The Alternative Road To Diversification

By Monica E. Oss, Chief Executive Officer, OPEN MINDS

In times of market turbulence, revenue diversification is an organizational strength. Right now, there are many moving market developments. At the federal level, the Centers For Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced it will no longer extend federal matching funds for non-health services in Medicaid 1115 waivers under the designated state health programs and the designated state investment programs, and the final rules for online prescribing of buprenorphine have been delayed.

There are an abundance of new developments in the health plan market sector—with health plans entering into new ventures and creating new service lines. And state policies continue to reshape regional health and human services markets. Oregon and Delaware are making changes in what benefits are available for children and how they are paid. And Indiana is looking to put in lifetime caps on applied behavior analysis (ABA) services.

Given the fluidity of the market developments and their effects on market size, margins, and competitive advantage, revenue diversification is a key to long-term success. We learned about one organization’s diversification strategy in the session, Alternative Roads To Revenue Diversification With Omni Family Of Services, at The 2025 OPEN MINDS Performance Management Institute. Jane Wintz, Chief Executive Officer, and Gwen Koenig, Chief Of Strategic Growth at The Omni Family Of Services (Omni), shared their approach to growth and diversification.

Tennessee-based Omni is a multi-million dollar for-profit, 100% employee-owned company that provides foster care, adoption, outpatient mental health, and community-based family support. It has 45 locations across Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina.

The executives from Omni spoke to the key factors driving their diversification strategy. These included revenue growth and risk mitigation; addressing changing reimbursement models; and improving consumer outcomes and enhancing community engagement.

The Omni team is taking a unique approach to diversification—one based on developing solutions for particular market “pain points” rather than framing the strategy on existing contracting opportunities. Their process starts with the development of a replicable solution-based product suite based on their market knowledge—and then researching competitive rates, and developing a fee structure and model. With a preliminary model in hand, the Omni team then conducts the market research to match the solution to payers and markets. With the solution and the market targeting, working with payers on initial contracts drives new customers and new revenue.

“We are no longer service line driven. We are product driven,” Ms. Wintz said. “Everything that we do moving forward has products in mind, and it has standardizing and manualizing those products. Initially, we decreased our revenue, but we increased our profit. When we increased our profit, our shareholder value increased. So, in the short term, we got smaller, but in the long term, we increased our profitability.”

To diversify revenues, Ms. Wintz and Ms. Koenig shared three pieces of advice—adopt a deliberate diversification process, standardize service offerings, and embrace flexibility to address payer pain points. For organizational synergy, a revenue diversification strategy needs to support overall organizational strategy. The diversification process should have measurable objectives and a structured process and timeline.  

Standardization of service lines is another key. Replicability of services (and performance measures) is important to payers—and allows organizations to expand faster and with lower costs. 

“You want to make iterations of what you know, what you do well, and how you do it,” Ms. Koenig said. “It’s a lot better to go into markets that know you or products that you can iterate on in a positive way. For us, diversifying means knowing that we’re good at that community-based continuum and then identifying products at Omni that we can iterate on well, but not something so different that we don’t have the knowledge base to be successful.”

Finally, even with service line standardization, the Omni executives emphasized that service lines will need to be customized for particular markets and payers. This involves modifications to administrative processes, the service/clinical structure, or reimbursement model.

“We’ve taken what we call the 90/10 or 80/20 approach,” Ms. Wintz said. “For example, the Indiana pain point was supporting kids in kinship care. But in Ohio, it was discharging kids from residential successfully and maintaining them. We sold both states the same model by being flexible enough to customize it to the specific pain points of the funding source and finding a solution for them in the process with positive outcomes. With this approach, we can diversify across markets.”

More executive teams are looking at the uncertainty right now and in the months ahead and prioritizing revenue diversification as a hedge against the unknown. It serves as insurance against having all of their “eggs in one basket.”