As a fond farewell to 2010, here are 10 of the most popular posts on OurParents this year. The topics are wide-ranging. Interestingly, however, three of the posts have to do with assisted living.

1. “Options for Long-Term Care Are Complex, Lack Accessibility”
2. “Medicare’s Annual Wellness Visits: The Changes Explained”
3. “Mayo Clinic No Longer Accepting Out of State Medicare & Medicaid Patients!”
4. “When Your Aging Parent Rebels—and Good Things Happen”
5. “10 Tips for Spotting a Bad Nursing Home”
6. “Assisted Living Criteria: Is It Time to Move?”
7. “Elderly Parents: 5 Warning Signs They May Need Help”
8. “DSS Statewide Respite Program Affected by Connecticut Budget Deficit”
9. “What Is Assisted Living? Who It’s Right—and Wrong—For”
10. “The Difference Between Nursing-Home Care and Assisted Living”

Looking into 2011, we’d love to hear what topics you’d like to read more about. We focus on finding senior care and paying for it. Within that scope, would you like to learn more about senior-care options? Ways to finance senior care? End-of-life care? Medicare? Something else? Please post your thoughts in the comments section below. We look forward to connecting with you more in the new year.

Reston, VA (PRWEB) April 21, 2010 — In-home senior care, in many situations, can prove to be a great answer for families with an aging loved one. The challenge is finding the right provider among the many options in a given area. OurParents’ new scoring system for in-home senior care providers helps solve that problem, dramatically improving the decision making process for families.

Medicare has done a great job in tracking quality information about in-home caregivers in the Medicare network. The data, however, is quite detailed, and difficult for a consumer to use to compare providers.
For that reason, today, OurParents is launching a five star rating system for in-home care providers, modeled after the five star rating system Medicare does for nursing homes.

Using Medicare’s detailed data, OurParents scores each provider, given them a rating from one to five stars. Those ratings can be used at www.ourparents.com/home_care , to help consumers search for in-home care in a given area.

“The Medicare nursing home rating system, while imperfect, has proven really useful to consumers using our senior care search engine,” said John McKinley, founder and CEO of OurParents.com. “We saw an opportunity to expand use the same approach to in-home care provider comparisons. When you combine this rating with our user reviews, pricing information, and the other information we supply, it can help a family narrow down the options that make the most sense for a given senior.”

In less than a year, OurParents.com has already become the second largest senior care matching service in the United States, helping thousands of families each day find senior care solutions that meet their unique needs. With a database of over 100,000 care providers, OurParents provides a free service to families looking for care options for their aging loved one.

“We don’t charge the families or the care providers for our service. That means that OurParents.com will never have the problem of conflict of interest when it comes to making this critical life decision,” said McKinley. “At OurParents, our founding principle is that we are and always will be on the side of the consumer.”

For more information, visit www.ourparents.com.

Contact:
Amit Shafrir
(301) 346 5540
amit(at)ourparents(dot)com

What is the best way to senior proof a home?

The response could include a list of suggestions on how to best senior proof a house, good websites and other resources, smart ideas, smart gadgets, anything you can tell us to figure out good ways to senior proof a home.

This contest will run for a week starting 11/19/2009 and ending 11/26/2009 and the best response will be chosen by the OurParents team.

Anyone can participate (given local jurisdiction regulations/laws/etc.)

The winner will be awarded an Apple iPod Nano.

Click here to submit an answer.

You can follow us on Twitter at @OurParents for more questions and contests.

We recently received a writeup from a member, that, while focused on one specific care provider, was worth sharing to give you a sense of how much care people are putting into their reviews (something we are really grateful for).

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The quality of care is directly related to the awareness and self-motivation of the individual caregiver, whether this is the aide or the nurse.

Many staff appear unavailable to answer call bells from patients’ rooms for rather long periods of time due to lack of adequate number of staff. This is exacerbated by not enough aides to cover for aides who go on break. While a few aides (god bless ‘em) are conscientious and professional, often aides appear unconcerned, talking and laughing loudly outside the resident’s rooms disturbing their rest.

If you sit with a loved one there for an extended period of time you will see just what I mean. Often it takes a long time for anyone to answer a call bell from the patient’s bed. If you ask at the nurses station, you will hear that the particular aide is on a break or having their mealtime and you will see that no one will come anytime soon.

I lost count of the number of times I had to move my loved one’s water cup close enough to be reached. Careless/clueless aides or cleaners often move the bedside tray to clean and can’t be bothered to replace it within reach of the patient. So, “no water” even if the cup is full!

If your loved one needs help to feed themselves at mealtime you had better be there yourself, as it appears to be a low priority to help those who are room-bound, unable or unwilling to participate in their monitored feeding room program. So, while a tray will be delivered, often there will be”little or no food” actually getting to your loved one.

Even if you visit 1-3 hours duration per day it is difficult to get the staff to attend properly to care duties.

When anything goes missing they tend to blame the other residents, which is simply not credible every time. Your loved ones’ sweaters, dusting powder, and even gold frame prescription eyeglasses will disappear.

Peek inside the large family/staff conference room on the main entrance hallway. On the fold-out bulletin board and you will see an appalling and inexcusable number of falls on any given week.

By the way, don’t trust the social worker who smiles and reassures family members but doesn’t really advocate for the residents enough to enact meaningful positive change in this for-profit institution.

If you come around often enough many elderly will beg YOU to take them home with you.

God help them all.

Finding the right Senior Care Solution for an aging loved one is one of the most complex decisions you can face in a lifetime.  It’s incredibly stressful, and often needed to be done in a very short timeframe.  It is for that reason that we’ve developed OurParents, and why we’re outlining some best practices other families have used to find the right answer that meets their loved ones’ unique personal and financial needs.

