Note: This article is sponsored by Rooted Home Health Care. As such, it likely contains some bias toward the sponsor. However, efforts have been take to ensure that the content is as neutral and honest as possible.
In 2020, Brooke Kane was an ordinary nurse. But Covid-19 transformed Brooke’s work into something unique and perhaps old-fashioned: a traveling nurse.
While Brooke works for herself now, she is still a registered nurse. That means she is allowed to give IVs with various medicines and treatments, take vital signs, and do basic assessments. She does this under the guidance of her medical director–nurse practitioner Jessie Peters. (Peters operates her own health care service: Druthers Health Care). This allows Brook to give prescription medicine to patients under a standing order which limits the amount she can decide to give.
Sometimes, Brooke’s patients are more than she can handle. In those cases, Brooke either works with a doctor via the internet or recommends them to a provider she trusts: often Druthers Health Care or Hope Health in Sandpoint.
Brooke started doing house calls when friends kept bugging her about help with Covid-19 they weren’t finding elsewhere: “[I] started out as strictly COVID care. That’s what brought this business up in the first place. People were having a hard time getting care anywhere, for various different reasons. back in 2021 and people who knew me and knew that I was a nurse were calling me constantly and saying, ‘my dad has COVID and he’s super sick. We tried getting him in somewhere else and nobody is doing anything. Do you have any tips? Do you know anything about COVID or what people can do?’
And I was getting so many phone calls like that, that my husband told me you should just start some kind of business and so I did. People could have a tele-health appointment with me where I would give them holistic interventions that they [could] do that were very effective. And then I got oxygen concentrators and nebulizer machines and got myself Jessie as my medical director and we just went into people’s homes and we put them on oxygen, we gave them breathing treatments.”
According to Brooke, the response was fantastic: “People were really happy with it.”
These days, Covid related work has died down, but that hasn’t kept Rooted Home Healthcare from staying busy: “People liked the home visit stuff so much that a lot of those patients we took care of were saying, well, what else can you guys do?”
Brooke is always looking to add new services to the Rooted Home Healthcare lineup. However, Brooke is focusing cultivating the home health care community in Coeur d’Alene: “I work with a lot of people, doctors and other businesses in the area. And all of us together are working on growing the home care community. We like doctors and nurses that take care of people at home. It takes a lot of the load off of our hospital. The area has grown and we have outgrown the size of our hospital here. So, taking care of people in their homes helps reduce that load a little bit and people feel safe and in control.”
Because there is so much need, Brooke doesn’t see the market as especially competitive. In fact, Brooke often recommends people to other IV infusion clinics. Nevertheless, she tries to fit her patients in within 24 hours.
Brooke also says that her work has managed to steer clear of pushback: “It’s gone pretty smoothly. It’s, it’s really just been people that are really excited about it. The people that don’t like this kind of stuff. Well, they just don’t reach out to us.
