Home Care

Are ‘drop-in chefs’ an alternative to assisted living?  Some headline writers saw an opportunity – and some ran with the title even though the original NPR story stepped back a bit and said ‘help seniors stay in their own homes.’  You probably have heard that cost-sharing is an alternative to assisted living. Or sharing your home with roommates through Room2Care, with the founder wisely observing “Not everyone needs to be in assisted living.” Or let’s take Granny Pods – are they an alternative to assisted living? Remember these – prefab back yard cottages fit up with computers to provide medication reminders?  Or maybe Information Week’s Eight Technologies provide an alternative to assisted living -- the article said ‘changing home health care,’ but web designers know SEO and threw in 'assisted living.'

Does the opportunity with home care rest in its technology? Some Silicon Valley fellows think that it is does, and with a cool $20 million raised, they are launching Honor. What is this oddly named thing? What they've said: it's an in-home care agency that will have a smartphone app for the adult child plus a tablet in the care recipient’s home to say "what time the aide is arriving."  Oh, and it seems likely they will have home care aides who are paid better wages, at least in the SF area, where the 'earth revolves around San Jose' – no kidding, that heading is from the San Jose paper. Oh, and did I forget to mention that they will manage a process to help families hire home care aides?

The dilemma of distance -- boomers have parents who live in, for example, Florida. The oldest boomer is 69. They’re not all that healthy. The still-living parent(s) may be even less healthy. In this age of medical specialization and long distance families, many aging women living alone: they need to see doctors, perhaps multiple doctors. Even if the children of aging parents live nearby, experiencing enhanced intergenerational proximity (!), the aging parent may ultimately live alone. With life expectancy for woman now averaging 88+, it is safe to say that older boomers are still involved in coordinating the care of their aging parent/mother. And they’re doing it from a distance – since the boomer woman with a career may not reside in Florida. Consider that Florida is now on track to become the 3^rd largest state – with population growth primarily from migration. The state now has a median age of 74 for its 65+ population, one-quarter of that population widowed. But the dilemma of distance criss-crosses the country from California to Maine, from upstate New York to New Mexico.

Maybe you have Ann Clinton stuck in your mind too.  This woman and her husband spent $351,424 plus $4600 per month for the 'security' of having access to the continuing care of a CCRC. The 'continuing' of the CCRC was in one direction – she discovered that returning in a motorized wheelchair from the nursing home section to the independent living bingo game engendered big protest – from the other residents as well as management. You may have seen this yourself – people putting wheelchairs and walkers at a dining room door and limping in so that they could eat with friends in the 'independent living' dining room. These are well-documented -- if not well-understood -- policies. The message, perhaps constructed by CCRC marketing?  Independent living residents don’t wish to see people who are not as 'independent' -- or at least who don’t appear as independent as themselves.