Honor Health Network Finds Helpful Benefit, Strong Service with Tapcheck

Caregivers Living Paycheck to Paycheck, or Below

Honor Health Network operates more than 20 brands delivering personalized in-home care to seniors across the country. Most of their workforce is made up of non-skilled caregivers, a demographic that Honor Health aims to support in nearly every area, wage access included.

Many of Honor Health's caregivers are living paycheck to paycheck, or even falling short of it, juggling which bills to pay each month. Payroll can only cover hours already worked, and for a workforce facing rising costs and stagnant hourly pay, that isn't always enough. Many caregivers work multiple jobs just to make ends meet.

"With inflation hitting the cost of living, it's getting harder and harder for our caregivers," said Gwen Buse, VP of HR and Organizational Planning with Honor Health Network. "This is something we can offer to make things a little bit easier."

When the First Vendor Fell Short

Honor Health rolled out wage advancement with another provider years earlier, but customer service issues hampered it from the beginning. When employees called that vendor with a problem, the calls would often get pushed back to Honor Health's own HR and payroll team to resolve. Gwen and her team found themselves fielding urgent, sometimes frustrated employee complaints with no portal access and no direct line to anyone who could actually help. It was eroding trust with her team and turning what should have been a helpful benefit into something that required constant maintenance.

The old vendor also wasn't proactive about system outages. Honor Health often had to be the one to tell the vendor a feed was down, rather than hearing about it from them first. On top of that, the terms around recoupment were never made clear, leaving Gwen concerned that Honor Health could end up on the hook for a large, unexpected bill.

An Intro from Viventium and a Fast Implementation

Honor Health's relationship with Tapcheck started through Viventium, their payroll provider for caregiver payrolls. Viventium had also referred Honor Health to their original vendor, and after hearing about the customer service problems, their customer success manager pointed Honor Health toward Tapcheck instead.

Honor Health piloted Tapcheck in a few locations, saw an immediate difference, and moved the rest of the company over. The Tapcheck team worked on Honor Health's own timeline to get their many entities connected and live. Tapcheck was also upfront that recoupment would never fall back on Honor Health, resolving a concern that had lingered with the previous provider.

Proactive Support and Direct Access for HR

The difference showed up immediately in day-to-day support. Where the old vendor pushed employee calls back to HR, Tapcheck's team handles them directly. Gwen now gets regular reports from her contact at Tapcheck, showing usage across her workforce and giving her visibility she never had before into whether her team is getting the help they need.

Turnover runs high across the home health industry, and Gwen is candid that caregivers will often go wherever the hourly rate is highest, regardless of benefits. But she's also clear that offering a benefit that actually works, backed by a team that shows up, hasn't hurt.

Data from the Honor Health program shows that employees who simply register for Tapcheck see a 7% lift in retention over their peers who do not. Among active users of Tapcheck, their retention rate is nearly 30% greater.

Higher Usage, Fewer Calls for Help

Since switching, Honor Health has seen meaningfully higher usage than it did with its previous provider, a shift Gwen sees as a sign her team is taking advantage of a benefit that finally works the way it should. Employees have accessed $1.2mm in earned wages, and every one of those transfers is one less call to Honor Health's office asking for a loan or an advance.

For a VP of HR who doesn't have time to troubleshoot every vendor issue herself, that reliability is the point. Tapcheck hasn't left Honor Health to handle problems alone, and Gwen now recommends Tapcheck to peers facing the same challenges she once did.