If you are already working as a professional long-term care (LTC) financing advisor, or as a family caregiver, you may be reading this article mainly to critique it.
You might be able to write a better version of this article, incorporating detailed reviews of the 1,000 biggest adult day care facilities in your market, in your sleep… while ordering a slow cooker online.
If you haven't been working as a professional LTC advisor: Congratulations! You're now an "informal LTC advisor."
Thanks to the aging of the world's population in general, and the U.S. population in particular, we're all starting to hear, and ask, questions about what we should do about loved ones who need help with handling complicated daily medical needs, or help with the activities of daily living.
One basic lesson many Americans are now learning is that LTC services can come in many different gradations, ranging from having a supermarket deliver groceries every week to a frail 85-year-old who has trouble driving, to full-blown skilled nursing facility care.
For many family caregivers, especially those who have full-time jobs, using adult day care services, rather than home health care or care in a residential facility, can be a way to maximize their care delivery capacity and to get as much care value as possible out of each dollar coming from savings, current income, and private insurance benefits.
See also: Genworth creates LTC planner site
Earlier this year, CareScout found that the median cost of 50 weeks of U.S. adult day health services is just $17,000. That compares with a median annual cost of $91,000 for a private nursing home room.
One challenge is that shopping for adult day services can be even more complicated than shopping for ordinary medical care, or for child care.
Nothing can ever replace talking privately with recent users of a provider's services, but, for a look at five things your clients ought to know when they shop for adult day care services, read on.
1. When it comes to technology, they tend to be more into clay tablets and papyrus than into the digital age.
Some adult day care services show up everywhere on social media services like Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus.
They have big, thriving message board forums online.
When state and federal agencies open up adult day care regulatory proposals up for public comment, they comment up a storm.
But analysts at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found when they looked at the 2014 National Study of Long-Term Care Providers survey data that adult day care providers are not actually very good at installing electronic health record (EHR) systems.
Only 23 percent use EHR systems at all. Just 8 percent can use their EHR systems to connect with hospital EHR systems, and barely 6 percent can connect their EHR systems with physicians' EHR systems.
If your clients want to find adult day care services that can interface seamlessly with doctors, hospitals and private insurance providers — to use the magic of technology to improve the quality of care and reduce the cost — they may have their work cut out for them.
2. Adult day care providers' financial performance varies widely.
Outsiders might think that U.S. adult day care providers should have an easy time bringing in new business and generating big profits, given all the headlines about the aging of the population, but reality is more complicated.
For one thing, the biggest users of paid LTC services are ages 75 or older. Today, the people who are ages 75 or older are all members of the small "Silent Generation" (the generation of people born during the Great Depression or World War II); members of the greatest Generation; or very old members of what's sometimes called the "Interbellum Generation."
