By Susan Saldibar

Several years ago, Steve Moran’s mom, who was recovering from a stroke, needed some extra help. So he called a home care agency and hired a person to help her with a few things once a day.

The person came in and completed the tasks. The whole process took maybe 45 minutes. Great, except for the fact that the minimum engagement was four hours!

So for three-plus hours, Steve paid a stranger to do nothing but feel awkward.

You know this kind of story. Maybe you’ve even experienced it. Truth is, it’s an expensive leftover of an old model that makes agencies rich and breaks the banks of seniors.

To me that’s shameful. It should be to you as well.

That’s why Steve (and I) are so impressed with what Steven East and Jennifer Devine with CaringOnDemand (a Foresight partner) are doing. They are breaking up those four-to-eight-hour minimums and enabling people to pay only for what they need. He chatted with them recently, and you can watch the video here.

I know what you’re thinking, but this isn’t just for home health ….

You probably have residents regularly using outside services.

Case in point, Jennifer tells of an assisted living resident who got tired of paying for four-hour minimums for an agency worker when all she needed was some occasional help.

Scouting around, she learned that it would be cheaper to move down the street to an independent living community where she could afford those four-hour minimum agency fees. So, she did.

Another community lost seven assisted living residents who moved down the street to an independent living community and shared the use and cost of agencies with other residents.

Seems like a great fix, and yet these are folks who may have benefited from the assisted living environment. And the operator loses residents!

That’s why CaringOnDemand is about more than home health.

Their model is simple.  

  • They partner with hundreds of reputable agencies across the U.S. to make sure the caregivers dispatched are credentialed, are vetted, and meet best-practice requirements.
  • They bring them together on a single platform that enables caregivers to share workloads.
  • Anyone (home or in IL/AL) who wants a little extra help can sign up and use the app.
  • A caregiver will visit a resident, help them for only as long as they are needed, and move on to help someone else.
  • There are no more minimums for residents who need a little extra help.
  • Residents save money, and operators keep them in their communities longer.

Instead of seeing “agencies as enemies,” why not own the benefits of CaringOnDemand?

As Steven notes, lots of residents in senior living are using external services from time to time. Now they can save money when they need that extra bit of help. Why wouldn’t you want to partner with these folks and bring those benefits to your residents? Then you can tell your new residents that, when they need extra hands-on help, you have a solution to help them get it and pay only for what they need.

CaringOnDemand challenged the old agency home-care model and won. Now you can win too.

Check them out here, and see what you think. Oh, and as for minimums? How about signing up one resident for 20 minutes of care to try it out? Minimums? There are none.