HealthBridge's In-Home Care Blog

I spend a lot of time talking with HealthBridge clients about their senior care decisions.  They each want timely, compassionate and thorough care, but don't want to waste their money on things they don't need.  Most of them describe their efforts to find a sort of equilibrium.  A balance between service and price.    

In other words, each is after value.  Which raised an important question:

• How do people value senior care?  

• How should we measure that value? 
  
• How does professional home care stack up against the alternatives?

To answer these question, we've created the Senior Care Value Matrix:

After analyzing the data and reviewing the results, I have arrived at two startling conclusions:

1. As an industry, Senior Care providers must aggressively work toward improving the peace of mind of their clients and families.  With "high" peace of mind at 90%, we all have a lot of work to do.
2. Senior care is too expensive.  If everything holds steady, demographic trends will drive prices up by at least 75% within the next decade.  

Assumptions & Notes

To build this matrix and standardize the data, we've used a few assumptions:

• To keep things consistent, we've assumed care is provided 5 days a week for Private Sitter, Adult Day Care and Professional Home Care
• For Residential Care Home and Adult Day Care costs, we polled facilities
• For Professional Home Care, Independent Living, Assisted Living and Skilled Nursing Facilities we used data from the Dallas Business Journal and CNA.  
• Private Sitter costs were based on 1.75 x minimum wage as the hourly costs.
• We assumed Home Alone carried some minimal costs and used $500 per month.   

To measure Peace of Mind, we polled our clients to ask them how they quantified it.  As you can imagine, opinions differed widely, but we were able to centralize on a small number of themes.  We used the following factors on a weighted scale:

• Daily personal assistance
• Medication management  
• Daily personal care
• Mitigation of fall risk
• Nurse on call or "clinical presence"
  
• Trust factor
• Social influence or reputation
• Preservation of core values such as independence and wellness