Three Workforce Development Programs That Actually Support Caregivers (Daniel Stringer)

Total Care Connections CEO Daniel Stringer shares how his team supports a workforce of roughly 1,000 active employees delivering 17,000 hours of care each week. He breaks down a paid-leave program that provides six weeks after childbirth plus two weeks of parental leave for birth, foster, and adoptive parents. He explains the company’s employee relief fund and how it has awarded 264 grants totaling more than $200,000, with employees eligible for up to $1,000 annually. Daniel also shares how moving to self-funded health insurance helped the company keep employee costs flat despite receiving a 76% renewal increase—and reduced some employees’ prescription costs from $500–$700 per month to $50 or even zero. This episode gives home care owners three tangible ways to invest in caregivers and start building benefits that meet our workforce needs.

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min

Aug 18, 2026

Three Workforce Development Programs That Actually Support Caregivers (Daniel Stringer)

Miriam Allred (00:00)
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Home Care Strategy Lab. I'm your host, Miriam Allred. It's great to be back with you. Hope everyone's having a great week. Today in the lab, I am joined by Daniel Stringer, the CEO at Total Care Connections based in Tempe, Arizona. Daniel, welcome to the show.

Daniel Stringer (00:15)
Awesome. Thanks, Miriam. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Miriam Allred (00:18)
I've been looking forward to this for a few months. You and I have talked, I don't know, over the last year or so and you're busy and you've got a lot going on, but I have genuinely been looking forward to this. So thanks for giving me the time.

Daniel Stringer (00:29)
Yeah, it's an honor to be here. I've been listening to your show and congrats to all of your success as well.

Miriam Allred (00:34)
Yeah, go ahead and start with your introduction. for those that don't know you or your wife or your business, tell us a little bit about maybe your life kind of pre starting the business and then why you got into it and then we can talk a bit about your business model.

Daniel Stringer (00:54)
Okay, awesome. So my name is Daniel Stringer, and I started Total Care Connections just over 17 years ago. I was 22 years old at the time, and it was just coming off of the heels of the Great Recession of 2008, and I was trying to figure out how to survive, was really my goal in life at that young age. And started Total Care Connections down in Tucson, Arizona was our very first location, and then we've ex since expanded over the years. we've done

A couple of we've done four acquisitions in total. they were all like tuck-in type models, except for the first one we did in it was our third acquisition, but the first one that we did in Colorado, and that was our expansion into Colorado. that became our our kind of platform location for Colorado, and then we did a fourth acquisition in Colorado and tucked that in. So today we're in Tucson, Tempe, which is the greater Phoenix market, and then Colorado Springs, and we cover about seven counties in that.

Colorado Springs area, and then we have plans to continue expanding throughout both states. So that's where our current expansion plans are. Although we are open to acquisition opportunities in like adjacent states, and so we're looking, we're always looking at opportunities like that to expand, but that's our current footprint right now.

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Miriam Allred (02:14)
Okay. And started as a non medical home care company and have since grown into a lot of different services and offerings, correct?

Daniel Stringer (02:22)
Yeah, so we actually started a hundred percent private pay.

that's all that we could wrap our heads around back then. And I actually started it with a business partner who I later bought out in 2015. So our first client that actually was paying was in the very beginning of 2009, down in Tucson. And then my wife and I got married in 2012. My wife is a nurse practitioner and she became our director of nursing and we actually started doing private pay nursing. So we weren't licensed as a home health agency even when we were doing the nursing.

As a private pay organization, we were able to do that. And that was something we I didn't realize we could do, but when I discovered that with the Department of Home Health, they said, you know, if this is private pay, we're not getting involved. So we were able to do that for several clients, and we continue to do that to this day. 2015, we then got our first VA contract. And this was before the Community Cares Act. We had to contract directly with the VA hospital. So it was a very difficult process to

It us years to like pound on that door until we could get that contract. And then that became like a huge part of our business down in Tucson.

Community Cares Act rolls around. 2016, we opened from scratch our Phoenix location, now headquartered in Tempe. And we were able to then take that VA contract and then that segued into the Tri-West, which is what most people are familiar with on the West Coast, for the VA. So we the we got the Tri-West contract, which now today allows us to provide VA services in all of our locations under Tri-West. And then in 2017, we

We got our first Medicaid contract. So in Arizona, it's an MCO state. So there are three managed care organizations or insurance companies that manage Medicaid funding for the state. And so it's very competitive to get a contract. And so we had tried prior to that, but had not had no success until 2017. We got our first one. We only had one MCO contract. And then that expanded to today. We have two.

Of the three MCOs in Arizona. and then in Colorado, when we acquired the agency there, it was private pay. That was in 2021. And that was 100% private pay. We added VA since we were already doing it. And then we were able to add Medicaid with our fourth acquisition, which was actually a Medicaid agency in Colorado, tucked all that together, and now we're private pay, VA, and Medicaid across the board. And then about a year and a half ago,

Actually, it's just about two years ago, we made the decision to expand into licensed skilled home health, but not doing episodic. So our model is specifically focused still on long-term care in the home, hourly shift type care in the home. But with our license and now Medicare accreditation. So we just got Medicare accredited in both Colorado and Arizona. We now have the ability to provide that long-term nursing care. Pay

By various payers, including the Federal Department of Labor, the Department of Developmentally Disabled in Arizona, we have a contract with now. TRICARE and TRI-WEST both have programs for this. There's workmen compensation programs that pay for private nursing in the home. And then Colorado Medicaid has many private duty nursing programs to provide nursing in the home.

now are you know both skilled and non-skilled and we're really going to be launching those new programs under that Medicare accreditation. Our plan is for those to really start to ramp up in the fourth quarter of this year and really steadily going, you know, starting next year.

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