For over 20 years, Community Homecare has been making patients across New York State feel comfortable, cared for, and safe. With over 3,000 caregivers on staff, the organization provides in-home care, as well as ancillary services like physical therapy and medication management, to patients in the Hudson Valley region of NY.

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Improving recruiting, retention, and performance across 3,000+ active caregivers 

Community Homecare wanted to attract reliable caregivers, improve their performance, and retain them as long as possible. But to do this, they knew they'd need to improve caregiver satisfaction.

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Research shows that employees who feel appreciated perform 11% better and are 56% less likely to seek a new role. The team saw this firsthand. "We had disgruntled caregivers who weren't feeling seen or appreciated," she explains. "That was creating low motivation, underperformance, and high turnover." As a result, Community was constantly hiring large volumes of caregivers to maintain its 3,000+ person workforce.

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Meanwhile, electronic visit verification (EVV) compliance was another concern. For years, the payroll and billing teams encouraged caregivers to track time through their home health aide (HHA) app rather than submitting paper timesheets, which slowed processes like EVV documentation, payroll, and billing. However, with many of Community’s caregivers feeling underappreciated, few changed their behavior. 

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Still, Community met New York’s minimum EVV compliance for five years running. But with The 21st Century Cures Act officially going into effect in January 2023 and little improvement to EVV in recent years, the leadership team worried about how they’d meet the new program’s stricter 90% compliance requirement.

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Community knew an employee recognition program was the answer. But, with so many caregivers, even basic admin tasks like payroll were time-consuming for the team; let alone going above and beyond to show appreciation. 

"Caregivers are on the front lines for our company. They’re the ones who are with patients every day. But with such a large workforce, it was hard to find a way to reward everyone and say thanks.” 

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Incentivizing caregivers to perform at their best with automatic rewards and bonuses

With Perry, Community now recognizes and rewards every individual caregiver for their contribution with minimal administrative lift. This has not only helped caregivers feel more appreciated, which has improved employee sentiment, but also significantly improved employee performance.

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For instance, "we've noticed a huge increase in behaviors like EVV completion, which we’d been trying to incentivize for years,” Renee shares.

To make this happen, Community relied on Perry's:

1. Performance-tied incentives. Community automatically rewards targeted behaviors — like clocking in and out with their HHA app — using Perry Points. Caregivers can then redeem these points as gift cards at 50+ retailers, including Amazon.
2. Weekly check-ins. Using Pulse Surveys, the Ancillary team can now easily track employee sentiment week-over-week and proactively support caregivers with declining sentiment scores, getting ahead of potential churn.
3. Referral bonuses. In addition to lowering turnover, Community has turned every caregiver into a recruiter by rewarding them with $125 in Perry Points for every qualified candidate they refer — significantly lowering the company's recruitment costs.

“Perry’s a game for our caregivers. They love logging in and claiming $5 or $20 to Target or Amazon. It makes them feel appreciated because they get instantly rewarded for a job well done.” 

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Maintaining 90% employee satisfaction across Community’s massive workforce

Today, roughly 75% of Community Homecare’s 3,000+ caregivers use Perry daily. This has made it easy to show caregivers appreciation at scale, creating "an incredible ripple effect" on recruitment efforts, employee performance, and retention rates: 

• 90% satisfaction across the 2,100+ caregivers using Perry
• 12% of candidates referred via Perry successfully hired
• 5% increase in EVV compliance after 5+ years of stagnancy

“With Perry, we’ve improved caregiver satisfaction. Happier caregivers come to work on time, they do their job more efficiently, and they're more likely to recommend us to their friends.”

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