Another tool has emerged for Baby Boomers and Gen Xers faced with caring for an aging parent or grandparent.
Caring.com, which debuted Monday, offers how-to information on caring for elderly family members, whether they live in their own home, with a family member, or in a facility. The topics include providing in-person and long-distance support, financial and legal advice, and end-of-life issues.
Caring.com features a community area for people to share care-giving tips, as well as a section where questions can be posed to various experts, such as a communication supervisor with the American Medical Response ambulance company.
Tools on the site include a risk calculator to determine the chances an elderly family member will fall and tips on how to prevent falls, said Andy Cohen, co-founder and chief executive, who started the company in January.
"There are a lot of sites that address specific diseases, but no other site is as comprehensive," said Cohen, whose mother died of lung cancer last fall.
Cohen is a former Intuit executive who launched Caring.com with Steve Fram, a former BabyCenter vice president of engineering, and Jim Scott, BabyCenter's former global editor-in-chief. Both Fram, Caring.com's chief information officer, and Scott, the site's editor-in-chief, are dealing with elderly parents who are suffering from health issues.
An estimated 34 million Americans are caring for elderly parents. The National Alliance for Caregiving and the MetLife Mature Market Institute found that 15 percent of caregivers live an hour or more away from the elderly family members, making it harder to track whether they are taking their medication or to keep a watchful eye on them.
Although a number of groups and companies are betting on the future of eldercare technology, the interest of caregivers in receiving information and tips is not lost on venture capitalists.
Caring.com has raised a total of $7 million in funding from Doll Capital Management and Split Rock Partners. A large portion of the funding is earmarked for providing unique content, which is designed to serve as a barrier to entry for competitors, Cohen said.
Once a week, my younger brother calls our parents to see how they're doing. I, the not-as-dutiful daughter, am a much less frequent caller.
However, I am equally interested in their safety and well-being, and prefer hopping in the car for the five-hour trek to see them. You can learn a lot from a visual glance--such as do you "really" need to sort through a zillion pill bottles every morning and evening?
As I told my parents, there are technologies out there to help manage such tasks. They rejected my offers to buy them a souped-up pillbox, but were willing to try a low-tech, tackle box-like weekly pill organizer that I had found at a local pharmacy.
I'll keep this lesson in mind, as I head to the fourth-annual Healthcare Unbound conference in San Francisco next week. The conference has added a new "Aging Services Track" to the July 16 to 17 event.
The conference will feature such panels as "Piloting tomorrow's technologies: Challenges and opportunities," "Telehomecare and remote monitoring: What's Next--Now," and "The future of aging services: Provider business models."
The remote monitoring panel, for example, will delve into case studies of providers using telehomecare and the best practices for offering such services. And it will cover how these technologies keep family members, caregivers and health care providers all connected, in some cases, in real time.
Conference goers attending the "Piloting tomorrow's technologies" panel will examine the need for pilot studies to test the most promising technologies, using large test groups.
All this sounds well and good, but, in the end, will low-tech concepts prevail over a daughter's high-tech intentions?
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