The Gold Standard for Dementia Home Care (Jim Kimzey)

Most home care agencies treat dementia care as a service line. Full Bloom built an entire company around it. Jim Kimzey, Co-Founder of Full Bloom Home Care, shares the systems, training, and care philosophy that allow his team to successfully serve some of the most challenging dementia clients while helping caregivers, families, and staff thrive. Jim breaks down the three levers that drive better dementia outcomes, an eight-step process for overcoming care refusal, and the gold standard for supporting complex dementia clients at home. He also explains how a dementia-first approach can reduce caregiver burnout, ease operational strain, and create better experiences for clients and families. This conversation is a practical roadmap for delivering better care to anyone serving dementia clients and families.

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min

Jun 2, 2026

The Gold Standard for Dementia Home Care (Jim Kimzey)

Miriam Allred (00:11)
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Home Care Strategy Lab. Thank you all for tuning in week after week. I hope you are implementing what you're learning from the show and I'm just grateful to have you here. Today I am joined by Jim Kimzey the co-founder of Full Bloom Home Care based in Northern Chicago in Lake Forest. Jim, welcome to the show.

Jim Kimzey (00:31)
Thank you. I'm happy to be here.

Miriam Allred (00:33)
Your name has got a really nice ring to it. Almost sounds like a famous person's name. Jim, are you famous?

Jim Kimzey (00:40)
There is a famous Jim Kimzey, but I'm not that one. He's one of the co-founders of AOL, America Online. Yeah, yeah, right.

Miriam Allred (00:42)
Okay. Got it. Let's make you famous in home care though. The real Jim Kimzey is here today. It's great to have you here. We've gotten acquainted recently. I've interviewed Paula Marks recently on the show and met your co-founders over the last couple of weeks. so I'm really excited to have you on the show and get you in the hot seat to talk about the model that you all are building. Let's start with your introduction. Tell us a little bit about yourself and overview your professional work history and home care.

Jim Kimzey (01:13)
Okay. I mean, I first got involved in home care and like I started my first company in 2009. It was a company called Tender Rose Dementia Care Specialist. I got involved in home care the way a lot of people do is I had a personal family experience. And so my mother had Alzheimer's. It was my job in the family to figure out what we could do to help my mom. And I did a bunch of research and in doing that research, I realized that, you know, as an adult child of somebody with dementia, there's a lot of other

adult children out there. And the thing that I cared about is how good would the home care agency be at dementia care? didn't care about anything else. And, you know, once that idea got in my mind, I just started thinking, well, maybe I ought to create a company. And then I couldn't find any other company that actually did that. And I was, you that was kind of a red flag for me. But the idea that entered my brain was if I do this, it'll help my mom. Everything I learned will help my mom. And then once I got that idea in my mind, I had to do it.

And so I started Tender Rose Dementia Care Specialist in 2009, sold it in 2020 to Home Care Assistance, thought I was gonna retire, ⁓ missed the home care industry, missed working with families, missed working with caregivers. So I came out of retirement a couple of years ago to start Full Bloom Memory Care in Lake Forest, Illinois with ⁓ my two co-founders, Andy Tysinger and Jennifer Muskat

Miriam Allred (02:36)
Amazing. Toot your own horn for a second. Was Tender Rose really the first of its kind in California, even nationwide?

Jim Kimzey (02:45)
It's well, I couldn't find at the time another home care agency that specialized only in dementia care. Of course, every home care agency does a lot of dementia care, but I couldn't find another home care agency that all of their clients had dementia. All their caregivers were highly trained in dementia care. And when Home Care Assistance was talking to me, they said they couldn't find one either. ⁓ Now I would say there's at least five, six or seven home care agencies in the country that are focused exclusively on dementia care.

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Jim Kimzey (03:15)
Tender Rose being one, because it's still around and still doing only dementia care, and Full Bloom being another one. And I know of at least probably four others now.

Miriam Allred (03:25)
Okay, as I've gotten acquainted with you, I've met a handful of other people that have cited Tender Rose and I think the model that you all built people are intrigued by and only so many people can implement this exact model. But everyone listening to the show is taking care of dementia patients. And so I want to unpack what traditional home care looks like in regards to dementia versus what you all are building and helping people just think differently about dementia care. And we're going to identify resources and

tactics and all sorts of things that people can take kind of slivers of and implement in their own business. So let's start there in your own words. When we hear dementia care in the traditional home care model, like what are people referencing? What does that look like? And then we'll explain, you know, what you're building and what that looks like.

Jim Kimzey (04:10)
Well, I mean, think everybody in home care knows what providing dementia care looks like because almost, I mean, every home care agency is doing it. I would say the difference between traditional home care and what we're doing at Full Bloom is we really focus on, I would say the biggest difference is we have relatively fewer clients who need more care over a longer period of time. They're willing to pay a premium for expertise and they're looking for long-term care in the home. ⁓ On the caregiver side, we have relatively fewer caregivers who work more hours for us over a longer period of time. We invest in their training. We also give them a lot more support in the field and we're giving them excellent benefits, medical, dental, ⁓ 401k match, that type of thing, but mainly higher pay and consistent hours over a long period of time.

and the opportunity to make a big difference in a family's life. And so we actually partner with a lot of traditional home care agencies. And what my pitch to a home care agency owner is not like, me all your dementia patients, because that's the bread and butter for the industry. It's, pretty much say, give me the cases you wish you didn't have, right? And these are the ones that are verbally abusive, sexually aggressive, physically violent. Maybe they've got delirium.

or they've got some family dynamics that make it really, really challenging. And so a lot of times if you have a really challenging dementia patient in traditional home care, you're burning out your caregivers, you're burning out your staffing managers, you're taking on a lot of workers' comp risk, a lot of reputation risk, and we're built to handle the hard cases. And so we don't send our caregivers in to get beat up every day. We take the time and energy to figure out and work with the doctors and kind of figure out

What is the right mix of kind of care, changes to the environment, and if need be, some help from the doctor's prescribing pad to kind of get the behaviors under control. But the fact that our clients need more care over a longer period of time means that we can invest upfront to kind of figure that situation out.

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