From Unread Emails to a Seat at the Table at the Nation’s Number Two Rehab Hospital

Wayne Morgan opens up about the persistence, mistakes, and lessons that finally got him in the door at Spaulding, the nation’s #2 rehab hospital. Alongside Breanne Muchemore, who led Spaulding’s care management team, they share what actually matters to hospital partners and why most agencies never make the cut. This is an inside look at the conversations, questions, and trust-building that turn ignored emails into a first-class referral relationship.

Play Episode

min

Aug 26, 2025

From Unread Emails to a Seat at the Table at the Nation’s Number Two Rehab Hospital

Miriam Allred (00:31)
Welcome back to the Home Care Strategy Lab. A little love from me, your host, Miriam Allred, before we get into it. I just want to say thank you again for tuning in. I'm glad you're listening, but I also hope that you're learning and doing. This information is good, but it only is best when it's applied in your businesses. So I hope you're taking what you're hearing week after week and turning it into tactics and adaptations for your business.

Today I'm super excited to be doing something that I've been wanting to do for a while and I have really high hopes. So I have a feeling that we're going to start doing more of this. But today I'm joined by two people. I've got Wayne Morgan, presently the co-owner and COO of Amada of Central New Jersey, formerly on my past podcasts. So some of you may know him, but he was formerly a case manager. ⁓

served in business development representative roles, and was also a VP of corporate development. So as a really vast background, then I'm also joined by a special guest. I have Breanne Muchmore, currently the regional director of referral operations at a nationally recognized skilled nursing facility group. She was formerly the senior director of care management at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, one of the most prestigious high-end rehab hospitals in the area, Boston region, but also probably in the nation. So Breanne is a special guest. I haven't had someone like her, let alone her on the show before. So I'm super excited to have this conversation about both of you working together kind of in a past life and a past role. And we're going to dig into that relationship and that experience and Wayne, how you got your foot in the door and how you started winning referrals from Breanne at that prestigious rehab hospital. So thank you so much, both of you for being here.

Breanne Muchemore (02:20)
Thank you.

Wayne Morgan (02:20)
Thank you, appreciate it.

Miriam Allred (02:21)
Let's have you both, I just kind of quickly overviewed your backgrounds, but I want you to share a little bit more depth, ⁓ paint a little bit of color into your background, your work experience, and then also share a little bit more detail on your point of view that you're bringing to this conversation. So Wayne, let's start with you and then Breanne over to you.

Wayne Morgan (02:41)
Yeah, no, I appreciate it. And thanks for the opportunity. Thanks, Breanne, for being a guest and joining me. And thanks to the listeners, right? This is what it's about. So ⁓ like you said, I am the co-owner of Amada senior care of central New Jersey ⁓ COO as well. You know, titles are titles. But we've been in business for about this will be our second full year. So about a little over two years. We're doing extremely well. We're within two full years. looking at most likely trending right now to $2.5M

million dollars. So I'm really excited. We're growing a great team. We're helping great clients, helping really good families, hiring amazing caregivers, which is the most important thing. But the backtrack, ⁓ I grew up in a restaurant setting, hospitality background. As you mentioned, I was a case manager working for a care management organization helping ⁓ adolescents that were at risk. My caseload at that time were children that were detained in detention centers. And my job actually was working for the of Bergen County, New Jersey to actually reduce the length of stay for children in detention and to work with the stakeholders, the attorneys, ⁓ find the resources for them to rehabilitate them, which in a weird way I did correlate now with senior care. And then from that time, just building a little bit of my resume and my experience working with families, working with kids, strategically trying to figure out how to help them. ⁓ I was then presented an amazing opportunity to be part of another home care agency in New Jersey called Home Well Care Services in New Jersey. At that time in 2000, I think 17 they were expanding and ⁓ the owner needed another business development representative to expand into a new territory and ⁓ I was grateful to be part of that team. ⁓

We expanded. did really good. was with them, I'd say five, six years. ⁓ If anyone's listening, know, home care years are like dog years, but really good dog years. You work hard, you learn a lot. ⁓ That team there taught me everything I knew. I was very spoiled. Just, I was put in front of a lot of mentors that you've had, ⁓ you know, currently on your previous shows with consultants and coaches. And, ⁓ you know, that leadership from that company gave me every tool to be successful. And lucky enough, my field nurse became the, the nursing director and a COO and now currently the CEO. So I learned from really good people;

but they also gave me the tools. I also, you know, I studied from there. ⁓ I wanted to kind of like go more and like not just consulting, but like more of a national role just because working within Homewell, we had a lot of other Homewell owners reach out a lot of other, you know, marketers, salespeople. I don't like the word sales, but business development representatives like come to us and ⁓ shadowed me. And that was like one of my favorite things to do. So I was actually presented an amazing opportunity to do corporate development.

for another home care agency who is in six states, 20 plus locations called Caring People, amazing company. The owner, his grandma started the company in New York, really great teams. ⁓ It gave me an opportunity to go into other states, other markets and learn, but ultimately streamlined processes, helped with sales training, ⁓ actually utilized a lot of operational experience that I knew I had, but I actually didn't realize I knew so much. ⁓

But that's why I was successful in that business development role was understanding operations and procedures and systems. I was with that company for a little over a year. ⁓ We did very well. Part of that job was to actually expand into Boston. ⁓ So within one year, we developed that team and developed that office where we did just about $1 million in one year. From there, I really thought about consulting and kind of do my own thing. And thankfully, I had ⁓ a really good relationship with the owner of Senior Care in Bergen, Bisset County, New Jersey where we decided to be co-owners and join forces and Amada Senior Care is a fantastic franchise nationally as well and I have good back end support and here we are.

