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.
If you're involved at all in organizing the home care of a person who's recuperating from an injury or serious illness, is elderly and ailing, or for some other reason requires frequent visits from nurses or therapists, keep an eye on Enurgi, a health-care marketplace that just launched.
Patients and clients can manage their caregivers.
You can find caregivers on the site, book them for home care, rate their job performance, and manage their payment via Paypal. The service helps you keep a calendar so you can easily tell who's coming over and when, and quickly fill in gaps you may have in your coverage.
Unlike many other service directories, Enurgi starts with a fairly complete database of providers. The registration records for nurses certified to deliver home care are public and recorded at the state level, and the company has incorporated all 50 states' data into its catalog of providers. Practitioners do have to "claim" their entry, though, before they can connect with patients and collect payments.
The service is free right now, but in 2008, the company will take a percentage of revenues paid to service providers: 6 or 7 percent, founder Chiara Bell told me. Bell compares this to the much larger percentage skimmed by traditional agencies who connect caregivers and patients. Bell also points out that with Enurgi, patients can pick their caregivers and select the best blend of skills for their situation, instead of just taking the first match proposed by the agency. Likewise, caregivers can be more selective about accepting gigs that fit their commuting and work preferences.
Caregivers get their own interface, to manage schedules and clients.
Enurgi is a smart business not just because the data to build it is available, and not just because the fees that the company will charge are substantial yet still undercut the established middlemen in this market. It's also smart because sales efforts for the service can be highly leveraged: If Bell can get some hospitals, corporate HR departments, or associations centered on particular ailments (such as dementia) onboard, she'll easily be able to generate revenue, probably enough to turn a profit.
Future plans for the site include management of insurance billing, paying employment taxes, and keeping track of flexible spending account data.
Related: We're previously looked at CareSquare, which does the same thing, but for childcare. It's a theoretically useful service but much harder to make into a business since there's no database of providers and no powerful organizations supporting them. See also: Care.com, Gonannies.com, and Sittercity.com.
Microsoft is giving a booster shot to its Health Solutions Group, announcing on Monday plans to acquire clinical workflow software developer Global Care Solutions.
The acquisition of Global Care Solutions, based in Bangkok, Thailand, is designed to enhance the management of clinical workflow, medical records, billing and regulatory compliance at hospitals and other medical facilities. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Global Care worked with Thailand's Bumrungrad International Hospital to design its system, which serves more than 1.2 million patients a year from nearly 200 countries. The hospital uses Global Care's system to manage scheduling and medical records in multiple languages.
Peter Neupert, vice president of Microsoft's Health Solutions Group, noted in a statement that Global Care's "state-of-the-art health information system" allows patients to see a doctor within roughly 17 minutes after arriving at Bumrungrad.
Is Thailand gearing up to be the next India for tech resources? Get those passports ready.
Just got passed an invitation to yet another social networking site called Goodreads. My first impression is that it's Last.FM for books.
There's a database of books I can browse or search through and rate on a scale of one to five stars. So far I've made it through 229 of all the books I've ever read. How did I have time? Rafe Needleman asked me to write this blog posting, and therefore it became "work."
You can also add books to shelves. The default is to add it to a "read" shelf but I also added the books I'm currently reading to the "currently reading" shelf. And I even added a book to the "to-read" shelf.
On any given book you can write a review to support your rating, a little like how it works at Amazon.com. I didn't do that to the 229 books I rated.
I'll have to give it a little time to see if I really use it as a recommendation engine or not. In the meantime, it was fun to browse through and remember books I'd read but hadn't thought about in a long time.
Babysitters scare me. The concept of giving my child over to the care of a young (usually) person I barely know is utterly terrifying. That's why word-of-mouth referrals are so important for child care. But talking to friends to find a sitter? That's old-fashioned.
CareSquare finds babysitters by schedule.
(Credit: CNET Networks)A new site, CareSquare, is a social network and scheduling utility for parents, babysitters, and nannies. On this system, you can review babysitters' profiles and see reviews from the community at large or from other parents in your network.
More importantly, you can search for child care by date and time. This is the really cool part. You specify when you need help, and the system tells you who is available. You can view schedules (and rates and feedback comments) and book babysitting time right on the system.
For this to work, of course, child care providers have to use the system, and it appears that CareSquare hopes to rely on them to get the word out. The system recommends that caregivers invite their current customers to the network under the guise of easier scheduling. Then they'll hopefully post feedback, invite their friends online, and the network will grow.
Scheduling grid
(Credit: CareSquare)But forget the social network angle. From my perspective, just having our sitter share her availability calendar with us would be a great help. It doesn't look like the system can be used in this private mode, but the site is very new (some interface bugs were fixed since last night), and I expect it will evolve quickly.
If you have kids, CareSquare is worth a try. If you don't find what you need on it, I'd recommend coming back again in about a month after its creators have had some time to shake out the feature set and, hopefully, grow the network. The site is currently free.
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