Fractional Care in Senior IL’s Doesn’t Have to be Difficult

For Home Care Agencies and Senior Independent Retirement Communities Providing Fractional (Short-Visit) Services to residents living in Senior IL Communities

It’s Your Decision

Your instincts may be telling you that you are either not running fractional (short-visit) home care efficiently in the independent living communities - or you're simply struggling to make it work.

We’ve been there ourselves as former home care agency owners that provided fractional care in Ils. When we first started there were no roadmaps - no clear guidelines for how to schedule and operate short visits effectively. Like many, we winged it at first, and the results were…less than optimal:

• Unhappy clients, who didn’t get exactly what they wanted when they wanted it, often competing for time and attention.
• Unhappy caregivers, who complained about teammates, worked inconsistently as a team, and were forced to use subpar mobile technology never designed for how they actually deliver care. (In fact, many reverted to paper.)
• Community care coordinators (schedulers), who struggled to maintain balanced staffing, swinging between over- and under-staffed shifts.
• Home care technology that worked fine for traditional private-duty cases but simply didn’t fit the unique demands of community-based fractional care.

Bottom line: Fractional care is not easy.

The Good News: It Doesn’t Have to Suck.

To borrow a line from an old 1999 Amstel Light commercial (and adapt it):

"Sorry. We’re from CINCH. We didn’t know fractional home care services in Independent Living was supposed to suck."

It doesn’t have to.

It may have started that way for us - but it didn’t end that way. Over time, fractional care became a game-changer, transforming our home care agency into a thriving business with:

Steady recurring revenue.

Happy clients and caregivers.

A scheduling team that had all the tools and technology to schedule, adapt, and monitor care in real time and more easily. They were a lot happier.

And we got more traditional home care referrals from the community so our traditional longer visit home care grew.

How Can We Help?

By sharing:

Straightforward metrics to evaluate your community care operations

Time-tested, proven best practices for running an efficient fractional care model

Below, we’ve laid out both.

Essential Metrics

True leadership recognizes the most important treasured asset – People. I’ve read many posts by leadership in our industry and the resounding theme when evaluating your operations is to put:

“People before metrics”.

Absolutely. We did. That’s why the metrics we recommend include people first - then financial and operational measures:

1. People (survey/measure)
   • Caregiver Utilization (tracked on the CINCH Home Page Dashboard: actual care hours vs. scheduled shift time)
   • Caregiver Satisfaction
   • Client Satisfaction
   • Community Leadership Staff Satisfaction (Executive Directors and their key staff involved or influencing resident care and wellness)
   • Your internal team - schedulers, nurses, administrators
2. Financial
   • Gross Profit (tracked on the CINCH Home Page Dashboard)
   • Net Profit by Community
3. Technology
   • Ease of Scheduling: How well does your platform handle real-world dynamics - callouts, delays, and community events that disrupt caregiving visit timing?
   • Billing Accuracy: Can you easily create accurate, custom invoices that support a la cart, task-based, time-based and packages?
   • Caregiver Mobile Usability: How simple is it for caregivers to document care electronically?
   • Critical Health Care Industry Compliance Standards:
   • HIPAA - Must
   • Electronic Visit Verification (EVV) - Highly Advisable
4. Communications
   • Enable Caregiver ↔ Caregiver secure messaging (with office oversight). YES/NO.
   • Enable Family ↔ Office (viewing schedules, completed care, encrypted messaging). YES/NO
5. Fractional Services Marketing and Sales
   • Services Description & Pricing Clarity: Hand your one-pager to a potential client - can they understand it easily (score: 10) or does it require a decoder ring (score: 1)? Metric: Keep it simple. Clients including the property understand it with little to no explanation.
   • Community Engagement: How often are you present—weekly, bi-weekly, monthly? Metric: Shoot for at least 2/month.
   • New Resident Support: You are part of the process for supporting community sales teams and new resident move-ins? Metric: You should be.

Best Practices for Optimizing Fractional Care

You already have policies and procedures for operating your traditional home care.

Fractional, community-based care is very different from traditional home care - it needs an adapted playbook from your traditional home care. Your best practices should align with the metrics above to help you operate at peak efficiency.

Here are several best practices items to consider:

• Adapt Your Traditional Home Care Service Agreements:
• Factor in shorter visits (i.e., 7/15/30 min)
• Set expectations on realistic arrival windows (e.g., ±5–10 minutes)
• Flexible but clear care cancellation policies tailored to community care
• Set Expectations with all involved:
• To clients and their families
• To community leadership and staff (what you can and cannot do)
• How?
• One-on-one meetings
• Community Town Hall to residents
• Webinar Virtual Meetings with Resident Family members
• Establish Communication Norms:
• Timeliness standards for responding to phone calls, emails and messages
• Specify your preferred communication channels for updates and questions about care in the community for your clients, their families and community leadership
• Scheduling Discipline and Best Practices:
• Set clear “thumb rules” for when to add or remove caregivers based on caregiver utilization thresholds
• Create a transparent process for incorporating new clients
• Collect Feedback Consistently
• Perform regular surveys of caregivers and scheduling teams
• Establish regular and formal channels for input from caregiving and office staff
• Measure Outcomes
• Monitor metrics daily, weekly, and monthly – The top two key metrics and indicator of community health is overall gross profit and caregiver utilization
• Consider using tools like Active Insights (formerly Home Care Pulse) for surveys to caregivers and your resident clients

Final Thought

“Run the community - don’t let the community run you.”

Fractional care doesn’t have to be difficult.

Done right, it can be a sustainable growth engine for your agency and a source of satisfaction for your caregivers, clients, and community partners.

Call to Action:

Take a few minutes to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of your fractional, community-based home care operations. Click on “Discover Your Community Care Performance” below. After completing the evaluation, feel free to schedule a free consultation—we’d be happy to review the results with you.


DISCOVER YOUR COMMUNITY CARE PERFORMANCE



Thank you for the important services you provide to help seniors improve their well-being and continue living where they love most—their independent living community.

About CINCH CCM

CINCH CCM® is a purpose-built Software-as-a-Service platform that makes it easy for home care agencies and independent living communities to efficiently schedule and deliver team-based, short-visit care. Designed for value-based models, CINCH helps our customers deliver services that improve resident well-being and enable them to live longer, healthier lives in the place they call home - the community.