Home Health & Hospice Week

Jackson, Mich.-based Great Lakes Home Health has purchased Bingham Farmsbased In-House Hospice &Palliative Care with financing from CIT Group Inc.

With the acquisition, Great Lakes aims to gain a bigger share of the Southeast Michigan market and add an experienced hospice operation, reports Crain's Detroit Business. In the past 18 months, Great Lakes has acquired several home health providers in Michigan and Indiana, and plans to continue acquiring other companies and hiring more employees, increasing its 900-employee workforce by about 150 employees each year, William Deary, CEO of Great Lakes, told the newspaper. "Hospice is a small sector of health care that has gone from Kumbaya to big business, where you have publicly traded companies on the New York Stock Exchange," Dottie Deremo, CEO of Hospice of Michigan, says in Crain's. The acquisition of In-House will be one of the first of many in Southeast Michigan, Deremo believes.

"Scale will be essential for survival (because of reimbursement changes under health care reform)," Deremo told the newspaper. "There are a lot of small providers that will have difficulty surviving over the next three to five years, and there will be more consolidation."