Home-Based Care Execs’ 2026 Playbooks Focus On Breaking Silos, Winning With AI
This week, Home Health Care News published two lists of predictions from top home-based care executives for 2026. These lists included insights from 20 executives in non-medical home care and Medicare reimbursed home health on the top challenges, opportunities and trends in the year to come.
Parsing through these executives’ predictions, one thing is certainly clear: home-based care will continue to be a critical part of the U.S. health care system’s evolution – if providers meet the moment and adopt key technologies, while closing communication and collaboration gaps.
More specifically, technology is a top priority, but adoption alone is insufficient to fully transform operations and propel providers into the next era of home-based care.
And long-standing siloes can not continue to persist. Providers must take stock of their own service lines to see if they can become more of a one-stop shop, and collaborate with payers and policymakers with whom communication can be a persistent struggle.
In this week’s HHCN+ Update, I’ll share my key insights from 20 home-based care executives’ predictions for 2026, and share analysis and key takeaways, including:
– Why providers can’t stop at finding the right AI tools, they must overhaul whole operating systems
– The barriers keeping home-based care operators from evolving their business
– How addressing these barriers positions providers to thrive in the upcoming year and beyond.
The ‘how’ of technology
Unsurprisingly, many executives’ predictions and priorities for 2026 came down to technology and specifically AI. But it became clear that just having the tools is insufficient, providers must leverage them as strategically as possible.
“AI and automation will move from experiments to everyday tools that encompass intake, scheduling, documentation, QA and family communication,” Jeff Salter, CEO and founder of Caring Senior Service, said. “The agencies that thrive won’t just ‘have AI,’ they’ll redesign their workflows around it. This will shift back-office work from manual and reactive to assisted and proactive, freeing humans to focus more on relationships and less on repetitive admin.”
This raises an important point – it’s not just about having the tools. It’s changing processes to include them and make it attractive for workers to actually use them.
One of the technology-related challenges I’ve heard about from providers is that it can be difficult to get workers trained and on board with using a new tool. While executives and technology teams may geek out on new tools, clinicians and caregivers are far less likely to revel in having a new tool just for the sake of something new. Workers want reliable tools that make their jobs easier, and tend to favor stability over novelty.
Companies looking to transform their business with technology must consider the full implications of such an overhaul. In addition to changing workflows, they must keep the human element in mind and prioritize compliance.
“These tools promise major reductions in administrative burden and error rates, but they also bring challenges,” Namrata Yocom-Jan, president of Seniors Helping Seniors, said. “Agencies will need to redefine job roles, maintain effective human oversight and keep pace with evolving expectations around data privacy, documentation standards and AI transparency.”
For providers, it isn’t a race past the pilot and to installation, it’s a race to actually transform day-to-day operations to make processes simpler and more efficient. Without a full system overhaul in addition to the implementation of new tools, it’s possible for providers to spin their wheels and the main benefit of their technology implementation to be talking points, rather than transformation.
Collapsing siloes
As long as I’ve been reporting on health care, the key challenge I’ve heard about the U.S. health care system is its siloed nature. Patients are being told different things from different clinicians, chasing down itemized receipts for services rendered and endlessly writing their personal information on yet another clipboard-backed sheet of paper.
Opportunities to collapse siloes were regularly featured across executives’ predictions, whether it be gaps between service lines, between home care and health systems or between providers and payers.
On the home health side, providers must look to the full continuum of care to fully facilitate the transition of the health care ecosystem into the home.
“The greatest opportunity lies in fully integrating home health with hospice, palliative care, primary care and risk-based programs so patients experience a seamless continuum of support,” Jonathan Fleece, president and CEO of Empath Health, said. “Providers who can deliver coordinated, whole-person care in the home will help define the future of health care.”
HHCN has written about the opportunities – and challenges – of expanding into some of these service lines. For instance, expanding into palliative care can differentiate home health providers from their peers and can improve outcomes, but providers looking to chase this opportunity have to address the knowledge gap of what palliative care actually is.
In 2026, the providers that shift toward a full-continuum approach to health care are very likely to give their businesses the best chance of success, but I would add a word of caution that this transition must be undertaken carefully, keeping in mind the distinct challenges of each service line.
For home care providers, a key opportunity lies in the ability to partner with health care systems, according to Margaret Haynes, president and CEO of Right at Home.
“The increased need for home-based services opens new avenues for collaboration with health care systems, enabling home care to play a central role in conjunction with the entitlement programs in delivering care where people feel most comfortable – at home,” Haynes said.
But partnerships for home care providers cannot stop there. Collaboration should also include work with policymakers and payers, executives said. With policy shifts, like reductions in Veterans Affairs’ rates, tightening margins, working with payers to craft value-based arrangements and working with policymakers to improve the regulatory environment will be more crucial than ever before.
Overall, providers that prove themselves to be a crucial part of the overall care continuum – or to create their own continuum – will be better positioned to excel in 2026. Those that do so while overhauling their systems with AI technology will be the providers that overcome industry pressures to become top industry players for the years that follow.
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