well, we didn't have any transparency into where they were along that timeline.

So we might not even hear anything for 12 weeks. So you can imagine how frustrating that was. Where now with our certified GUIDE ready model, what we do is you have a system where you put in your referral and you know pretty instantly if they're gonna qualify. All right, and that's a key, right? So you're not gonna disappoint the family. And then what you do is you see all the steps that they're making.

along that workflow that they have internally on the clinical side. And they can send messages back saying, we've run into a little bit of a hurdle. Maybe the family is unresponsive to their outreach. Well, we made that initial connection with the family. And again, that's what's beautiful about being that intermediary and being in control. The family made the connection with us. We're gonna be able to help drive this process.

And then if they're having a struggle to connect with them, we can reach back out to them. It's tricky because there's a certain amount of outreach that has to happen, but nobody wants to answer the phone anymore. So we can drive that and make sure that things are happening. So what we're finding, and we can intervene when necessary. And then what we're finding is

Miriam Allred (40:59)
Mm-hmm.

And I'm guessing

your marketers own this process end to end. Your marketers are out finding these clients, submitting the referrals. Are they also managing the communication and the technology piece?

Debbie Miller (41:19)
Yes, between

the marketer and in our case, because we're a large agency, we've got probably a bigger infrastructure than a lot of people. So we have care managers that do the assessments. And so the marketer will put the referral in. And when it's time to say, ⁓ coordinate the care for the respite and do the safety, the safety assessment, the care manager will, they'll, they'll make those interventions that are necessary.

So what we meet every single Monday and we now part of our workflow is we go onto the platform and we see where our clients are in this workflow. Because we have so many that were, it's almost becoming a full-time job for her. So we're constantly, because in Mike's shop, we have a lot of hands in the pot. So it's been, it's a little bit complicated, but for a smaller shop, this is easy to manage, but you'll.

want to make it a weekly thing where you're looking in the portal and making sure that everybody's moving along that that continuum. So what we're finding... ⁓

Miriam Allred (42:26)
And this is a good problem to have. This

program alone could fuel a single marketer to manage this process end to end.

Debbie Miller (42:34)
100%. So again, what I love about it is that, you know, somebody is looking to build some infrastructure, it can pay for itself. So say you want to even hold an off hiring a marketer, this program itself could help pay for you. Or maybe you want to build some infrastructure operationally. This could be the revenue you need to add on that scheduler or your recruiter. ⁓ So, you know, it's, it's one of those situations, what comes first, the chicken or the egg?

Well, this is a revenue generator that could help you build that, get you to that next level.

Miriam Allred (43:11)
And a key part of this is the training that you mentioned, which is also lacking. People understand that there's this program, but you said you and Jim and this program that you have built, your training operators and marketers explain exactly what they get if they opt into this. What is the training component?

Debbie Miller (43:28)
Okay, so I'll definitely take everybody through what we've included in the model. But to get the certification, and we've worked together to make this set a standard, right? To actually have that label as certified GUIDE ready respite provider. We're really requiring folks to be in a position where they can actually start care.

Obviously quickly, you don't want to disappoint people and get them all excited about respite care and then not be able to provide it. Also complete the training modules and I'll outline what those are, including your staff, the more in your organization that go through the training and it's free. We're going to walk through that in a minute. The better it's going to be for everyone. So everyone can talk to the families about this model. You want to be able to support the family caregivers. That's the vision and mission behind this program.

So understanding where they are, educating yourself about dementia, those kinds of things. Be able and willing to get out into the community and educate the community about GUIDE. Follow the referral workflow, and then also generate at least five referrals a month. So that's kind of what we're looking for folks to do. That's sort of what we need on your part. ⁓ And just in terms of the workflow,

the referral workflow, it makes it really, really easy. It's, you know, get out there, identify people who need it, educate them about it, then validate that they're eligible, enroll them into the platform, and then set up your shell, whether you're using Access Care or WellSky, set it up and tag them as guides so that you know, and you can follow and keep track of those patients, and so you can do an ROI also. And then monitor the portal.