‍

Miriam Allred (06:40)
I love it. Thank you so much for sharing that Wayne. We were talking before this. I like to have you dial through your career history because there are administrators and directors and GMs maybe listening to this podcast and you almost don't know what you don't know about like a career path in home care. It's a little bit ambiguous. And so I like to hear like your progression because again, I think even that's useful for people to understand like different pivots and roles are possible inside of home care. Excited to hear more from you today. Breanne, why don't you jump in and talk a little bit about your background and your point of view.

Breanne Muchemore (07:12)
Absolutely. Well, first of all, thank you guys for having me. This is so exciting and really a great opportunity to be a part of this. So my name is Breanne Muchmore. I am a clinical social worker by background and a certified case manager. I received my bachelor's degree at Baylor University in Texas and have my master's degree in social work from Boston College. So my career I knew from truly probably the age of five that I wanted to go into the field of social work. Just wasn't sure.

exactly what social work was at that point, but I knew I wanted to help people and I knew I wanted to make a difference and ⁓ my career path has really led me to the place that I'm at today. So I started working in Boston after graduating from Baylor and I spent a lot of time in the city of Boston working with patients with mental health disorders, helping them with ⁓ jobs, finding jobs, obtaining employment, doing some job coaching and it was a really great entry to the

career and the profession that I'm in currently. Then I transitioned to working into inpatient psychiatric hospital as a clinical social worker, which really laid the foundation for all of the work that I've done throughout my career as a clinician and also as a leader and administrator. And ⁓ more recently, I was the senior director of care management for Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital. Spaulding is an amazing hospital, model systems,

⁓ and they are currently number two hospital in the nation, is really exciting. I oversaw a team of about 60 clinicians, including social workers, care managers, inpatient teams, outpatient teams, utilization management, and some very unique donor-funded programs as well. So after almost 12 years at Spaulding, ⁓ I made the decision to transition my career to another side of the post-acute world, and so I'm currently working for a large

skilled nursing facility company that's nationally recognized and I'm a regional director of referral operations where I have the opportunity to really build relationships and work with our hospital partners and hospital leaders on ⁓ the throughput from the hospitals and getting them into our skilled nursing facilities here in the state of Massachusetts. a ⁓ little bit about my career. In addition, I am super passionate about the field of social work and case management. ⁓

to be elected to the board of American Case Management Association, the Massachusetts chapter, and recently president-elect for that organization. that's a little bit about my background and excited to share more about how I've interacted with the home care agencies, particularly Wayne, and how we can continue to do great work together as hospital and community partners.

Miriam Allred (10:06)
Fantastic, Breanne. We are lucky to have you. Honestly, this is my honor to interview someone like you. And I know you're nervous, but that just made me nervous. we're the real deal. But that's why we wanted to have this conversation, is you see home care from your angle, and that's what we want to talk about today. So just kind of a quick overview of how this conversation is going to run. In home care, we talk a lot about the low-hanging fruit. The referrals that are pretty easy to go out and capture and you know, next week you're getting that first referral and you're already moving. This is the opposite spectrum. This is the long-term relationships that are hard to get in a market that take weeks, months, even years to build a relationship like this to get that first referral because you said it yourself, Spaulding is number two in the nation.

You will talk about this, but home care agencies are walking in left and right and you're turning away. don't know. 98 % of them and only working with a handful. So what we're going to talk about is Wayne getting your foot in the door with Spaulding with Breanne. Then we're going to talk in depth about the discovery phase, like building that relationship, building that trust, getting that first referral, like all of the legwork that goes into that and then we're to talk about like getting creative together, building up programs and initiatives and value adds to support each other. Um, and then we're to talk about the continuum brand. Obviously you have all of these other partners and Wayne needed to tap into those. We're going to talk about like building the continuum around each other to make you essential and irreplaceable and to drive really that long-term growth. So we're also going to talk a lot of stories, a lot of mistakes, a lot of lessons learned. Like I want you guys to sprinkle all of that into this conversation.

Wayne, let's start with you and let's go back to kind of the beginning. How did you first come across Spaulding and then how did you find Breanne at the organization and what was your initial approach? Like literally like that first meeting or the first couple of meetings, like what was your approach to meeting her?

‍

Download Transcript