Amy Hancock is a true entrepreneur whose passion for health care and commitment to the Pittsburgh region has resulted in her founding not just one company, but three different companies operating in the health care industry. AdvantageCare Rehabilitation Inc., Advantage Home Health Services, and AdvantageCare Consulting are the organizations that make up the Advantage group of companies.
Hancock, founder and president, combines deep experience and high quality care with innovative technologies to strengthen both the patient and care facilities. Her three companies together deliver a wide range of health care, nursing, therapy, and social services.
The first of her businesses, AdvantageCare Rehabilitation Inc., was founded in 2003 to provide geriatric therapy services to long-term care facilities in the region. She started the company to provide a better contract therapy option than the large national therapy companies could provide. The large national companies were steadily decreasing services to facilities in response to reductions in Medicare reimbursements and Hancock wanted her company to improve patient care. The company delivers treatment that results in the best quality of life possible and provides facilities with improved therapy operations.
Three years after Hancock founded her first business she was ready for more growth and ready to expand the company’s offerings, so she founded Advantage Home Health Services in 2006. Advantage Home Health Services took the services of AdvantageCare and brought them into the home, including in-home nursing for ongoing nursing and therapy needs of patients as they left long-term care. The home service also offers HealthCheck which monitors patients’ daily health and can detect early warning signs of health trouble.
The AdvantageCare business was thriving, but that didn’t satisfy Hancock’s desire to continue the development of her businesses. In just five years and two businesses later, she was ready to add a third business to improve patient services and the overall operations of her group of companies. In 2008 she founded AdvantageCare Consulting, a management consulting company for long-term care facilities designed to help them improve patient outcome and financial performance through audit and cost management services. The company helps facility administrators and therapy directors evaluate current therapy operations to identify practices that are undermining the facility’s ability to deliver consistently high quality care over time, potentially threatening the long term health and viability of the facility. Hancock understands that at the heart of achieving the optimal relationship between care, results and reimbursements is the care assessment, categorization and management process.
Hancock’s drive to continually expand and improve the experience for her patients got her honors as one of Pittsburgh’s Top 25 Women in 2009 and one of Pennsylvania’s Top 50 Women that same year. With three businesses offering services very few other companies could compete with, 2009 proved to be a good year. She was named an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in the Professional Services category and AdvantageCare Rehabilitation was named one of Pittsburgh’s Fastest 100 Growing Companies two years in a row.
Since the company’s founding in 2003, the Advantage group of companies has grown from just two employees to more than 235 today. The business continually sees a client retention rate just shy of 100 percent and that is due in part to the company’s motto; you deserve to get better.
While the motto keeps everyone in the company working toward achieving the same results, it is the employees of the three businesses that really make it exceptional. Hancock knows that a company is only as good as the employees who make up the organization. She does whatever she can to make her employees feel valued by doing things like hand-writing notes wishing employees happy birthday or recognizing their contributions and anniversaries. She also gives them cell phones and laptops for when they visit with customers on location to make processes run smoother.
The company has even added a 401(k) match at a time when most companies were cutting back their benefits programs. When the recession hit in 2008, Hancock was prepared. She approached the tough economy by employing technology to become more cutting edge and progressive rather than retrenching. These moves allowed the company to provide the benefits of the latest technologies, medical applications and procedures, attract and retain quality talent and leverage the cost benefits of better tools and resources.
Today, those investments have resulted in significant returns for the Advantage group of companies, which Hancock has put back into the company to continue its growth with new products and services.
HOW TO REACH: AdvantageCare Rehabilitation Inc., (412) 440-0145 or www.feeltheadvantage.com
