Home Care By the Numbers

Aging in the Third Millenium: Part 4


Finding the right caregiver can be a challenge, especially when today’s feisty elders may not want or feel they need any help — even in their 90s. If only something as amorphous as matching your grandparent’s personality and lifestyle to the appropriate home assistant were more quantifiable.

HomeHero to the rescue. As its name implies, HomeHero connects seniors with home care mathematically, so there’s less room for error. And it works: HomeHero has gown to become the largest independent home care provider in California, where it launched in 2013.

The Match Game

reverse mortgage newsThe 15-point matching algorithm takes the guesswork out of finding the right match. It’s a little like friend dating — in fact, 28-year-old co-founder Kyle Hill says HomeHero is “more like Match.com than like Uber” — and affords seniors and their families the option of completing the questionnaire on their own online, or in collaboration with HomeHero via a phone call. (Though these entrepreneurs are young, they understand generational preferences — which are rapidly dissolving as today’s elders embrace technology).

According to a company profile in Forbes, HomeHero’s algorithm takes just twelve minutes to suggest suitable care providers. It’s not a new concept, or even disruptive, but it may be the best tech solution yet for seniors who themselves are on the leading edge technologically. As a next step, HomeHero is forming the HomeHero Collaborative, a care management platform for hospitals and health plans that connects and extends the health system into the home.

Born Free

Some seniors are going to refuse a home attendant no matter what. And they could be right: such a step might be unnecessary, with the advent of next generation PERS (personal emergency response systems). Freeus provides Belle, a mobile emergency alert pendant that connects users to an emergency care center 24/7, where Belle wearers can speak with specialists via built-in two-way voice technology. The specialists, in turn, will send loved ones or emergency services to seniors if such action is warranted.

A companion product, eResponder, features a rechargeable battery, and enables caregivers to receive low battery and power off notifications by text message and email. Caregivers can also be contacted if the eResponder user needs non-emergency assistance.

Reimagining Medicare

Then again, perhaps the best course of action is to start at the source, and reinvent Medicare. At Washington’s Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation, that’s precisely what a visionary alliance of doctors, lawyers, health policy experts, and career Medicare employees are attempting to do.

Created under the aegis of the Affordable Care Act, the Center has already tried 60 experiments that alter payment and accounting practices, to see what might be most effective.

Excessive Care?

The key to overhauling home care — or health care in general — lies in listening to the seniors themselves, as Atul Gawande makes clear in his breakthrough book, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. Our culture has a propensity for prolonging life at all costs, even to the detriment of the patient, which I experienced when my mother was dying. Though she had a DNR (do not resuscitate) on record, this did not take into account incidents that occurred while she was conscious, in the days and weeks following an unsuccessful heart valve replacement. The doctors recommended seemingly endless procedures that my Dad, wanting to do all he could for her, kept authorizing.

“Patients often want to be kept comfortable rather than undergo medical interventions, but physicians are trained to do everything possible to prevent death,” says Dr. Diane Meier, director of the Center to Advance Palliative Care and professor of geriatrics at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine in New York. Yet, shockingly, doctors themselves do not choose these same medical procedures when they are terminally ill, preferring to spend their remaining time with loved ones rather than attempting to prolong their lives.

The 4 Cs of Proactive Care

What does “proactive” health care for seniors look like? It’s akin to what builds ongoing reverse mortgage relationships:

  1. Customer-centric
  2. Connected
  3. Continuous
  4. Coordinated

With digital technology and a person-centered focus, the shift towards connected, continuous, coordinated care that emphasizes the older adult in question is poised to become a welcome new model of proactive care.

 

Nature Knows Best

What we can learn about aging from trees…


reverse mortgage news“If you’re lonely, sit under a willow tree,” says ethnobotanist and medical biochemist Diana Beresford-Kroeger, who then explains, biochemically, why this will help. Equal parts scientist and mystic, Irish-born Beresford-Kroeger grew up studying the interface between the arts and sciences, forging her unique perspective to illustrate how, beyond bromides, Mother Nature really does hold the answers for health and well being, for people and planet.

In The Sweetness of a Simple Life: Tips for Healthier, Happier and Kinder Living Gleaned from the Wisdom and Science of Nature, she mixes knowledge, wonder, and a heaping dose of common sense to show us how to age well, create a healthy home environment and take care of our planetary body, with humor and down-to-earth information relayed through storytelling and supported with plenty of science. Best of all, her suggestions are easy for seniors, reverse mortgage professionals, or anyone else who yearns to become and remain healthier to implement.

Building Better Brains

Dementia is on the decline, reports Laura Koniver, MD, and fish oil is one of the best ways to protect against it. Beresford-Kroeger agrees, and provides some backstory: “Omega-3 wires the body, connecting the brain to itself and to the rest of the body in the neural pathways, insulated by a myelin sheath, which surrounds the nerve fibers. Omega-3 also wallpapers the membranes of the retina to form the visual images translated and transported by the optic nerve into the brain.

