This is the seventh in a series of articles covering the home healthcare industry. See part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here, part 4 here, part 5 here and part 6 here.

Facts are simple and facts are straight, facts are lazy and facts are late,
Facts all come with points of view, facts don’t do what I want them to,
Facts just twist the truth around, facts are living turned inside out,
Facts are getting the best of them…

This is the sixth in a series of articles covering the home healthcare industry. See part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here, part 4 here, and part 5 here.

In the last article, we used AFAM as a case study to assimilate the dynamic drivers of VN admissions growth we reviewed in the first four articles. AFAM had 7,737 admissions in 2001, of which almost 60% were referred from hospitals, about 30% from physicians and the remainder from various assisted living facilities. It had 39,666 admissions in 2008, of which about 45% were referred from physicians, 35% from hospitals and the remaining 20% from assisted living facilities. That 23% CAGR in admissions over eight years can be broken down as follows:

This is the fifth in a series of articles covering the home healthcare industry. See part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here, and part 4 here.

“…after a repetition of similar instances, the mind is carried by habit, upon the appearance of one event, to expect its usual attendant, and to believe, that it will exist.” (David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding)

This is the fourth in a series of articles covering the home healthcare industry. See part 1 here, part 2 here and part 3 here.

The first three articles in this series should have served to contextualize the emergence and maturation of the “Prospectivized" home healthcare industry. Along the way, we took a meaningful peek at stock prices through the end of 2008. In this article, we will get a close-up view of how the prices of our four publics (AFAM, AMED, GTIV and LHCG) came to be so cheap at the beginning of this year.

This is the third in a series of articles covering the home healthcare industry. See part 1 here and part 2 here.

As we learned in the previous article, systemic changes have been the dominant factors in admissions growth for this industry and will remain as such at least until 2017. Now we will peer inside this high-growth industry to learn how, at the turn of this century, the sails of a handful of companies were lifted by the confluence of disparate, but correlated, winds. Those leaders—especially our four publics, AFAM, AMED, GTIV and LHCG—are now positioned, more so than leaders from other industries within healthcare, to benefit greatly from consolidation, future healthcare reform and eventual demographic changes.

This is the second in a series of articles covering the home healthcare industry. See part 1 here.

As demonstrated in the previous article, demographics have not been, nor will be for several years, a meaningful driver of admissions growth for home healthcare agencies (HHAs). In this article, we will review the systemic changes that have caused about four fifths of this industry’s 6.25% admissions growth from 2001 to 2006 (a figure that certainly increased over 2007 and 2008). We will spend the next article studying how our four publics (AFAM, AMED, GTIV and LHCG) have voraciously devoured more than their fair share of this expanding pie.

(This is the first in a series of articles covering the home healthcare industry.)

Brad Barber and Terrance Odean in 2000 demonstrated that individual stock traders in the U.S. have an average annual portfolio turnover of 75%. Various studies have shown mutual funds, in aggregate, have an approximate 100% annual turnover. Hedge funds, on average, do not appear to hold onto stocks for that much longer. Such is the short attention span of our investment community at large.

With the possible exclusion of Philadelphia Eagles fans, there is not a more fickle group of people than Wall Streeters. Certainly there are exceptional Wall Streeters who bring much needed value to our economy—who facilitate beneficial transactions and even add intrinsic value to the companies we invest in. But those people aren’t seeking our attention. The Wall Streeters who are anxious to get our attention usually are gifted in appearing to have long ago identified the newest bandwagons. When changes in trends are just becoming obvious, these folks can ditch a heretofore-favored-but-now-defective ride and jump on the next hottest thing in a New York minute—without looking the least disheveled. “Financials? Paaashaaa. Oil stocks? Of course! Who didn’t see that coming? I’ve owned Exxon since it was called Standard.” They don’t share their doubly regrettable sale of Bear Stearns at $5.

Within the resilient healthcare industry we will find a sector that has also become a Wall Street darling recently: home healthcare. Over the past 13 months this sector’s increase in market capitalization is somewhat commensurate with its increase in stock analyst attention. I offer data on four companies below  - Amedisys, Inc. (AMED), LHC Group (LHCG), Almost Family (AFAM) and Gentiva Health Services, Inc. (GTIV) - as a sort of stock market snapshot of the sector.