Marcus Primavera has been in the health and human services for two decades.
Eventually, he became an executive director at Sevita Health.
But when it was time to make another career change, Primavera joked that he felt like Al Pacino’s character in “The Godfather Part III.”
“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in,” Primavera recalled. “But in all seriousness, I missed my colleagues, I missed the industry. It was something I dreamed about: value-based care, margins, the caregiver crisis. It was hard for me to really just let it go.”
After a few months of looking for his next chapter, Primavera landed at LightSpring Home Care, a Philadelphia-based home care company that provides services in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.
Primavera was named LightSpring’s new managing director in May and said it was a perfect fit for several reasons.
“It’s medium-sized, but growing,” he said. “We are expanding into New Jersey and Massachusetts pretty aggressively at the moment. Ultimately — and I don’t want to disparage the big agencies — but there’s a lot that we can do as a good, quality agency at the medium level that as you scale up, operationally, things get a little harder as you get really big. This also was an opportunity where I’m the one in charge and the owner has delegated me to fully run the company so I’m just beaming with ideas right now.”
Before joining LightSpring, Primavera also served as the director of business development and account management at CareGivers America, which is a part of Modivcare Inc. (Nasdaq: MODV).
LightSpring provides non-medical home care services through the Community Health Choices waiver in Pennsylvania and is focusing on private-pay home care in New Jersey and Massachusetts. The company’s census is about 200 across the three states.
Coming from a larger provider where there were thousands of clients to care for, Primavera said he’s excited about the operational workflow and flexibility that comes with leading a provider with fewer hoops to jump through.
“I could not say anything more positive about my experience in the past, but here we can pivot quicker,” he said. “We don’t have a board that has to approve everything that could delay care when people are waiting. There’s so much waiting in the waiver world. We can move quickly. I believe we have the core here and we’re going to grow fast.”
Primavera plans to use quality initiative measures on the internal side of the business to drive growth.
“My approach here, and at Caregivers America, was to not talk a big game but to prove it,” he said. “Through quality initiatives that we are doing internally, through metrics that are already very high here, quality assurance initiatives. When I reach out to MCOs and FCs, I’ll be coming at them with proof that we are a good agency.”
Growing LightSpring’s workforce will also be a major focus in the first 12 months on the job. That, Primavera said, is a unique challenge in Philadelphia but one where he sees an opportunity to lean on the company’s strong reputation.
According to some estimates, a fifth of all working Philadelphians are caregivers.
“I know it varies and is different everywhere, but if you look at the data here in Philly, word of mouth is everything,” Primavera said. “Caregiving in Philadelphia is such an integral part of the economy. Hypothetically, if it sort of went away, the literal economy of the city would be destabilized. So it’s a really big deal here and word of mouth is really important and something we have to capitalize on.”
Aligning the company with its MCO partners on “all things” value-based care will be a top priority for the new guy in charge.
“I believe the basis for this agency to be successful is the quality of care,” Primavera said. “I may be naive here, but the quality comes out [eventually]. The MCOs notice it, your partners notice it, states notice it. Ultimately, I think we’re well poised to really grow pretty quickly here and so some amazing stuff for our participants.”
