Posted by Ken Accardi on Fri, May 25, 2012 @ 08:32 AM
Today's blog post comes with few words and instead let's a video do the talking. Produced by Ankota's partner Be Close, this video expresses the benefits of aging in place and living at home from the perspective of elderly moms.
Sometimes being in home care every day we can forget the value of what we do. We keep peoples loved ones in the surroundings where they're comfortable, where they made their memories, and away from the institutional feel, high costs and infections that come from aging in facilities.
Pretty nice, huh?
Be Close provides a way to help you monitor how your mom is doing. They
make sensors that go in mom or dad's house and keep track of things like when they use their favorite chair or open the refrigerator. The sensors are hardly noticable. Then they provide a monitoring service that let's you make sure mom's ok with her routine. You can learn more at www.beclose.com.
Ankota provides software to improve the delivery of care outside the hospital. Today Ankota services home health, private duty care, DME Delivery, RT, Physical Therapy and Home Infusion organizations, and is interested in helping to efficiently manage other forms of care. To learn more, please visit www.ankota.com or contact Ankota.
Posted by Ken Accardi on Mon, Aug 15, 2011 @ 09:26 AM
If you've come to this article, you're likely to have an elder family member or friend who is either temporarily or permanently struggling to live safely on their
own and you're wondering what you can do to help them. This post is a survey of options for you to consider for the care of Americans over age 65. What you choose depends on the person's physical condition, available finances, and support. Note to our regular readers, this post is intended to help the consumers who come to our site. We wanted to have a resource to help them get started. If you can help improve the content, please let us know and we'll do it.
- Is your family member or friend coming out of the hospital? If yes, then based on their condition, the hospital should be directing them to the care that will best serve them at the lowest cost. Note that sometimes cheapest is best, because in this case the least expensive solution is likely to be to have them go home and receive care from a home health care provider. If they can't walk or require special care or medication, then they might be referred to a skilled nursing facility or a rehabilatation center.
- Is your Friend or Family Member Coping with One or More Chonic Illnesses? If yes, you may be in luck! It has been recognized that elderly persons with one or more chronic diseases are the most likely to generate high healthcare costs if they don't have the proper care and Medicare is very motivated to reduce costs, which could mean that your friend or loved one may be entitled to some free care from nurses or in a facility best equipped to care for them. The available help, however, varies widely. Our advice is to get advice from their primary care physician, a geriatric care manager, or a social worker.
- If no to the above, then it's likely that your friend or loved one is facing the natural challenges of aging. There are options:
- Non-medical Home Care might do the trick: A home health aide can come and assist with things like meal preparation, laundry, companionship and some hands-on care such as assistance with bathing. This care is often paid privately, but there are also programs (generally through Medicaid) that can make this kind of care available. From a money perspective, this can be an inexpensive option when the person needs part time help, but it can become one of the most expensive options when 24 hour care is needed.
- Elderly Group Living: Many options are available and sometimes multiple options are available at the same facility. The options range from "independent living", to "assisted living" to "Skilled Nursing". Some places will allow you to pay a consistent price and they'll provide the level of care that is needed, whereas others charge based on the level of care needed
- Independent Living Assistance: There are ways other resources that can help keep your loved one in their home. Among them are "Villages" like Beacon Hill Village where neighbors help neighbors and the village can get you discounts with well qualified service
providers. There are "telecare" systems that very inexpensively monitor your loved-one's home and activities from afar. One is provided by BeClose. There's even a national cohousing network to try to pair people together to enable living with companionship at a lower cost.
Get the help you need to make informed decisions. Seek out your local council on aging, the primary care physician, or professional care managers to assess the available options for your loved ones.
Ankota provides software to improve the delivery of care outside the hospital. Today Ankota services home health, private duty care, DME Delivery, RT, Physical Therapy and Home Infusion organizations, and is interested in helping to efficiently manage other forms of care. To learn more, please visit www.ankota.com or contact Ankota
Posted by Ken Accardi on Tue, May 03, 2011 @ 07:22 AM
Ankota recently posted an article about combining "TeleCaregiving" with home care as a way to provide a lower cost
alternative for aging in place. We had a few comments and questions about the cost of a TeleCaregiving system so we caught up with Liddy Manson, the president of Ankota's partner BeClose. Here's a transcript of our interview with Liddy.
Ankota: Can you describe for us a typical BeClose system installation and the associated costs?
Liddy: BeClose is typically installed in a home where an older adult is living alone and would like the safety net of knowing that if something goes wrong, a family member or caregiver will find out. We have customers at a range of stages on the health spectrum from extremely active and independent (walks 4 miles per day) to very infirm (cognitively impaired and bed ridden 90% of the time). The advantage of the BeClose system is that it is flexible enough to provide caregiving information that is actionable regardless of the health and mobility of the resident. Our average system costs roughly $300 for the equipment, and as little as $49 per month for the monthly service fee.
Ankota: Another concern we hear is about the wiring and the need for a phoneline for a system. How has BeClose responded to those concerns?
Liddy: Unlike all other Emergency Response and Home Monitoring systems, BeClose is an entirely wireless system. This means that residents do not need an additional phone line or broadband internet access in the home, each of which adds between $20 and $40 per month in expense. BeClose operates using wireless technology to communicate to caregivers, and the cost for that transmission is included in the monthly fee.
Ankota: I know that there are easy instructional videos on the BeClose website, but can you give us a feel for whether special skills or training would be required for a home care agency to be able to plan and install a BeClose system?