“Life with very little Omega-3 changes the chemistry of the brain itself, resulting in attention deficit disorder, depression, bipolar disorder, memory loss, schizophrenia, even suicide…” Eating a diet rich in Omega-3s (e.g., lamb, saltwater fish such as salmon and sardines, walnuts, and olive oil) is a dietary solution more effective and palatable than pharmaceuticals.

No Bones About It

Then there are the aches and pains that accompany aging. Just a fact of life as our bones become brittle? Not at all, says Beresford-Kroeger. She explains how the “biological rubber” (chondroitin sulphate) that keeps our skeleton functioning can be replaced, with “a good bowl of hot homemade soup made from beef broth. It has all the ingredients to stop the aches and pains in your knees, fingers, feet, hips, neck and back.” She details what to buy and how to prepare the soup, to restore the healthy bounce elders recall from their younger years. [Note: In many communities, it’s now possible to purchase ready-made bone broth from farmers’ markets and organic butchers. Seniors should be sure to ask whether the animals were raised without hormones, on pesticide-free pastures.]

Beresford-Kroeger also describes simple steps to treat addictions (which she used successfully to cure her husband’s three-pack-a-day cigarette habit), what to eat to prevent cancer, and how to create and maintain a healthy weight. It’s the kind of kitchen wisdom our ancestors lived by, often lost today to the lure of technology and accelerated lifestyles.

The Original Social Network

Rediscovering a reverence for Nature’s vast wisdom, we’re invited to join the primal social network: trees, says German forest ranger Peter Wohlleben. “Trees in the forest are social beings. They can count, learn and remember; nurse sick neighbors, and warn each other of danger by sending electrical signals across a fungal network known as the ‘Wood Wide Web’.”

The more time we spend in front of computers and other devices, the more we need to spend time in a forest, says Beresford-Kroeger. “Walk into a pine forest; you’ll come out smarter.” She explains how the biochemical aerosols that pine trees release on warm days penetrate the human central nervous system, making us calmer, better able to focus and learn. Between pine trees, Omega-3s, bone broth, plus the plethora of additional wisdom Beresford-Kroeger shares, seniors (or anyone, of any age) can begin today to boost brainpower and overall health.

Perhaps your next reverse mortgage meeting ought to take place at the edge of a forest. At least consider keeping a jar of organic walnuts on your desk.

 

The Future of Aging Well

There is the matter of how societal expectations affect where older adults live, which makes the changing senior living landscape a bright field for the reverse mortgage industry. As we’re exploring, the desire to age in place is expanding into ever more creative ways to age in community, which may or may not mean moving from one’s lifelong residence to a smaller (or larger) home, a new area, a co-housing community, or a senior living community.

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Enhancing Communication / Part 1: Hear, Hear! Hearing Loss Can Be An Audible Problem

The Center for Hearing and Communication reports that 30-40 percent of people over 65 have some type of hearing loss. But younger people (perhaps even reverse mortgage professionals themselves) aren’t immune: 14 percent of those ages 45-64 also have some type of hearing loss.

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Rethinking Housing, Boomer Style

 

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There’s no question the Boomers are reimagining every aspect of retirement, as we’ve discussed extensively in previous posts. One of the biggest factors is where and how to live, since, unlike prior generations, there’s no assumption that they will simply retire, sit back, and relax in the home they’ve always owned.

According to The Power Years by aging expert Ken Dychtwald, a Del Webb survey indicates nearly two-thirds of Boomers — 59 percent — plan to relocate after leaving their primary careers. Ten percent even plan to purchase a second home. Clearly, many Boomers view retirement as a time to expand, not contract. And they embody a wanderlust that characterized their coming-of-age in the 1960s — a nomadic state of mind which they’ve never lost, and now embrace with fervor.

So in facilitating your younger reverse mortgage prospects with their housing options, release the images of both staying put and of a golf course in Florida or Arizona, advises Dychtwald, now 62 and hardly the image of a “retiree”; while these states still top the list of places to move as Boomers age, many other locations, including Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Maine, hold allure. How to find the best combination of weather, opportunities, affordable housing and leisure? Interactive websites such as Find Your Spot and Best Places allow people to mix a number of criteria, then offer suggestions of the best places to settle in the power years.

Another idea is theme communities. Dychtwald cites examples of one couple who relocated to a horseback riding ranch, and notes that there are also one focused on the arts, fitness, gardening, and ecology. Some people are opting for intergenerational communities in which elders play an active role, but unlike “retirement villages”, such communities are not off-limits to the younger set.

College towns are popular for the mix of culture, walkability and affordable housing they usually provide. If one of your reverse mortgage clients has strong ties to his or her alma mater, this might be an excellent suggestion of a place to seek a primary or secondary residence for their power years.

Some people will not relinquish the city for anything, so if this is your prospect, perhaps they’d like the reverse of typical retirement housing: a primary city residence and a sometime-home in the country, rather than the other way around.

Whatever constitutes your Boomer reverse mortgage prospects’ ideal homestead for the Third Act, supporting their shifting perspective will help cement a sound relationship as you discover how to best serve their evolving needs.