What big agencies are doing to address coronavirus fears

Coronavirus / COVID-19 notice on our client’s home care website

Put up a COVID-19 alert notice

Since the storm has arrived, it’s time to adjust the sails a bit.

If agencies respond correctly in the face of the COVID-19 crisis, they will stay afloat, help others, and even grow their agency.

Here’s a first step: put up a COVID-19 alert notice on your website.

Here’s why.

We foresee an increased sense of caution on the part of daughters and sons looking for care for their seniors. They want safety – freedom from virus infections. When there is a choice as to whether mom or dad should go to a residential facility or rely on home care, the scales are clearly tipped in favor of the safety of home care.

An outbreak of 24 known cases of COVID-19 at a Willowbrook, IL nursing home as of March 18 is a wakeup call to seniors and those caring for them. That news followed on the heals that 35 coronavirus deaths have been linked to Life Care Center in Kirkland, WA.

The public is worried.

The Home Care Association of America stated March 18 that they are,

“…receiving calls of concerns from clients’ families, asking what protocol home care agencies are following during the pandemic. Every member organization should have communicated this information to their current clients and to employees.”

And the public is turning to the internet for more information.

Internet traffic for healthcare increased 16% in a seven-day period recently over the week before, according to marketing expert Neil Patel.

Operational disruption

And nearly 60% of those surveyed by Home Health Care News believe home-based care providers should be “very concerned” about the coronavirus and its potential operational disruption.

The first step, simply put, is to reassure your audiences that home care has a tremendous advantage over residential facilities.

“The safest place for many folks is at home, particularly when you have to deal with such an infectious disease and virus,” said Joanne Cunningham, executive director of the Partnership for Quality Home Healthcare (PQHH), according to a March 15 article in Home Health Care News.

Home care agencies need to reinforce that idea for two of their target audiences:

• Current clients
• Prospective clients

This needs to be done with mailed letters, emails and website mentions on home pages..

What home care agencies are telling us

We at Savvy Senior Marketing have been talking with locally-owned home care agencies recently, and while many of them have alerted their current clients with mailed letters, only a few have alerted the general public via their websites. This omission should be addressed. This kind of alert is best done in a headline above the fold, or visible part of the website, with a link to a page outlining an agency’s best practices and policy for prevention.

It only stands to reason that clients and especially prospects who are checking out their services will look to the internet to see how agencies are handling safety and prevention when it comes to the COVID-19 threat.

Here’s another possibility – they likely won’t be getting as many in-person referrals from discharge planners, social workers and the like as much as in the past, since social distancing has prevented such visits.

Large franchises ahead of the game

In an informal website search this week, we found that of locally-owned agency websites, only 6 out of 18, or 33% have notices about the coronavirus/COVID-19 on their home pages. On the other hand, five out of ten top home care franchise agencies – such as Brightstar, Right at Home and Synergy HomeCare – have such notices on their home pages.

For example, Right at Home’s website says on its home page,

“Right at Home’s greatest priority is the health and well-being of our clients and caregivers. As a society, we are facing unprecedented challenges presented by the coronavirus (COVID-19). As a leading provider of home care services, we recognize our team serves a vulnerable population, and we take that privilege very seriously.”

We at Savvy Senior Marketing have found that the best coronavirus notices spell out the agency’s current health safety policies as required by state licensing agencies. Other, less effective website information simply talk about practices such as washing one’s hands and practicing social distance. That is not enough.

A long-term strategy

Placing such a notice on your website is not a quick-fix for a temporary problem. It is a good first step for planning for the months and years to come. Tomorrow’s new clients will come from today’s marketing. There will be an ongoing demand for such services, even in the face of this crisis. Home Health Care News said on March 18, “Despite headwinds from COVID-19, the in-home care market will continue to be buoyed by demographic shifts and the health care policymakers trying to shift care downstream.”

State your policy clearly

When it comes to your online presence, we at Savvy Senior Marketing recommend restating the content of your agency’s policy and procedures manual as required by states such as Illinois. Websites should also provide the agency’s sense of sympathy, concern, attentiveness and readiness to change in these unpredictable times.

Our COVID-19 Alert Package

To that end, we at Savvy Senior Marketing have recently developed a COVID-19 Alert Package, in which we offer to place such a notice on an agency’s website, and a link to a separate page that spells out the agency’s best practices policy. We begin with a COVID-19 Prevention Policy template that we have developed with points taken from the CDC’s infection control policy and other relevant sources. We will work with you over the wording to make sure it reflects your own policy, and then post it on your website.

This is a great boon to locally-owned home care agencies who often do not have the resources to quickly attend to their website needs.

To learn more about our COVID-19 Alert Package, please make an appointment on our calendar, or call us at the number at the top of the page.