The Future of Home Healthcare

October 13, 2025

Home healthcare is growing at a rapid pace. In the U.S., employment in the home health sector is expected to add 700,000+ new jobs per year through 2031—growing three times faster than the healthcare industry as a whole.

What is driving this growth? What will the future look like? And how can home health providers handle this increased demand while continuing to provide high-quality patient care?

Read on to learn more about the drivers of growth, the challenges of home health, and the technologies enabling the future of home healthcare.

Home Healthcare Market Factors

Home healthcare spending continues to see strong year-over-year growth as providers and patients alike turn to home health options. Patients see opportunities for personalized, convenient care in a comfortable setting. Providers see the benefits of preventive care, hospital at home, aging in place, and at-home health tech. 

In addition, consider the complex factors in the home healthcare market:

  • Aging global population: 800 million people around the world, 10% of the global population, are 65 and older. An aging adult population drives increases in cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, high blood pressure, and other conditions. This trend, plus limited space in traditional healthcare facilities, drives an increase in home health and mobile healthcare. 
  • Healthcare funding: After a peak in 2021, funding for digital health technology startups has returned to pre-COVID levels. This requires health tech companies to reset expectations and seek new, creative funding sources to continue developing new health tech.
  • Industry consolidation: Mergers and acquisitions among healthcare organizations continue to shape the industry in real-time. There were more than 2,000 hospital and health system mergers from 2018-2023, and the share of community hospitals that are part of a larger system increased significantly in the past two decades. Financial pressure continues to drive consolidation in the market as providers seek to improve operational efficiency and stay open in underserved areas.

These combined factors risk a significant long-term burden on health systems. Expanding sites of care—via home health, mobile healthcare, and distributed care—can help improve accessibility and introduce preventive care to people of all ages.

The Future of Home Healthcare Staffing

Finding and retaining skilled workers is a challenge throughout the healthcare industry: the American Hospital Association predicts a shortage of up to 3.2 million healthcare workers by 2026. This is especially challenging in a high-growth area like home healthcare, where providers see the increased demand for more services but lack the supply of qualified, available caregivers they need to grow.

Going forward, home healthcare providers will continue to grapple with:

  • Attracting home health workers and offering competitive pay
  • Developing staff through training, continuing education, and ongoing coaching
  • Retaining skilled workers with thoughtful scheduling, technology, and support to make the job easier
  • Improving productivity and utilization of skilled workers

To address these challenges, healthcare providers must prioritize training and on-the-job support for the workforce. Creating an excellent residency program and supporting preceptors are good ways to create an environment of continuous learning and development. 

“We can find better use of technology and virtual care models to create at least a 30% increase in labor productivity for our existing labor resources. The supply isn’t increasing, so you have to drive labor efficiencies and productivity through technology that also reduces the burden on clinicians.”
– President/CEO of a U.S. home healthcare company via Home Health News

Healthcare organizations will continue to invest in high-quality technology that workers like to use—like mobile-friendly clinical notes and digital forms—to improve job satisfaction and worker retention. In addition, providers will use smart scheduling and workforce management software to improve job matching, ensure workloads are appropriately balanced, and get real-time info about workers’ locations and statuses.

These tools empower caregivers to spend more time with patients and less time on administrative work and unnecessary travel. 

“It comes from creating a very efficient model of care delivery, which is predominantly focused on having the finite nursing resources and managing that to the absolute best of our ability. In our case, anything that does not have to be managed by a nurse, we take it out of their hands and we manage it by others. We don’t want them to work on those tasks. We’re focused on the execution of highly capable nurses and the things that only they can do.”
- Founder/CEO of a U.S. home health organization via Home Health Care News

The Future of Home Healthcare Technology

The future of healthcare depends on reliable mobile health tech. Sometimes this is cutting-edge technology, like AR and VR tools that enable new types of staff training. And sometimes it is reliable, everyday technology to enhance staff skills, like a user-friendly smartphone app that home healthcare workers can use to record visit notes, reference safety checklists, and follow up on key tasks after the visit.

Here are some of the key tech trends and specific technologies to watch in the home healthcare space:

Technology trends in healthcare

There are several industry-wide tech trends affecting home healthcare:

Turning siloed tech into streamlined, integrated processes

In the past, technologies that are essential to healthcare operations—including EHR/EMR, HR, billing, imaging, and more—were siloed and lacked a way to communicate and share information among systems. As software platforms advance, healthcare organizations see the benefit of technologies that not only work, but work together. The future of home healthcare software is integrated, interoperable, customizable, and adaptable.

