Home-based care provider BrightStar Care has pursued a multi-year investment to become a more data-driven organization through the creation of proprietary technology and bringing on leadership and team members to drive business intelligence. These efforts are paying off in big savings and enhanced outcomes.

Currently, the company’s 400 locations are 90% franchise and 10% corporate owned, operating in 42 states. In July 2024, BrightStar Care reported that it signed 15 new franchisees in the first half of 2024. It also signed 24 new franchise agreements and opened 16 new locations during this period.

To foster this growth, BrightStar has made substantial investments in its data capabilities, Shelly Sun Berkowitz, founder and executive chairwoman of BrightStar Care said at the recent Home Care 100 conference in Florida.

“Our investments in data have been very important to boost global performance, but also to boost clinical quality, and so we’ve always made an investment in data,” Berkowitz said at the conference. “We have a proprietary platform that has given us this intelligence. We can look at data over a 20 year period of time.”

BrightStar has also made investments in people who know how to collect and apply these data to improve financial and clinical outcomes. They company created a vice president of data strategy to lead its business intelligence efforts, and as of 2024 it had expanded that team to 12 people, up from three in 2021.

A key initiative of this team has been a multi-year, $6 million effort to build a proprietary dashboard system that can help BrightStar and its local franchise leaders assess their performance.

“We really are seeing that we’re driving growth through competition, because our franchisees can see how they’re performing compared to their peer set. They want to be the best, which means that if they can see what’s possible. They can see how they’re performing in comparison, it makes them want to do better,” Berkowitz said. “So we’re seeing our growth rates improve. We’re seeing margins improve across our network. They can click through and immediately see which customer, which referral source, is driving the higher margin versus lower.”

For example, BrightStar used this system to conduct a 2021 study into their personal care business. Through the data collected via their dashboard, they determined that they had achieved average savings of $13,000 per person across 30 different diagnoses, according to Berkowitz. For heart failure patients, they generated an average $30,000 in savings.

The company’s application of data has gone toward improvement in quality at the local level in addition to financial metrics.

“We focus very much on outcomes at a brand level. [Local franchisees] could click through to see how they are doing and how they are benchmarking and where they should be,” Berkowitz said. “That’s given us the capability to add scale to being able to use additional optional partners from the corporate office to do clinical quality, QA audits and go back to work in an individualized way with our local offices to help them raise their quality scores.”