Right, respond to any alerts if their client is non-responsive. that's kind of like, you know, part of that workflow on our part is to make sure people are moving along so that we don't have people that are disappointed. And then provide the respite care when that's time. So let's look at the training program, okay? So what the training program focuses on is in equipping and really arming agencies with everything they need

and what they need to, ⁓ how to communicate and get out there in their community and drive referrals to them. So it's the community outreach path is what it really focuses on. And so we've put together a very robust training program that helps around messaging, positioning, and again, imagine your whole team is going through this training. And of course we always, ⁓

use education as a big part of our marketing and particularly important here in this program because it's a new program and you just really getting the word out there. So the three key areas that the program focuses on is our ⁓ marketing to your current clients, going direct to consumers and or family members, family caregivers, and then the marketing piece, ⁓ the community piece, educating and mobilizing your referral sources.

when we talk about the families is educating, pre-qualifying, enroll, enrolling them. And the current clients is just getting, letting them know that this is going on and then enrolling them. So let's talk about educating the community. ⁓ So we outline who you wanna target. And if you have a marketer currently, this is a no brainer. You need to enroll in this program, get the agreement going with our partner with Harmonic Health.

and have them go through this. And it's just gonna be, this could basically be your marketing program for 2026. ⁓ So you're gonna focus on your physicians and clinics, hospitals and skilled nursing facilities, your senior living communities, even memory care. We've got folks out there, we've got somebody that was in our pilot that generated 24 referrals in their first two weeks of marketing the program. And one of the ways they did that was with the memory care centers.

Miriam Allred (47:40)
Wow.

Debbie Miller (47:45)
So lot of folks as they transition into memory care, can you imagine how overwhelming that is for somebody with dementia? They use the respite care, partnered with the memory care community, and the GUIDE respite is their transition into the memory care. So it's amazing. So that's just one idea. Associations, churches, your financial and elder law professionals are all very receptive to this message because what is it saving families money?

Right? ⁓ But at the end of the day, everybody knows somebody that's caring for somebody with dementia. This message resonates with everyone. So the marketing opportunity is off the charts. So we've put together materials as part of the training program. Once you've completed that, and I'll walk you through all the steps here in just a minute. We've got a editable.

Dear Client Letter that you can help communicate and this is all driving them to call your office so that you can ⁓ pre-qualify them and you'll be able to put on your local and so forth. We've got materials that are for your referral sources out in the community that again that are all editable you can download and make them your own as well as materials for family caregivers. You can get the drop these off at the doctor's office, senior centers.

The library, I mean, you can use these for everything that you can think of. And so once you've completed the program, if you didn't want to do it, you want to take a more professional approach to this, we have access to a real print shop. So you can go in there and, ⁓ again, customize these and you get them shipped directly to you.

So we've also put together an amazing PowerPoint presentation that you can utilize to present to family caregivers, to professional health providers, anybody in your community that you could think of, senior centers, you can just tweak it. There are a few slides that you can add your logo to customize it. It walks them through the program and it points them to you, right? So I've highlighted where you're gonna put your phone number, et cetera. And I've even included

⁓ your ⁓ speaker notes. All right, so we've made it as easy as possible for people to get out there and take advantage of this.

Miriam Allred (50:10)
And I just want to interject, it's all done for you. It's free. And Debbie herself is using this with her team. know what I love about you, Debbie, there's no fluff here. You are quite literally using these materials yourself. And when we talk about a million dollar opportunity, you have gone out and done this. And so the other thing that I just add is providers have their different style, different flow, different branding.

Take this and build upon it and make it your own. That is the beauty of what Debbie's put together is she's giving you a place to start and start extremely strong, but make it your own and tailor it to your partners and your business.

Debbie Miller (50:44)
Exactly. So here is the, I mean, I've created a 60 day roadmap to get people off to the races. If they just follow the roadmap, using the messaging that I've provided. So outlined in the training, if you're calling on different influence center types, there's different messaging. So I've outlined what's going to resonate with them, what your key messaging is that you'll be delivering.

