In long-term care, post-acute, and skilled nursing facilities, turnover isn’t just a workforce issue; it’s a financial one. Every lost team member creates ripples of cost: recruiting, retraining, covering gaps in care, and resettling operations.
And it’s not just frontline staff. When HR is overwhelmed, and enrollment becomes a scramble, even the back office feels the weight. Behind many of these challenges lies a quiet but costly culprit: outdated, manual benefits administration.
At Brian Patten & Associates, we’ve seen it time and again: facilities losing money not because they offer too few benefits, but because they lack the infrastructure to deliver them effectively.
Delegating benefits administration isn’t a luxury. For many operators, it’s the fastest path to reducing unnecessary costs and protecting their margins.
The Hidden Price Tag of Turnover
Let’s talk numbers. Industry estimates suggest replacing a single long-term care worker can cost between $4,000–$7,500, depending on their role. That includes:
- Recruitment and onboarding
- Lost productivity
- Temporary coverage/overtime
- Disruptions to resident care
Now multiply that by dozens, or hundreds, of exits per year. For regional operators and national groups, the financial impact quickly adds up.
And what’s behind much of that churn? A lack of clarity, a lack of trust, and a lack of support. When employees don’t understand their benefits or feel like they can ask for help, they check out. Disengaged staff don’t stick around. Disengaged staff don’t stay long, and high turnover carries a real cost.
What In-House Admin is Really Costing You
You might not be writing checks for your internal admin workload, but make no mistake, you’re still paying for it.
HR teams in long-term and post-acute care settings are under constant pressure to:
- Manage benefit elections manually
- Chasing down missing forms
- Answer the same questions again and again
- Fix enrollment errors across multiple systems
Every hour spent untangling benefits issues is time pulled away from what matters: hiring, staff development, and long-term workforce planning.
What looks like a staffing shortage is often a time shortage, with HR teams stuck in reactive mode, cleaning up yesterday’s paperwork instead of building for tomorrow.
BPA as a Cost-Saving Engine
This is where BPA makes a real impact. Our model combines licensed Benefit Coaches with purpose-built technology to lighten the administrative load and support your employees, without adding headcount.
By partnering with BPA to manage benefits, you can:
- Reduce manual admin hours
- Minimize confusion and enrollment issues
- Boost employee satisfaction and understanding
- Strengthen participation and retention
- Create more consistent onboarding experiences across locations
The result? Less drag on your operations, more time for your HR team, and a workforce that’s more stable and supported.
For many clients, BPA’s services more than pay for themselves by reducing the hidden costs of turnover and administrative overload.
Why CFOs and Operators Are Re-Evaluating Their Admin Costs
Across long-term care and post-acute networks, leadership teams are asking a sharper question: “What’s it really costing us to do this in-house?”
It’s not just about salary lines. It’s the time spent correcting avoidable mistakes. The delays during onboarding. The slowdowns during open enrollment ripple across the organization.
For CFOs, every inefficiency adds up. Manually tracking benefits can lead to billing missteps and confusion. A disorganized enrollment period means higher call volumes, repeated escalations, and more hours spent fixing what could have been prevented.
For operators, the absence of a scalable system makes growth harder. Whether opening a new site or bringing in a new care team, benefits administration shouldn’t be the bottleneck.
That’s why more leadership teams are choosing to delegate what drains their capacity, so they can focus on the goals that matter: stability, retention, and care quality.
BPA helps make that shift possible by absorbing the day-to-day strain of benefits administration with tools and support that scale alongside your organization.
From Enrollment to Advocacy: A Proven Partner for Care Teams
Across the industry, care providers are partnering with BPA to strengthen employee communication, simplify complex enrollment tasks, and relieve HR teams of manual lift.
For organizations with multiple sites or 24/7 operations, BPA provides consistent, personalized benefits education across all shifts and throughout the year, not just during open enrollment.
With licensed Benefit Coaches, structured workflows, and year-round employee support, our model has helped HR teams:
- Reduce administrative backlog
- Improve employee confidence in their benefits
- Increase consistency across locations and teams
As one senior HR leader put it, BPA quickly became “an essential part” of their team’s strategy: delivering clarity, reducing handoffs, and improving the overall experience for employees and administrators alike.
Stability You Can Build On
Turnover creates chaos. Manual admin slows you down. Together, they drain time, trust, and resources.
BPA replaces that churn with structure.
We don’t just help HR get through open enrollment. We help leaders regain control of their operations. From new hire onboarding to benefit education, file feeds to audit-ready tools, we handle the logistics, simplify the experience, and provide year-round support that strengthens your entire organization.
That support sends the message, “This is no longer a problem we have to solve on our own”, not just to your staff, but to your leadership. Now, they can stop fighting fires and start building something stronger.
Smart Leaders Delegate What Drains Their Teams
If your HR team is constantly stuck in catch-up mode?
If your turnover rate is quietly climbing year over year?
If administrative and operational costs are creeping up with no clear end in sight?
It may be time to rethink where your benefits administration lives.
With BPA, you get more than a vendor. You get a cost-saving strategic partner that supports your workforce in ways that pay off financially and culturally. We’ll help you build trust to keep great staff longer, reduce inefficiencies, and finally get ahead of the back-office strain that’s eating into your potential profit.
Because in long-term care, doing more with less shouldn’t mean doing it all alone.