Chad Choat – From Vocational Ag Classroom to Community Home Health
Most people who run a home health agency did not start out teaching high school agriculture. Chad Choat did. Before he had anything to do with patient care, he spent 1994 and 1995 in front of a classroom, teaching vocational agriculture to high schoolers in Oklahoma. It is an odd first chapter for someone who now leads one of the state's top-performing home health agencies, but it is the one he actually lived.
Walking into the family business
In 1995, Choat left teaching and joined Community Home Health, the company his mother had started in 1990. He did not walk in as the owner. He walked in as family, learning a business from the ground level, at a time when home health care in Oklahoma looked very different than it does now.
For fifteen years, he worked inside the company his mother built, watching it grow and learning what it took to run it well. That stretch mattered. By the time ownership changed hands, Choat was not stepping into a job he had to figure out from scratch. He had already spent a decade and a half inside it.
Taking over in 2010
In 2010, Choat's mother was ready to retire, and he purchased the company from her. It is a specific kind of transition, buying a business from a parent, that blends family history with the ordinary pressures of running a company. Choat became owner and president, a role he still holds.
Community Home Health has since been ranked in the top one percent of agencies in the nation by Medicare statistics, a marker that reflects years of operating decisions rather than any single event.
Serving on the Claremore City Council
Running the company was not the only thing Choat took on during those years. From 1998 to 2003, he served on the city council in Claremore, Oklahoma, where he still lives and works. Local government is a different kind of responsibility than running a business: it means sitting in rooms with neighbors who expect answers, not just good intentions. For someone who already had a business to run, adding a council seat on top of it says something about where his interests sit.
A longer interest in politics
That interest did not end when his council term did. Choat has stayed involved in Oklahoma politics in the years since, working on and donating to statewide campaigns. He served as Rogers County chairman for Todd Lamb's 2017 campaign for governor, a role that put him closer to the organizing side of a statewide race than most business owners ever get. It is a thread that runs alongside his work at Community Home Health rather than instead of it.
Ties to Claremore and Oklahoma State
Choat's life outside the office is built around a short list of places and institutions he keeps coming back to. He is a member of Claremore First Baptist Church and has served on the board for the William Barnes Advocacy Center for Children. He is also a lifetime alumni member of Oklahoma State University, where he earned his bachelor's degree in agriculture education in 1994, and a major supporter of Rogers State University athletics. None of these are new commitments. They are long-running ones, built up over years in the same community where he has lived most of his adult life.
Recognition along the way
In 2013, Community Home Health received Business of the Year at the chamber awards. Awards like that tend to mark a point in a longer story rather than the story itself, but it is worth noting as part of the record: a company started by one person in 1990, carried forward by her son, recognized by the community it serves more than two decades later.
A career built in sequence
Looked at in order, Choat's path reads less like a leap and more like a sequence: teaching, then a family business learned from the inside, then ownership, then public service layered on top of both. Few of the pieces look related on paper. A vocational agriculture teacher, a city councilman, a campaign chairman, and a home health administrator are not usually the same person. In Claremore, they are.