But this is sort of like a marketing roadmap. And if you follow this to AT, you should be generating at least 25 referrals by the end of 60 days. All right, and so I've kind of given you step by step what you need to be doing. So it's all in there for you. It is completely laid out and we've just tried to systematize it so that people can follow the bouncing ball, as we often say, to 52 weeks marketing.

Miriam Allred (51:40)
And one of the things that I want to add right here at Devi that you educated me for some reason, just assume you could only work with one partner. But many people listening to this are probably working with a partner already, maybe a couple, but likely one. There's no limit to my understanding of how many partners you can work with. so say you have a partner and you're generating some referrals, but you're not taking advantage of the community outreach. You're not leveraging this with current clients. This is an opportunity to just maximize.

what you're already doing and the partner that you're already working with is sign up with another partner, see what Debbie has to offer and then take this to all of your partners and all your opportunities and leverage these materials.

Debbie Miller (52:21)
Right, right. I have agreements with, ⁓ gosh, at least four GUIDE partners, but I'm not waiting for the referrals to come to me. Now, when I generate referrals, I will only give them to my partner, to Harmonic Health, because I've worked really hard to get that referral, and I just love the system that we've created in the collaboration, and I really want that transparency into where that

hard-earned referral is in the process, and I have control over moving that patient along. So one of the questions that we often get is, ⁓ you know, well, what's in it for you, you know, being Debbie Miller? And so I will first talk about what's in it for you all. And I'm gonna talk about it from the standpoint of let's look at a harmonic health partner, all right, who's been just incredible. So.

What you're getting from them is a virtual medical clinic with very robust systems. Best in class software platform. I have never seen anything like it. helped tweak it to get it to the place where it's at. I can't take any responsibility at all for the design as a whole team working behind the scenes of engineers. ⁓ all we've done is give feedback as we've, as they've continued to advance that. Also we've dedicated, they've got dedicated success managers specific for

folks that come into the certified GUIDE ready model. All right, so from 52 weeks, what are you getting? Training and marketing blueprint for success, customizable marketing materials, and we're gonna continue to add to that as time goes on. And we've created an ongoing ⁓ what we call GUIDE growth marketing club. All right, so that's gonna be something that we're just gonna continue to build on. So what's in it for harmonic health? Well,

What they need are partners. They need home care partners. They have patients right now who are authorized for respite care that they are not able to activate. And so they're looking for home care agencies. So that's when I say, you know, this was a partnership made in heaven. He was like, my goodness, you could bring me partners. Fantastic.

Miriam Allred (54:36)
context, were on the, you and I were on the phone yesterday. Jim was calling you and saying, do you know anybody in Seattle? Quite literally his phone is ringing off the hook. There are people knocking on his door and he has no place to send them. And so this is just, that blows my mind in that there's opportunities that we're just not quite taking advantage of, but this is where we collaborate and come together.

Debbie Miller (54:44)
It's.

Exactly. Exactly. And so what's in it for 52 weeks? Well, what we get is exposure. We know that this this topic is going to resonate. People need this education and training. And so this gives us exposure to more agencies that we can, inform them about 52 weeks marketing and about Helper Heroes. So as they grow their business and they need help with building their infrastructure,

we can provide the virtual assistance to fill some of those positions like scheduling and recruiting and after hours and weekends, on call, et cetera. So as they get to know us and know more about our services, it allows us to grow those agencies. since I was doing it for my agency anyway, I thought let's scale this and provide this as a free offering and make new friends. That's kind of how this all came about.

Miriam Allred (55:52)
I love it. So yeah, tell people how they can get involved. think everybody's interested and it's like, okay, what now?

