TruBlue Total House Care recently welcomed Carrie Coumbs as the company’s new senior strategic advisor.

Cincinnati, Ohio-based TruBlue is a senior-focused home repair company that operates under a franchising business model. TruBlue specializes in house care, home maintenance and safety modifications.

Coumbs is a senior care veteran with 20 years of aging services experience under her belt — serving as a senior vice president at Elara Caring, vice president of national business development and innovation at Right at Home and vice president of national care collaboration at Kindred at Home.

“The beauty of experiences is that you pick up a little bit from every organization, mentors and professionals that you’ve met along the journey,” Coumbs told Home Health Care News. “It’s been a long journey for me. I have picked up strategic information about all areas that support seniors as they age, and I’m very happy to support organizations as they want to get deeper into this aging space.”

Now, in a strictly advisory role, she will aid TruBlue’s leadership team in its strategic efforts.

“It’s been an interesting breakdown these last two years, not only during pandemic times, but then the complete shift of how senior health care, geriatric care and support has transitioned,” Coumbs said. “I am so pleased that I’ve been able to maintain my many industry contacts, and explore new ways that we could connect and build, as these changes have come about.”

Indeed, forming connections and building relationships was what put her on TruBlue’s radar in the first place. TruBlue President Sean Fitzgerald first got to know Coumbs during her tenure at a large personal care organization.

Under Coumbs’ guidance, her former organization established a partnership with TruBlue. The partnership put in place a support connection focused on maintaining the home space.

“It ensured that the location that a senior calls home was in fact supporting their aging,” Coumbs said. “It’s a safe location that has been well-maintained, there’s been adaptive modifications provided in the home that give that senior a longevity and aging-in-place opportunities that they didn’t have before.”

Last year, Coumbs had a hand in connecting TruBlue with The Helper Bees, a company that works with large insurance companies and Medicare Advantage (MA) plans.

MA plans are actively looking at what it would mean for their beneficiaries to take proactive steps to improve current home setting and embrace adaptive home modification opportunities, according to Coumbs.

“I saw how these two puzzle pieces came together,” she said. “These Medicare Advantage companies are being supported by The Helper Bees. There’s some coordination and solution offering being provided by The Helper Bees that the Medicare Advantage organizations may not have the time and bandwidth to go and find on their own. The Helpers Bees can essentially be the broker and the finder of services befitting the Medicare Advantage beneficiary.”

The partnership creates an avenue for TruBlue to be an additional solution to support MA beneficiaries.

Moving forward, Coumbs will help advise TruBlue as it grows and finds its future-facing strategy.

Part of that is connecting the company with aging services programs that will enable TruBlue to support its communities. One of these is the Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE) model.

“Those programs are amazing,” Coumbs said. “They’re all across the country now for profit and nonprofit. In some cases, they are attempting to support 5,000-plus members. The goal is to keep that member in the location they’re calling home safely with proactive and supportive care provided under one umbrella organization. The area that has been unattended has been the actual home they send the seniors to and from as they engage with the PACE program.”

While no TruBlue and PACE partnerships have been confirmed, this awareness creates a window of opportunity for the company.

“Modifications keep that senior well within the program of care, and their independence, dignity and the ability to live in their own home,” Coumbs said. “I think that that is an opportunity for growth.”

Looking ahead, Coumbs believes that home modifications will play a larger role in MA plans goals of keeping seniors safe.

“As we collect more and more data related to the services provided, we’ll see that even the smallest of home modifications makes a very big impact on the overall health of the MA beneficiary, and provides them with a better location to call home,” she said.