When Kathleen F. Moren moved to Rhode Island from Chicago in the late 1990s, she found the state lacked services for new mothers.
In 1999, she started Healthy Babies, Happy Moms Inc., a licensed and accredited health-nursing agency and durable medical-equipment provider in East Greenwich that specializes in breastfeeding equipment.
A mother of four boys, Moren found flexibility in running the business at home, and success in slowly growing the company.
“I … subtly did things [such as] get a website and grow it slowly,” she said.
Business really picked up, however, after Moren deftly predicted how big an impact the Affordable Care Act would have on her business.
“I knew my services were going to be covered under the ACA,” Moren said. “Part of my goal was to be in a position to handle that when the ACA did go into effect.”
Moren moved the business out of her house and into office space. She obtained a nursing agency license from the R.I. Department of Health and became nationally accredited. She didn’t know for sure the ACA would pass, but she was willing to take a risk.
Her gamble paid off, and after the ACA started rolling out, she landed a contract with Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island, which started offering her services to policyholders.
For the first time, families could use insurance instead of cash to pay for her popular at-home lactation and sleep-consulting services. New mothers could rent her breast-pump equipment for medical purposes or for when they were ready to return to work.
The at-home services are popular because it allows new mothers to stay at home after being discharged.
“Women are discharged from the hospital so quickly, they are not able to often leave the hospital feeling confident in their ability to breastfeed their baby. Rather than going back to the hospital after discharge, they’d much rather have someone come to their home,” Moren said.
Moren declined to disclose top-line figures but said sales have grown three-fold since the ACA started rolling out. She also recently got Blue Cross to cover her phototherapy for babies with jaundice, a common condition in newborns that turns the skin yellow.
“We’ve probably kept hundreds of babies out of the hospitals,” Moren said.
Moren also recently benefited from graduating from the 10,000 Small Businesses Program, a business-development program sponsored by Goldman Sachs and offered by the Community College of Rhode Island.
The experience, Moren said, gave her the confidence to bid for a contract she ended up winning with the state of Montana to provide breast pumps to its Medicaid program.
“I would never [have] gone through with it if I hadn’t been in the 10,000 Small Businesses program,” Moren said.
Looking forward, Moren hopes to add more nurses to serve her footprint more efficiently. She’s also hoping to secure local government contracts, if possible, and to work with more insurers.
She sees a lot of benefit in the company’s mission to keep babies healthy at home with their mothers.
“Families are so happy to get home after the hospital, so the prospect of going back to the hospital is just torture,” Moren said.
OWNER: Kathleen F. Moren
LOCATION: 4512 Post Road, East Greenwich
TYPE OF BUSINESS: Home health-nursing agency and medical-equipment provider
EMPLOYEES: Eight
YEAR ESTABLISHED: 1999
ANNUAL SALES: WND
