Greeley health company expands

FORT COLLINS – Preferred Mobile Nurses Inc. of Greeley has opened a Fort Collins office at 540 S. College Ave., from which it will offer home-health services.

For nearly 11 years, Preferred Mobile Nurses has operated in a dual capacity, providing supplemental nursing staff and offering home health care. Under the name Preferred Home Health, the new office will focus on home care, said Phil Pettus, company president.

“We’ll keep our supplemental staffing services in Greeley for now,” Pettus said. “But we may look at doing some recruiting and placement out of the Fort Collins office later on.”

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A staff of about 15, headed by branch manager Judy Maupin, will provide all home-health services and work with providers, private insurers, Medicare and Medicaid, Maupin said.

“We’ll concentrate on self-pay,” she said. “Patients who use a private-pay option have more flexibility in the care they receive in terms of overnight stays and so on.”

Preferred Home Health is the company’s first branch office, but Pettus plans to open several more along the Front Range.

“The way home health is headed toward managed care, you need broader geographical coverage to be viable,” he said. “We’ve affiliated with Medshares, a home health-management company out of Memphis (Tenn.) to help us with administrative services and joint-commission accreditation procedures. And our long-range plan is to open multiple offices.”

Maupin and her staff come to Preferred Home Health from Western Medical Services’ Home Health division, which is closing its operations in

Fort Collins. Western Medical Services will continue to do medical staffing, but Medicare’s new interim payment system has forced the company to close offices with high percentages of Medicare patients.

Western has closed 20 percent of its home-health offices across the company, said company president Mike Nicholson.

“We would have continued operating those offices even if we were just breaking even,” he said. “But we were paying the government for the right to serve its patients and losing money. We had to make a hard decision.”

Preferred Home Health, a private, for-profit company, continues to grow while other home-health agencies close their doors, because the company is diversified in terms of services and payers, Pettus said.

“We also have the staffing side of our business, and Medicare represents only 10 percent of our business,” he said.