Avenues to Independent Living helps New Jersey adults with varied abilities live more freely and participate fully in their communities. With approximately 400 patients and caregivers, Avenues to Independent Living provides one-on-one support that improves patients’ lives. In addition to in-home care, the agency offers supportive employment, skills development training, and community integration events such as sports days. 

Boosting EVV compliance to avoid risk and improve quality of care 

Since being signed into law in 2016, electronic visit verification (EVV) has been the industry standard for tracking the administration of in-home care. But the path to EVV adoption hasn't been easy. Many home care agencies reported uncertainty about how to implement the technology or when they needed to meet the new requirements, which varied from state to state. 

New Jersey, for instance, implemented an 80% compliance minimum in 2021 — a standard many agencies couldn’t meet. As the state ramped up to stricter compliance oversight for 2023, Avenues to Independent Living implemented a three-strike suspension program to incentivize better quality of care. But despite their efforts the company’s EVV compliance rate remained at 70%. 

"Agencies that are non-compliant risk not being assigned new clients — or even losing existing clients — if they don't meet these goals," explains Regina Brogan, Avenues to Independent Living's CFO. So, incentivizing caregivers to comply was mission-critical for the company.

However, EVV wasn't Avenues to Independent Living's only concern. To support its client base of adults with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (IDD), the agency needed to find and retain more talented caregivers. This need to hire wouldn’t be going down anytime soon — nearly 8 million Americans live with IDDs, 19% of whom receive long-term support from a state agency.

To balance rising demand and higher compliance standards, Avenues to Independent Living needed to recruit more high-quality caregivers who could help the agency exceed industry expectations as it grew.

"We needed to find a positive way to improve caregivers' performance and instill in them the importance of EVV compliance. Perry helped us do this." 

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Incentivizing EVV completion and rewarding referrals with Perry Points

Since partnering with Perry, Avenues to Independent Living has implemented an easy-to-maintain incentive program. This program automatically recognizes and rewards caregivers for all their hard work.

From day one, Regina knew Perry would be an unlock for the company because employee recognition has been proven to improve performance. In fact, 83% of employees find recognition motivating, and 77% feel it makes them more productive. 

Built with these principles in mind, Perry has enabled Avenues to Independent Living to improve EVV compliance for the first time in years by automatically rewarding caregivers for target behaviors, like using HHAeXchange mobile app to clock in and out.

To do this, the agency relies on Perry Points to:

• Automatically reward targeted behaviors. With Perry, caregivers automatically earn points for not only going above and beyond but consistently meeting EVV requirements, like documenting when, where, and by which caregiver certain services were provided. Caregivers can easily track how many Perry Points they've earned and for what in the app, which reinforces the targeted behaviors. With enough points, caregivers can redeem their rewards as gift cards to 50+ retailers, including Walmart and Amazon.

• Incentivize referrals with bonuses. In addition to rewarding performance, Avenues to Independent Living uses Perry to gamify its referral program. To do this, in-app notifications routinely nudge caregivers to refer their friends. Caregivers then get 9,000 bonus points if their referral gets hired and another 9,000 points when that new hire completes 50 hours of work, ensuring the program drives high-quality candidates.

"If a high-performing caregiver refers their friends, those are usually better leads,” Regina shares. “After all, they're not going to refer someone they don’t think a good fit because they know the level of care we provide to our clients.” As a result, Perry’s referrals have introduced a new hiring pipeline for the company that’s more cost-effective and leads to better hires that retain longer.

“Caregivers are genuinely excited to instantly get rewarded through Perry. It’s so much more motivating than a yearly or quarterly bonus.” 

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Hiring 50% more caregivers while exceeding EVV standards

With Perry’s automatic rewards, Avenues to Independent Living has found a low-lift way to systematically show their appreciation to caregivers. Not only has this improved caregiver performance — leading to record EVV compliance — but it has helped the company recruit and retain more people: 

• 90% EVV compliance (vs. 70% previously)
• 65 referrals garnered in only 9 months 
• 50% increase in headcount since using Perry

“We improved EVV compliance in a matter of months with Perry. We’re one of only two agencies in the state to have compliance at that level, and the other agency is much smaller than us.”

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