Foreman Therapy Services is a finalist for the Entrepreneurial Opportunity Contest in partnership with BBVA Compass. For more information on the contest, click here.
Company description: Foreman Therapy Services (FTS) is a healthcare staffing company providing physical, occupational and speech therapists to home health agencies across the country.
Our mission statement is to change the culture of the home health industry. This ties in everything from the type of staff we want to hire, the type of work environment we want to create, the type of team we want to build and the level of quality we want to deliver to our patients.
The home health industry has a terrible brand, therefore a lot of quality clinicians (nurses, therapists, etc.) are on the sidelines because they don't want to work in the industry. Ultimately, this negatively impacts the quality of care being delivered to patients.
Our goal is to create the anti-home health company by creating a fun, innovative company that focuses on building a team environment in an industry that is historically known for isolation. The vision of FTS is to have an improvement in care when patients return to home, as opposed to a falloff of care.
This can be done by getting more quality clinicians interested in working in the home health industry. We believe that this can only be accomplished, by creating an environment that these quality candidates would want to work in. Our job at FTS is simply to create this environment and then open the Door. As Kevin Costner says in Field of Dreams, our hope is that if we build it, they will come.
- Number of employees at company/organization: 350
- Company website: www.foremantherapyservices.com
- Company Facebook: www.facebook.com/ForemanTherapySvcs
- Company Twitter: @ForemanTherapy
What is the concept you are pitching? We are developing a technology to "Uberize" the home health industry. The way home health agencies schedule and communicate with their field clinicians (nurses, therapists, etc.) is very outdated. Currently, home health agencies use office employees to relay information to field clinicians, similar to how taxi companies used dispatchers before Uber came around. Typical communication is through phone, text, and email, which is terribly inefficient.
Our technology (Zuum) is an app-based, Uber-infused, technology platform. All field clinicians will put their desired coverage area into their Zuum app and are automatically notified when a patient referral comes up in their selected area (similar to how Uber drivers get notified when rides are available). The clinician then has the option to say yes or no to the patient.
Zuum collects all of the yes responses and then provides a star rating for each clinician. One star is the worst, while five stars is the best. The company can then make sure the best clinician gets assigned to the patient. This creates good competition, which will ultimately improve patient care.
The home health industry is very challenging because most of your workforce is remote, which makes management and accountability very difficult. Zuum has built-in management and compliance tools so we can better control and manage our remote workforce. Zuum spits out thousands of automated notifications and reminders to our clinicians each week that would otherwise need to be done by a person.
FTS has been using Zuum, and it has reduced our overhead from 10% to 2%. I would estimate Zuum saved us $700,000 in 2018 by streamlining our operations.
While still in its beta phase, Zuum was the winner of the 2016 Innovation award by Staffing Industry Analysts, honoring the most innovative idea in the staffing industry that year.
Here is a video for that explains Zuum a little more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG4eNX_Ij_A
What do you enjoy most about being an entrepreneur? I enjoy the daily challenges that come with being entrepreneur. Whether it’s managing people, putting out fires or trying to grow the business, there is always something new every day.
I enjoy being to able to “create” something that can make a difference in people’s lives. We serviced 250,000 patients in 2018 and my hope is that we made a positive impact in those people’s lives.
How did you get your idea or concept for the business? I used to work for a company that does what we do, and very quickly, I realized a significant need in the industry.
Home health is a very isolating industry. Due to the nature of the business, most employees work remote. Due to this, it’s very difficult for the employee to feel like part of a team, and it’s difficult for the business to create any sort of company culture. This dynamic pushes a lot of great employees on the sidelines, which ultimately hurts the quality of care delivered to patients.
The goal of FTS is to create a community in an industry that’s known for isolation. We want to create a fun, innovative, team-oriented culture that top-notch therapy professionals would want to work in.
To what do you attribute your success to date? I have been fortunate to have an incredible group of employees on our team. One of the best decisions I ever made was to get out of the way and let our employees run the show.
What was your biggest challenge in launching or growing this business? Controlling growth. We grew very quickly and I had to balance saying yes, maintaining quality and keeping us in a healthy financial position. We almost grew ourselves out of business many different times in the early years of the company.
Tell us something about yourself that would surprise the people you work with. I really do get excited sometimes! I am known to not celebrate the wins, or mourn the losses. Most of our employees (and probably my wife) think I’m a-emotional. But I really do get excited sometimes, internally of course.
If you had one piece of advice to someone just starting out, what would it be? Failure is an opportunity to learn. Most people view failure as a stop sign, meaning, if you fail, you think you need to go do something else, or it just wasn’t meant to be.
If I had taken that position on failure, I would have shut FTS down one month in. We fail repeatedly, but we learn from all those experiences. I always say that our company was built on failure.
The five finalists of the Entrepreneurial Opportunity Contest will pitch their ideas to a panel of judges at the Cultivating Growth: Strategies to advance your business event on May 9. Register now to attend the event and watch their pitch.