Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for Reyna Aufiero · Frontline Medical Group · August 2026
Staffing is two markets wearing one name. One is the clinicians, and you already know how to reach those. The other is the organizations that need them, and that is the one this map covers: where the demand sits, who signs inside each setting, and roughly how many organizations there are. Counts are national with a New England read where it changes the picture.
Medicare-certified home health agencies
Your core setting and the one where the shortage is felt daily rather than seasonally. The register counts certified locations, and a large share of them belong to groups, so the number of branches is much larger than the number of decisions.
Who signs: director of nursing, clinical manager, branch administrator, scheduling or staffing coordinator, and the owner at independent agencies.
11,000 to 12,000
certified home health locations nationally; roughly 350 to 450 across the six New England states
Hospice providers
Adjacent to home health, staffed by the same license types, and bought by a different person. Coverage failures here are visible immediately because the visit cannot be rescheduled, which shortens the decision to hours.
Who signs: executive director, director of clinical services, on-call and after-hours staffing lead.
5,700 to 6,200
certified hospice locations nationally, many of them co-owned with a home health branch
Skilled nursing and rehabilitation facilities
The highest-volume setting on this page per building, and the one that treats agency use as a permanent line rather than an emergency. Group ownership is heavy, so the buying seat moves upward as the group grows.
Who signs: director of nursing, administrator, staffing coordinator, and regional human resources at group-owned homes.
14,500 to 15,500
certified nursing facilities nationally; roughly 850 to 1,000 across New England
Assisted living and residential care communities
Larger by count than every clinical setting above and licensed one state at a time rather than federally, which is why it is under-called. Lower acuity, higher turnover, and a buying decision that usually stops at the building.
Who signs: executive director, resident care or wellness director, regional operations manager.
28,000 to 31,000
licensed residential care communities nationally, assembled from separate state registers rather than one national file
Hospitals and health systems
Slow to open and large once open. The individual hospital feels the gap, but the agreement almost always lives above it, in a system office or a supplier program that reviews its roster on a set schedule.
Who signs: chief nursing officer, nurse staffing office, vendor management lead, VP of talent acquisition.
6,000 to 6,300
US hospitals of all types; the buying seat is usually the system above the building, not the building
Private-duty and employer-funded care
The part of the market that is invisible in federal files. Private-pay home care, workers compensation case management and employer-funded caregiving all buy the same license types and none of them are enumerated as providers.
Who signs: agency owner, care manager, benefits or occupational health lead on the employer side.
No single register
private-pay and employer-funded demand is not certified, so it does not appear in any provider file; reached by name, which is why it stays quiet

Where the openings are

1
The person who feels the shortage is not the person who signs the agreement. A scheduler at nine at night with an uncovered visit is the most motivated buyer in health care and has no authority. The signature sits with an administrator, or with a corporate list she cannot add to. A channel that reaches only one of those two stalls at the same place every time.
2
Ownership sits above the building. Home health and skilled nursing are heavily group-owned. The public file counts locations, so a raw list makes a fifty-branch group look like fifty prospects and points every one of them at a local manager who cannot buy. Finding the parent turns fifty cold calls into one real conversation.
3
Assisted living is the largest segment here and the least contested. Nearly thirty thousand communities, licensed state by state, staffed with the same aides and nurses, and largely ignored by agencies that organize themselves around federal certification. There is no national list to buy, which is exactly the reason it is still open.
4
This is bought at a moment, and the moments are visible. A survey finding, a census spike, a resignation, a new branch opening. Watching several thousand providers for those triggers is mechanical work that a referral network cannot do, and it is the difference between calling when it is convenient for you and calling when it is urgent for them.
Built from public registries covering US certified providers and licensed facilities, current to the most recent published files. Counts are banded deliberately. Provider files count certified locations rather than owners, so a single group can appear many times, and state-licensed categories are assembled from separate state registers rather than one national file.
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