Debbie Miller (55:57)
What

do I do? Okay, really easy. We've created a whole platform. And so you simply click on the link and watch the introductory video ⁓ that introduces you to Jim and I and kind of walks through in a little more detail the GUIDE program. And then there's the, I'm ready to get started. And so then you will be, once you click on that, put in there four pieces of information.

you'll receive a partnership agreement that will be sent in, and you probably, for those of you that have already got agreements, similar to what you've already done. ⁓ And so you'll get a docu-sign agreement. And after you've signed that, you will receive a link from Harmonic, which is the mandatory Medicare fraud check that they have to do. ⁓ And so that's really simple. It will require,

you to put in your social security number. just FYI, don't get nervous about that. It's a very locked in, locked down system. And once all that's done, you will receive from Harmonic a link to the training portal. So it's going to send it kind of back to Kajabi. This is where you want to share with everybody on your team and get them to register. They'll put in their information. They'll...

put in your company, whatever the company is, the way you put it on the agreement. But you want each one to have their own logins so they can work through the training modules ⁓ at their own speed. right, and so there's three key modules that they're gonna work through. And then once they finish that, they're gonna do a quiz. It's a 10 question quiz, shouldn't be too complicated. And then the next piece is, once you've done the quiz,

you get access to the materials that you can customize access to our printer and then you can you'll then create a schedule you're onboarding to the harmonic platform so they their team will walk your whole team through you want to get as many people on that call as possible you can schedule it at your at your convenience it's calendarly link and then you'll be you'll have access to the platform and then

Last thing is to join the Growth Marketing Club so that we can keep you up to date on new things that are happening and just help you continue to grow in this opportunity. So here is the link.

Miriam Allred (58:23)
Yes, I love it for everyone that's listening. We've got the slides up on the screen again, but also all of the links that Debbie has referenced and the slides that we've shared will also be in the show notes. You could click those and take advantage. Debbie, I'm just I love your excitement and your passion for this. have known you for a lot of years and when you get excited about something, I get excited about something. And this podcast has been a little bit different in just kind of format and style than normal. But you and I both know this is a huge opportunity. are so many home care companies.

and operators that are excited and interested and signing up with partners, but then it all just seems to be kind of falling flat and that they're waiting for their referrals. They're not going out and educating. And that's what I wanted this conversation to focus on is the opportunity to maximize this with your current clients and with your referral partners and with the general population at large. There are millions and millions of people out there that can benefit from this program, but home care has to do the work. And like you said, this is the biggest program to hit home care in 20 years.

Debbie Miller (59:17)
Yeah.

Miriam Allred (59:18)
Hopefully this is just the start. This is an eight year program and if it goes well, imagine what this can turn into.

Debbie Miller (59:20)
Of course.

Also, what Jim has told me is he believes a lot of these Medicare Advantage plans will also start coming online. So, because like I would imagine that a lot of people are gonna be heading back to traditional Medicare. ⁓ So in order to safeguard those members, they're probably gonna have to be looking at care models like this. So yes, the opportunities now.

The way I look at it, there's probably going to be some three major players in each community. You wanna be one of them. And if you're the first, you're going to be, it's just gonna be a huge, huge opportunity for you. But just down the road, even more and more opportunities as you identify patients and bring them into the clinic, get them diagnosed. then, so you've got that opportunity as well.

So we interface with people who engage with seniors and their family members every single day. So open their eyes and their mind to this and you're at the center of it. And sky's the limit here.

Miriam Allred (1:00:30)
Yeah.

The way that I see it is every home care company could be talking about GUIDE every single day. Every single conversation can likely be with the dementia piece in mind could be talking about GUIDE using the word GUIDE and your everyday verbiage with every single person that you talk to like that's that's how big this opportunity is. So Debbie I think you spelled this out so nicely.

Debbie Miller (1:00:36)
Yes.

Miriam Allred (1:00:53)
I just want people to take advantage of this. Like you said, you what's in it for you? asked you that question out of the gate. You are so graciously offering all of this up for free. That's how much you believe in this. You're using it for your own company. You see the advantages and now you're giving these resources so graciously to other owners and operators. And I just think why wouldn't you take advantage of this essentially? so ⁓ again, we'll have all of the links and the slides and the notes in the show notes, wherever you're listening to this.

and contact Debbie and her team. They are so knowledgeable. Again, if you have the opportunity to speak with Debbie, you can ask her a million questions and pick her brain on all of these things because like I said at the beginning, she talks the talk and she walks the walk. She's doing this in her own business every single day. So Debbie, thank you for joining me and we'll go ahead and wrap here.

Debbie Miller (1:01:35)
Awesome, thank you, Miriam. Bye for now, everybody.