Addressing user experience issues with EHR systems

EHR systems are too often cumbersome, slow, or highly particular. As technology has advanced—specifically in home health, but also in everyday life—workers have higher expectations for the tools they use. The usability, functionality, and integrations of EHR and EMR systems will be a bigger priority for home health companies going forward.

Using healthcare data more consistently

Healthcare organizations generate huge amounts of data. Organizing, analyzing, and using that data requires a commitment to data analysis. Unfortunately, most data is not used to its fullest potential. Healthcare providers will invest more in the data infrastructure, specialists, and workflows to capture the right data and use it for decision-making and the personalization of care.

Home health tech on the rise

In addition to overall technology trends, there are specific technologies driving the future of home healthcare: 

  • Mobile medical equipment like portable ultrasounds, EKGs, and MRI machines support the growth of home health as a comfortable and effective environment for patient care. Mobile healthcare clinics also bring healthcare services to underserved areas and high-traffic areas where they can do the most good.
  • Telehealth and virtual visits are made possible by advances in technology, increasing internet access around the world, and policy changes. For example, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and insurance carriers in the U.S. expanded coverage of telehealth services in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • Remote patient monitoring (RPM) involves the use of sensors, wearable devices, and other at-home medical devices that collect and transmit real-time data to healthcare providers. RPM helps healthcare organizations monitor patient status and key data points—like blood pressure, heart rate, blood glucose levels, and falls—to improve communication and proactive interventions
  • AI-powered tools are being applied to several functions of healthcare operations: AI optimization helps create and adjust staff schedules, generative AI supports financial decision-making and customer service, AI-assisted workflows automate recurring tasks like appointment reminders, and AI-enhanced claim scrubbing and data review tools reduce the rate of manual errors.
  • Data analytics help healthcare leaders make sense of massive amounts of data. This includes clinical data at scale, which helps understand patient health outcomes and demographics. It also includes non-clinical data about employee scheduling, revenue, and payer mix, which helps improve overall healthcare operations.

How tech affects healthcare access

Software, mobile apps, clinical technology, and workforce tools are essential to the future of healthcare. What does that mean for people, health systems, and regions that lack this technology?

Large and financially secure providers can invest in new tech solutions more easily. But health systems in financial distress and underinvested areas may be unable to bear the costs of hardware, software, infrastructure upgrades, and maintenance required to leverage new technology. In some cases, virtual appointments and home healthcare services are an affordable way to expand healthcare beyond onsite capacity.

For digital transformation to be sustainable, it also needs a regulatory and insurance environment in which it can succeed. There are some positive signs in this direction: for instance, the Food and Drug Administration launched an extended reality program to improve the home environment for patients with diabetes in rural and lower-income communities. This pilot, and others like it, will further explore how technology can bridge healthcare gaps.

Going forward, look for home healthcare leaders to continue to invest in technology to achieve key goals:

  • Improve patient health outcomes – use remote patient monitoring, integrated systems, and personalized care plans to improve health outcomes
  • Improve healthcare operations – improve the efficiency and effectiveness of customer support, scheduling, IT, finance, and administrative teams
  • Empower patients – improve patient engagement with patient portals, easy communication tools, and easy self-service scheduling
  • Facilitate public health responses – use data at scale to predict, address, and monitor public health crises
  • Improve worker retention – create an excellent employee experience to attract and retain skilled healthcare workers

The Future of Care at Home

As the demand for home healthcare becomes more acute, the challenges facing home healthcare providers require creative and timely solutions. More so than in the past, they’ll look for team-based and holistic approaches to healthcare. A coordinated approach to a patient’s care results in better health outcomes and higher patient satisfaction—but it also requires careful communication and coordination among providers.

Preparing for the future means optimizing efficient care delivery with a value-based approach to disease management, distributed care, and payment models.

Value-based care

By integrating personalized care strategies, preventive measures, precision diagnostics and treatments, and a focus on overall wellness, healthcare providers can offer more effective, efficient, and satisfying care experiences. This shift to holistic, mobile care delivery not only has the potential to improve individual health outcomes but also to reduce the overall burden on healthcare systems by preventing diseases and managing chronic conditions more proactively.

Value-based home care achieves these outcomes through a personalized approach:

  • It’s preventive – it focuses on early detection through proactive screening, and promotes wellness and healthy aging through patient education. 
  • It’s integrative – it incorporates the social determinants of health (the non-medical social, economic, and environmental factors that inform quality of life) into the care process. 
  • It’s collaborative – it prioritizes efficient and transparent coordination of care with a patient’s other providers and specialists. 
  • It’s comprehensive – it brings mental health care into primary care delivery, and ensures that patients have the support they need to prevent health risks associated with social isolation. 
  • It’s responsive – it provides timely access to reactive treatment when a patient experiences symptoms of illness or injury. 