Liddy: We designed BeClose to be as easy to set up as an electric clock and as easy to activate as a purchase on Amazon.com. For those who want additional insight on where to place sensors and how to set up custom alerts, we offer a half hour free consultation session with a customer support specialist so that everyone can rest easy that the system has been installed correctly.
Ankota: Would BeClose enable the business model that we proposed, where a home care agency can provide a service to check-in on clients with a BeClose system (e.g., weekly or maybe daily or monthly depending on need)?
Liddy: BeClose has a number of tools that make it easy for homecare agencies to use in providing top level care to their clients. We provide a daily summary email of each customer, so homecare workers can do a quick check-in each morning and get a sense of the state of the resident before they arrive for work. In addition, we offer multi-view monitoring for homecare workers should they wish to log on to our system and see a snap shot of several customers at the same time. Finally, we allow the families of the residents to send alerts to an unlimited number of care givers, giving homecare agencies the opportunity to provide families who are far from their loved ones backup support 24/7 -- a new model of homecare services.
Ankota provides software to improve the delivery of care outside the hospital. Today Ankota services home health, private duty care, DME Delivery, RT, Physical Therapy and Home Infusion organizations, and is interested in helping to efficiently manage other forms of care. To learn more, please visit www.ankota.com or contact Ankota
Posted by Ken Accardi on Mon, Apr 25, 2011 @ 08:24 AM
My friend and colleague Laurie Orlov posted another gem on her blog entitled “Tech-enabled home care is betwixt and between”
which you can read here. For those unfamiliar with Laurie, her website and blog is called the Aging in Place Technology Watch and can be viewed at http://ageinplacetech.com. As the title implies she focuses on technology for aging in place. From a style perspective, she has a snarky way of pointing out iniquities in understanding the way that technology and aging are being used and should be used. This makes her posts very entertaining. She’s also a great researcher which makes her posts well-informed and educational.
In a nutshell, Laurie looks at the high costs of elderly care in assisted living facilities (ALFs) and Home Care and then looks at how the Kentucky-based company ResCare has 50,000 employees helping 1 million clients by checking in on them using home monitoring technology combined with web-cam and chat capabilities. The caregiver checks in on the individual or couple remotely in their home, and has the ability to get them help only when needed. In the case of ResCare, most of their cases are reimbursed through Medicaid.
Laurie then points out that so far as she knows there aren’t a lot of private pay home care organizations using this type of technology to lower their costs or differentiate their service. In our home care entrepreneurship series on the Ankota blog, we suggested a blueprint for this several months ago that you can read here, but in a nutshell, here’s the idea:
- Offer a service to install TeleCaregiving technology such as the products offered by Ankota's partner BeClose. For this you can charge a site-survey and installation service fee
- Next offer a bundled service where you check-in on the client on a regular basis (weekly, monthly, etc. based on their need)
- Couple it with Ankota’s FamilyConnect which gives you a way to report back to the loved ones of the person under your care
- Also offer the ability to deploy a caregiver when needed (at a higher than normal price because of the on-demand nature of the service)
What does this give you:
- A low-priced yet high margin entry-level caregiving service that you can offer in your community
- A way of building a relationship with prospective clients long before you currently do
- A great shot at being able to provide in home care as the client’s needs escalate
Ankota provides software to improve the delivery of care outside the hospital. Today Ankota services home health, private duty care, DME Delivery, RT, Physical Therapy and Home Infusion organizations, and is interested in helping to efficiently manage other forms of care. To learn more, please visit www.ankota.com or contact Ankota
Posted by Ken Accardi on Tue, Aug 24, 2010 @ 07:28 AM
Non-Medical Home Monitoring Technology is starting to get media attention as distant Family Members search for better and more affordable ways ways to track how mom and/or dad are doing.
We've been following great stories about these trends in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Laurie Orlov's Aging in Place Technology Watch and Time Rowan's Home Care Technology Report. If you want to get quickly up to speed, review these two posts:
This week more coverage is available, this time as a four part series on NPR. The first article spoke about the emergence of "Villages" like Beacon Hill Village and a rapidly growing list of others that are essentially support groups to help with aging in place. The next two, talk about non-medical remote monitoring technologies. Here's a link to today's article (which has links to the first two in the series). You can also access it by clicking on the picture below.
So now that we've established that this technology is out there, the question we need to answer is whether it poses a threat to our home care private duty agency or an opportunity? The pessimist would say it's a threat - that families are working around us. But the smart entrepreneurial agency sees this as an opportunity, and a way to provide differentiating service to win more business. Here's a specific idea for you:
- Offer a service to evaluate for a home monitoring system. Your evaluation can evaluate how the client is doing, check for safety issues in the home, and determine what monitors would make sense for this client and their family. (To learn more about the monitors available, check out the demo videos at www.beclose.com). Note that you generally provide this service for free to a prospective client - in this case you can charge.
- Install the System and Train the Family: It is guaranteed that someone in your caregiver community has a spouse or friend who can do a great job providing this installation service. You can charge a nice margin here.
- Couple it with a short weekly visit and an assessment using Ankota FamilyConnect: This technology makes it easy for you to let the remote family members know how their loved one is doing. learn more here.
- Grow with the Client: The above three items will be a great service to the client and their family, and will make you some money. But looking at the bigger picture, you've also gained a client and family who will turn to you when they need more help.
Ankota provides software to improve the delivery of care outside the hospital. Today Ankota services home health, private duty care, DME Delivery, RT, Physical Therapy and Home Infusion organizations, and is interested in helping to efficiently manage other forms of care. To learn more, please visit www.ankota.com or contact Ankota.