Homewatch CareGivers CEO On Engaging Clients Beyond Their Caregiver
•February 7, 2026
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Why It Matters
Technology‑enhanced home care can offset shrinking margins and meet rising demand for remote, outcome‑based services, positioning Homewatch as a leader in the evolving senior‑care market.
Key Takeaways
- •Adding 40 offices annually through 2028.
- •Homewatch Connect enables virtual engagement beyond caregiver visits.
- •AI-driven fall risk sensors improve safety and data collection.
- •Expanding service lines: dementia, Parkinson’s, COPD, nursing.
- •Aggregating outcomes data to support value‑based payer contracts.
Pulse Analysis
Homewatch CareGivers is betting on a tech‑first model to stay competitive in a market where labor costs outpace reimbursement rates. The Homewatch Connect platform turns a television into a communication hub, allowing AI agents to monitor fall risk, temperature, and even cognitive changes through natural‑language interactions. This continuous engagement not only improves client safety but also generates granular data that can be leveraged in negotiations with private insurers and government payers.
The company’s aggressive expansion—targeting 40 new offices per year—focuses on underserved states with favorable demographic trends. By establishing a presence in regions like Hawaii, Alaska and Maine, Homewatch captures emerging demand while spreading the cost of its technology infrastructure across a larger client base. The rollout of specialized programs—dementia certification, Parkinson’s, COPD, and a nursing service seeking CHAP accreditation—creates a full‑service continuum that keeps clients within the brand as their care needs evolve.
Beyond operational efficiencies, Homewatch is positioning itself for value‑based care contracts. By aggregating outcomes data from a network that could soon serve a million patients, the firm can demonstrate cost savings and quality improvements to payers. This data‑driven approach not only helps protect margins but also aligns the company with the broader industry shift toward risk‑sharing models, making it a compelling partner for insurers seeking reliable, home‑based alternatives to institutional care.
Homewatch CareGivers CEO On Engaging Clients Beyond Their Caregiver
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The home-based care industry is facing increasingly compressed margins and reimbursement levels that fail to keep up with the pace of inflation. President of Homewatch CareGivers, Todd Houghton, is leveraging technology to protect the company’s margins – while aiming to grow.
Houghton told Home Health Care News that the company is aiming to add about 40 offices per year over the next three years, having opened 42 in 2025. As it does so, it is prioritising US markets without an existing Homewatch CareGivers presence — including Hawaii, Alaska and Maine — based in part on demographic projections of demand in those states over the coming years and decades.
Greenwood Village, Colorado-based Homewatch CareGivers was acquired by private equity firm Authority Brands in 2017. As of January 2026, it operated 302 offices across 43 states, plus Central and South America.
Houghton sat down with HHCN to discuss his priorities for the company, including AI technology and fall risk sensors, the future of value-based care and how the company has expanded its service line offerings.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
HHCN: What are your top strategic priorities for the next one to three years?
Houghton: Our biggest strategic priority is continuing to enhance our technology vertical at the point of care – Homewatch Connect – a smart device that connects to the TV and allows the client to be connected and engaged beyond the time a caregiver is in the home. We also have sensors that do proactive fall risk and ambient temperature evaluation. We’ll look to continue to enhance what can fall underneath that.
We are in pilot right now with an AI component that can call as many times a day as needed and the client can also call outbound to this AI agent and have conversations. It really improves efficiencies, but it’s also recording and scoring a client based on conversations.
So it helps us evaluate cognitive decline or other things that might require additional visits from a caregiver.
Why is Homewatch Connect the most important thing strategically?
Look at the next four years and the number of caregivers that we will need in the industry — we have to figure out how to improve their efficiencies. A client, on average across the industry, gets about twenty hours a week of care. Out of those, about 50% is truly direct care. With technology, we can keep that client engaged and monitored, providing virtual support when a caregiver isn’t there, but improving the efficiencies of a caregiver.
You’ve said previously that technology is the key industry trend in 2026. How would you describe Homewatch CareGivers’ technology strategy?
We’re going to see more widespread adoption across all sectors of the health care continuum and people are becoming more and more comfortable with it: an 80-year-old today is much more comfortable with technology than an 80-year-old ten years ago. That allows a person to age at home much more safely, by being connected when a care provider is not in the home.
Technology also helps us to harvest data, which is critical to understand a person in their aging process. It allows us to go to private or government payer sources and speak to the outcomes: that home care will continue to be the cheapest alternative to keep people safe and secure for the near term.
This takes us round to value-based care agreements, where you need to be able to demonstrate that benefit.
Absolutely. We still run about 80% private pay, but as we look to the future, we absolutely have to understand how we are going to be part of that value-based model. How are we going to look at risk sharing as we grow as a brand?
What other new tools or initiatives have you implemented?
One of the things we brought in in ‘25 is using AI and ambient listening in the development of care plans. The clinical person who’s going into the home to do that assessment is asking the questions; instead of them having to write it down, the AI is.
Do you have plans to grow your service offerings?
Two years ago, we looked at our service offering – companion care and personal care – and said, “We’re not meeting people where they are in their care journey. How do we become a more integral part of the continuum of care?” So we redeveloped all of our service lines, starting with active care: our tech-forward solution providing people a vertical to be connected and engaged without really having a caregiver in the home. As they start to age, they transition and we’ve rebranded our companion care to ‘wellness care’. Then we have our personal care service line, which is our largest.
In early ‘25, we launched our proprietary dementia certification programming. We are now in the process of certifying all of our dementia providers. We’ve also launched our Parkinson’s program, and in Q1 of this year, we’ll be launching our COPD program. We’ve also developed transition programming for somebody who’s transitioning from an acute care hospital or rehab setting to community-based living or wherever their home might be — we’re excited about that one. We also launched nursing services in ‘25. That wraps around everything. We are full-on developing and continue to add new locations under our nursing services model, which have to become CHAP-accredited. We’re excited about that because ideally, in the next 18 to 24 months, we’ll have our entire network CHAP-accredited.
What are the biggest business challenges the industry is facing and how are you overcoming them?
The biggest thing is compressed margins: the price for services is not going up in equal step with the cost of labor. Then payer sources like the VA, long-term care insurance, or even some Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates aren’t keeping up with inflation either.
We’re really focused on how we continue to bring in technology that can lower cost, improve efficiencies and help protect some of those margins.
We are working with other national brands across the United States to understand how we can bring certain data points together and approach some of these payer sources to say: ‘We collectively might be taking care of a million people, and these are the outcomes that home care brings.’ It initially started with six of us, and now we’ve got about twenty. We’re working through how we collect data points like length of stay, outcomes of stay, when discharge happened, why were they discharged. I can get a lot more traction with an insurance company if I have the data points for a million people instead of fifteen thousand.
By: Ben Upton
The post Homewatch CareGivers CEO On Engaging Clients Beyond Their Caregiver appeared first on Home Health Care News.
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