Holistic, value-based home care delivery is more cost-effective for providers and for patients. Its personalized, preventive approach helps patients stay healthier in their own environments, reducing the need for reactive treatment. Its focus on coordinated, integrated care manages risks before they lead to adverse outcomes. 

Chronic disease management

Home healthcare providers deliver care in the locations where patients can best respond to them. The future of distributed care will focus on improving disease management by providing access to preventive treatment and supporting timely response to changes in symptoms or health status of patients with chronic conditions: 

  • Mobile medical equipment and portable clinics provide more comfortable imaging and evaluation services for patients, and help providers reach previously underserved regions. 
  • Remote patient monitoring equipment, including wearable devices, transmit vital signs and ongoing patient status to providers in real-time, optimizing disease management for conditions including diabetes, heart disease, or respiratory disorders. 
  • Patients are more empowered to participate in their own care, live more independently in their own environments, and reduce the risks, complications, and expenses associated with hospitalization. 

Access to chronic disease management can improve when healthcare is decentralized from hospitals and distributed holistically to patients in at-home and mobile settings. 

Distributed care

Distributed care moves key services from centralized locations (like hospitals) and brings them closer to patients, typically through flexible options such as telehealth, mobile clinics, and home healthcare. Distributed care improves patient access to value-based care while relieving the pressure on centralized facilities to be all things to all patients: 

  • Distributed care networks train and educate providers to recommend in-home care when it’s clinically appropriate, and deliver more at-home or mobile services to patients.
  • Distributed care is ideal for patients with chronic conditions who need ongoing, coordinated support and services from different providers and specialists. It can also reach patients who don’t have ready access to more centralized care facilities for primary and preventive care. 
  • Distributed care is designed to leverage home healthcare technologies that keep patient data secure and mobile-accessible, ensuring a better overall view of a patient’s health across their complete care team. 
  • Distributed care is more cost-effective for both providers and patients because it allocates providers and resources to efficiently deliver the tests and treatments necessary. 

There’s no question that coordination and customization of care will improve as distributed care makes home healthcare accessible to more patients. How reimbursement models associated with mobile healthcare delivery will make these benefits more equitable, however, is less clear.

Reimbursement Models

Recent years have seen a push to reform provider reimbursement to shift costs away from patients, but there’s still a long way to go. Implementing new payment models and securing physician engagement are the two biggest obstacles to moving to value- and quality-based reimbursement models. These models focus on outcomes, rather than the volume of services delivered, which means rethinking reimbursement. 

  • While their goal is to improve the quality of care while lowering provider expenses, value-based payment models have yet to consistently demonstrate these desired cost savings. This may be because implementing some models placed undue administrative drag on providers, which in turn decreased their interest in participating. 
  • Despite that mixed data about cost savings, key value-based models were proven to provide improved care coordination, team-based care, customization of person-centered care to consider a patient’s local needs, and more efficient use of data to risk-stratify patients. 
  • Given that home healthcare is already seen as more cost-effective in general, policymakers could propose changes that specifically incentivize providers and payers to participate in value-based payment models of home-based care. 

With its ability to efficiently deliver distributed, value-based solutions at the patient’s point of need, home healthcare is well-positioned to adapt to evolving reimbursement models.

Prepare for What’s Next in Home Healthcare

At the intersection of increasing demand, decreasing funding, and hospital consolidation, home healthcare is uniquely positioned to accommodate challenges the broader healthcare industry is facing. With a holistic approach that responds to a range of patient needs and risk levels, everything from primary care to skilled nursing can be delivered by mobile health workers in distributed care settings, taking the pressure off of centralized health systems.

Mobile workforce management technology will continue to bridge critical gaps in accessibility and equity by making electronic health data more user-friendly for patients and providers, streamlining and automating administrative tasks, and coordinating care and patient monitoring in real-time. Because this tech integrates distributed settings like telehealth, mobile clinics, and care at home, mobile health workers can ramp up faster to provide more care to patients in the settings they prefer.

To prepare for what’s ahead, explore the Skedulo whitepaper on hiring, retaining, and managing deskless caregivers. You’ll learn about the strategies being implemented in a range of fields including home healthcare, ABA and human services, and healthcare workforce development, and hear directly from providers about how they successfully attract and nurture a talented mobile workforce in a post-COVID world.

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