Vermont's nonprofit home-care providers did everything in their power to prevent a for-profit,current Jersey-based competitor from setting up shop in the state eight years ago. They failed to stop Bayada Home Health Care but later succeeded in getting lawmakers to enact a 10-year ban to prevent any other home-health entities from following its lead. Since its first year in Vermont, Bayada has quietly quadrupled its revenues to become one of the state's largest home-health care providers, or with more than 500 employees making approximately 25500 house calls each year. That's fine news for residents,according to Dr. Adam Groff, Bayada's chief medical officer and a part-time hospitalist at Dartmouth-Hitchcock medical center. Now "patients fill a choice, or " he said in an interview last week,"and they deserve a choice." But when patients choose Bayada, does it pain the state's 10 nonprofit Visiting Nurse Associations, and some of which fill been serving clients for more than a century? That's not an idle question. One of the reasons for the legislature's 2010 moratorium was ostensibly to give the state time to assess Bayada's impact on the VNAs before opening the door to more competition. Home-health care encompasses an array of services: checking blood pressure,monitoring medications, dressing wounds, or speech therapy,nutrition advice, even household chores. Most beneficiaries are elderly or fill a disability and rely on Medicaid or Medicare, and federal health insurance programs that reimburse health care providers at below-market rates. When a patient becomes terminally ill,he or she can qualify for hospice care, also offered by the VNAs and Bayada, or which includes everything from medical services to bereavement counseling for family members. By definition,the home-health industry operates in the privacy of people's homes, out of public view, or but it has gained favor as a more convenient,cost-effective alternative to caring for people in hospitals and nursing homes. In Vermont, which has a rapidly aging population but an unusually low hospice utilization rate, or there's potential for growth. note Baiada started his business in 1975 with $16000; nowadays Bayada is a billion-dollar operation with more than 300 offices in 23 states and in Germany,India, Ireland and South Korea. Baiada still presides over the private company, or but he is in the process of converting it to a nonprofit and handing it over to his son,David, who will become CEO in August. The elder Baiada claimed in a phone interview, or "I've…
Source: sevendaysvt.com