How to Start a Senior Home Care Business – Licensing Overview

How to Start a Senior Home Care Business – Licensing Overview

Hey guys, Josh Markland here with 2nd Family. Today I’d like to talk to you a little bit about licensing. If you’d like to run a senior home care business, you will need to become licensed; whether you start from scratch yourself, or whether you buy a franchise. Now, licensing is done at the state level, and so requirements do vary from state to state. But today we’re going to talk about a general overview of what that licensing process looks like.

Your first step will be to submit an application to the state, along with a set of policies and procedures for your business. Your application will go to the Department of Nursing, or some other similar government agency in your state. The policies and procedures that you submit with your application will outline how you will run your business, so they’ll cover topic like your initial nursing assessment – what will you look for in a client and how will you put together your plan of care for that client? How will you monitor that client in time, so that as their needs change, the care that your providing changes as well? How ill you screen, orient, and train new applicants, new caregivers, who come on board to work with you? Topics like these are what’s covered in the policies and procedures, and it outlines exactly how you will run your business.

Once your policies and procedures have been reviewed by the examiner, you may or may not receive a list of items in return that you need to either clarify or amend in your policies and procedures. This is very typical; once you get those items back to the examiner, most of the time they will approve your application for a state license.

Now, your state’s process may also include an on-site survey from the examiner, in which the examiner comes to your place of business and inspects the record keeping process that you outlined in your policies and procedures. This may happen prior to providing care, and it may happen after you’ve begun to provide care to a handful of clients. Typically, the examiner will look through the records that you’re keeping for both client and caregivers to ensure that you’re abiding by the policies and procedures that you originally submitted in your application.

As part of our franchise onboarding process here at 2nd Family, we pair each new franchise owner with a certified homecare consultant. Now the certified homecare consultant is going to provide you with a list of pre-approved policies and procedures for your state. The consultant will also help you fill out the application, answer any questions, and reply to any requests from the state for clarification or correction in your policies and procedures. 

The certified homecare consultant guarantees that your policies and procedures will be accepted, and therefore that you will become licensed in your state. Another added benefit of the consultant that we provide at 2nd Family is that the consultant will maintain an electronic copy of your policies and procedures for the life of your business. Now, as you can imagine, in time, state law does change, and so your policies and procedures may become out of compliance if they’re not updated. The consultant will handle all of that for you, and so you’ll always be able to access and electronic version of your policies and procedures which are always up to date with the state code.

That consultant is provided to you by 2nd Family at no additional cost; it’s included in the franchise fee that you pay us at the outset of the business. If you have any additional questions about the licensing process, we’d love to talk to you further; just reach out and give us a call. Thanks for watching!