[Page 5]
In 2004, Cathy Hoffmann started “Vitalia, tu centro de día” (Vitalia, your day care center). Until then, she had been an occupational therapist. [4] She began her career working in a retirement home, where she observed that treatment was often not adequate. She started experimenting with a more holistic approach that saw the patient as an intricate mixture of personal, psychological, physical, physiological, and emotional components. After two years, she realized that there was a market niche for this approach. She continued working as an occupational therapist and took a specialized course for the management of retirement homes and day care centers for the elderly. There, she met three other people who were thinking of opening a privately owned day care center with their own resources. They joined forces and started the first Vitalia day center in a 2,100-square-foot facility in downtown Madrid, with Cathy as the center and company manager.
After two years of managing the Madrid center, Cathy wanted more. She took a general management course at IESE Business School. The course opened her eyes and she decided she wanted to grow the business. Her dream was to have centers throughout Spain. “One day the name Vitalia will be a neon sign in the street and people will recognize it,” she said. However, her partners were concerned about the risks of growing the business and just wanted to stay with the Madrid center. Cathy decided the best way forward was to buy them out. She talked to many investors and explored multiple avenues of growth. Among family and friends, she found investors who believed in her dream and so the three prior partners were substituted by three new ones. She decided to start her expansion using a franchise model. “Vitalia Franchise” was born in January 2008, 65% owned by her own company, Hofmann Consulting. The board of directors understood her dream and gave her the green light.
Every Vitalia center had two clients—the user and the family. The user receives the care and needs to be satisfied with the outcome. There were two types of users: Firstly, those who can take care of themselves and were fully aware of the treatment they received. These typically represented 60% of the clients. The other 40% due to their ailments—mainly early stage Alzheimer’s disease —were not fully aware of the impact of the activities they receive. Users typically came from the middle-and upper-middle social strata, who could afford payment for private care.
Cathy defined the service promise she wanted to deliver. To the users she promised personalized treatment, a caring and professional environment, and feeling “at home.” To their families she promised, firstly, care of their loved ones as if they were her own; and, secondly, quality of service that would be demonstrated by the team of professionals; the variety of activities tailored to specific needs; and the provision of a “family school” to act as a support vehicle for the families and the users in their daily lives.
Families played a critical role; they were usually the care givers and sometimes the fee payers. They received monthly detailed information in monthly meetings—the “family school”—that kept them abreast of the user’s improvement or difficulties. However, the ultimate purpose of these “family school” sessions was the comfort and reassurance of the care givers. The monthly two-hour “family school” sessions offered a way to share experiences, comfort, and ideas on how to manage frustration, and to meet other people in the same situation.
[4] In Spain, medicine is a six-year degree that does not require any pre-med courses.
Copyright © 2010, 2013, 2014, 2015 President and Fellows of Harvard College. To order copies or request permission to reproduce materials, call 1-800-545-7685, write Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston, MA 02163, or go to www.hbsp.harvard.edu/educators. This publication may not be digitized, photocopied, or otherwise reproduced, posted, or transmitted, without the permission of Harvard Business School.
This online case study is authorized for use only in the HarvardX course "Innovating in Health Care," Spring 2015. Copyright 2015 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the permission of Harvard Business School. This free online content will expire at the conclusion of the course. Course participants may procure PDF versions of this content as well as the entire required and optional reading list by purchasing a coursepack here: https://cb.hbsp.harvard.edu/cbmp/pages/content/harvardxbus51x.