Nurse Nurses Doctor Doctors Hispanic Woman Women 119518899If you start a Medicare-certified home health agency and don’t have a single good relationship with a referral source such as a doctor or discharge planner, you have started with a serious impediment. But there is a quick way around this impediment.

Ideally, you will have a relationship with medical referral sources who want you to start a home health agency before you start it. Starting a home health agency and then trying to make appointments with complete strangers, to ask for a relationship that benefits you more than it benefits them, is a tough way to start. Here’s one way to make that easier.

Hire nurses and therapists with excellent professional relationships in your community, and put them in positions of authority. Think of your administrator, director of nursing, director of therapy, and assistant administrator positions. Then let those professionals go to their old contacts and proudly announce that they are in a position to make sure all patient care will be handled well. Empower those professionals to live up to that promise. When this can be done well, agencies that started without the right relationships in place will rocket past many of the usual new-agency blues.