The purchase of Health Force Indiana by a Michigan homecare franchise will help modernize the Warsaw company, says Great Lakes Caring CEO William Deary. Deary is head of a Jackson, Mich.-based homecare company founded by his wife, registered nurse Cheri Lyn. He recently visited the Warsaw branch along with other sites in Indiana, Ohio and Michigan as Great Lakes marks its 20th year. The company acquired Health Force, which is also marking 20 years, in October. Health Force was founded by James Anderson Sr. in 1995, later joined by son Jim Anderson Jr. and daughter-in-law Christi Anderson. The company serves Kosciusko, Marshall, Wabash and Noble counties as well as Columbia City, and offers in-home services through sister program Irish Home Care. Great Lakes is introducing Health Force to the technology it uses elsewhere, such as home monitoring and electronic record-keeping. The learning curve on the new equipment will be the biggest change the staff in Warsaw see, according to Deary. “We're teaching them today to do all the documentation on a tablet that they were doing on paper,” he said. “I just told them, ‘Right now you're learning it, but in 90 days, you'll ask how you lived without it.’” The home monitoring, a practice called telehealth, can check a patient's vitals at home and alert staff remotely if anything seems wrong. He said it’s an important tool for keeping patients from returning to the hospital. “If something is out of reference – if you gain weight, or your oxygen level is down – we know something’s not right. We’ll call the patient and tell them there's a problem before it can exacerbate,” he said. He said Great Lakes turned its eye toward Health Force because they look for companies to acquire “with a level of quality in their clinical record.” “We acquire little companies and grow them,” he said of their expansion across three states and their growth from 40 patients to 400. “We see it as a hybrid between an acquisition and a startup – we help small companies get started faster.”
