Cross Country Healthcare Inc. (Nasdaq: CCRN), a provider of advisory and workforce solutions across the care continuum, has acquired Workforce Solutions Group Inc. (WSG).
The Boca Raton, Florida-based Cross Country was founded back in 1986, going public in 2001. Its co-founder and CEO, Kevin Clark, took a hiatus from the company for over a decade, but eventually rejoined as its CEO two and a half years ago.
Now, though the company’s general mission hasn’t changed much, its focuses have. That’s why further investing in home health care — and senior care overall — with the acquisition of WSG made such sense.
“[WSG] is a fast-growing business that is the de facto leader in senior care, which is a part of the continuum of care that Cross Country wanted to expand more rapidly into as health care systems continue to grow their footprint from acute care hospitals, to outpatient centers and home health care,” Clark told Home Health Care News. “So this acquisition strengthens our capabilities in terms of providing those services to clients.”
Cross Country provides health care providers with staff augmentation and consulting, among other services. It helps them staff their open jobs and, perhaps more importantly, find the right fit for those jobs.
On its end, Foothill Ranch, California-based WSG is a client-centric human resources consulting and talent solutions firm that focuses on addressing the unique staffing challenges that industries face, including the home health and home care spaces.
The acquisition went into effect on June 8. The purchase price included $25 million in cash along with $5 million worth of shares in the company’s common stock.
In conjunction with the acquisition, Cross Country has also received $100 million in financing via a second lien term loan. That loan was used to pay the $25 million cash, in addition to the costs, fees and expenses in connection with the transaction.
“We want to be the market leader in providing staffing and workforce solutions wherever the patient of today is getting their health care,” Clark said. “So in a way, we kind of follow the patient.”
For Cross Country, following the patient in 2021 means directing its eyes toward the home, which WSG will help with. As technology has advanced and the pandemic has increased demand for home-based care, it became clear to Clark that now was a good time for a move like this one.
Estimates suggest that 4.5 million more home-based care workers will be needed by the decade’s end.
“People today are more sensitive about remaining in their home, getting their health care in their local communities and being cared for in their home versus nursing homes and other facilities,” Clark said. “We think that’s a mega trend, and we think it’s a trend that is significant for our clients. We want to be providing the health care professionals in those local community health care centers, … and we can follow those patients from those local care settings into their home.”
That’s where WSG comes in. The company places hundreds of thousands of health care professionals in jobs per year, including home- and community-based caregivers.
“These caregivers are critical to health care delivery,” Clark said. “These are the folks that are giving people their medication. These are people who are driving them, feeding them and caring for them. And we think that’s an important part of the continuum of care, so we want to be a market leader there.”
Addressing the workforce crisis
Finding solutions for staffing issues in home-based care is not an easy initiative to take on, but it is a worthwhile one.
WSG has had “explosive” growth over the past few years, thanks to those challenges that home-based care organizations face. That growth will only be accelerated with Cross Country’s help, Pamela Jung, WSG’s founder and CEO, told HHCN.
“[For home care], we’ve put together a program that basically nobody else is doing in the marketplace right now,” Jung said. “I don’t want to give away all the secret sauce, but it’s very structured and a well-oiled machine. So we’re able to go into a market very quickly, implement a program, roll out of the market and allow our local staff there to continue to run it.”
Cross Country believes its proprietary technology provides answers to some of the toughest recruiting challenges in home-based care.
If it has a client in a specific marketplace, for example, it can create an algorithm that allows it to invest media dollars to attract the right candidates in that area.
“We leverage sophisticated programmatic advertising technology, where we believe we do a better job in aggregating and nurturing talent pools and supply,” Clark said. “We can accelerate these open jobs being filled with great candidates and meet the needs of these health care providers. The demand and needs can change in an instance, as we saw with the pandemic, and our ability to pivot a large amount of resources and staff to fulfill 100% of the needs of our clients is what can distinguish us or differentiate us in the marketplace.”
WSG’s team also spends a lot of time training caregivers from the gray market, the non-regulated market that about a third of all family caregivers come from. Developing and investing in those individuals enables more workers — and companies — in the field to satisfy strict compliance requirements in certain areas.
Alongside Cross Country, Jung hopes that WSG’s services will be expanded well outside California into various states elsewhere in the U.S.
“We’re looking forward to that continued growth and really bringing value to the senior community,” Jung said. “This population is often ignored. … We want to make sure that in all their transitions through the various stages of their lives, they’re very comfortable and they feel cared for. That’s our goal. We’ve got a very special program, and we are looking forward to expanding it.”