Here is a five step program to help you make an informed choice.

1. Assess where your loved one is starting from, physically and mentally

To find the right Senior Care option for your parent, you need to honestly ask yourself some tough questions about your loved one’s current condition.  That includes things like:

• How mobile are they?
• Are they able to clean themselves?
• Are they keeping up with their daily medical needs (taking their pills, etc.)?
• Do they have chronic illnesses that continue to increase in severity?
• Do they have memory issues that are starting to concern you?

If you need help doing an independent assessment, use our acclaimed FREE Care Options Advisor.  It is a great tool that takes about 4 minutes to complete, and asks you in plain, straight-forward terms to describe the aging loved one’s current situation, then lays out the available senior care options you should first consider (answering important questions like “Is in-home care a viable option for my parent?”)

2. Understand all the available care options

This is a really important decision for a family, and the senior care industry doesn’t make it any easier by all the complex terms it uses to describe different care options.

You should make sure you have a decent understanding of all of the different senior care options that are available to you and your loved one.  A great place to start is by reading this article that outlines the major options, and what they mean.

3. Determine your loved one’s ability to pay

There are five primary means to pay for care, and often, families use several of them to pay for the care of their loved one.  They are:

• Social Security
• Medicare
• Medicaid
• Pensions (Military / Government / Business)
• Money and/or Home owned by the aging loved one

Social Security is a primary component used to help pay for a senior’s living expenses.

Medicare is the program most families use as a core component of how they pay for Senior Care / Senior Medical Expense.  There are several components to the Medicare Program, as well as insurance products that help lessen the out-of-pocket medical expenses encountered (Medicare Advantage).

Medicaid is a program targeted at helping senior living in poverty.

Pensions, while not offered as much in businesses anymore, also can play a role in both paying for living expenses and healthcare (some unions and buinesses offer retirees good healthcare benefits, but again, that is becoming rarer and rarer.).

Family assets, including 401Ks, IRAs, saving accounts, as well as the equity in a house or condo owned by the senior, can also play an important role in determing what care options are viable.  Please note that some senior care providers only accept private payments (no Medicare/Medicaid).

There are lots of other things that can play a role in helping pay for senior care – things like long-term care insurance.  We are just focusing on the components most families ask us about.

If you’d like to understand all the potential government benefit programs that your aging loved one may be eligible for, here is a great tool to get started.

4. Search for the right senior care provider

The heart of OurParents is the 100,000 plus senior care provider directory.  Once you know where (i.e., what town/city/zip) you’d like to look for a provider, just use our search tool to enter the location in, and we’ll give you a list of viable providers.  You can then sort the results by things like overall Medicare quality rating, cost, and closeness to your requested location.  You can also use the check boxes on the page to specify any unique requirements you have (e.,g., “I need Alzheimer’s support”).

Each Senior Care Provider has a detailed profile page, with lots more information about them.  You can see user reviews, detailed services provided, Medicare audit results, and lots of other good information that can help you make an informed decision.  Use the search tool to narrow down your list of senior care providers you are interested in.

With a single click, you can request any of these providers to reach out to you to provide more specific information (like costs), and/or schedule an on-site visit.  Again, all this is a FREE service from OurParents.

5. Interview the finalists and make the decision

No decision as important as this should be made without an actual visit to any senior care facility you are considering (or an in-person interview with any proposed in-home care provider).

It is important for you to see first-hand what the care experience is like, what the person/poeple are like who you loved one will interact with, and whether this care provider makes sense for your aging loved one.

Each situation is different.  Each senior has their own personality, their own needs, their own interests.  You are the best judge of what solution works best.

To help you make this important decision, we have a series of interview checklists you can use to make sure you ask all the questions on your mind during the interview/visit.

Summary

The decision about finding a good senior care option for an aging loved one is incredibly complex, and filled with lots of tough issues you and your loved one will face.  Our tools and the process we’ve outlined, coupled with the support of the great OurParents community (who contribute user reviews and also help others in our Forums by offering up advice and guidance), can make the whole process a lot easier.  We hope you find them helpful!

This week, we are announcing the addition of user forums, a destination were you can discuss any senior care related question or issue you may have, be it about nursing homes, “aging in place” (home care), how to pay for senior care, and more. You can  ask questions, or provide insights from your own personal experience. We are quite excited about the evolution of our service.

Please check it out, participate, and let us know what you think.

“Our founding principle is that we are, and always will be on the side of the consumer.  For families in need of help, there is simply no better source of senior care providers on the internet.” – John McKinley – Founder.

OurParents User Forums

Washington, DC (July 23, 2009) – People searching for care for their aging parents find almost no independent advice about senior care facilities online.  Often, these families are drawn to misleading sites whose sole function is to sell their personal information to the highest bidder.  That’s how the so-called lead generation business operates in the senior care industry.  These businesses don’t care about the quality of the providers they sell the leads to, which can lead to some terrible experiences for the impacted families.

That is all changing. OurParents announces today free and immediate access to the largest online directory of senior care providers on the web – over 100,000 care providers across the United States.  The free service is totally independent and unbiased, providing ratings, price information and powerful decision-making tools including the remarkable Care Options Advisor. The site provides free detailed reports about each senior care provider, a $25 to $90 value, absolutely free to consumers.

OurParents.com also provides free access to user reviews, to allow visitors to hear first-hand from others about their experiences with a given care provider.  The goal of OurParents is simple:  to be the one trusted place to go on the web to find the best care solution for a family’s aging loved one.

“Having the largest online directory of senior care providers, over 100,000 so far and growing, was a big goal for us,” said John McKinley, founder and CEO of OurParents.com. “Families need a trusted place to go to see all of the senior care options that are available, and the current lead-gen players fail miserably in fulfilling that role.  Some sites have as few as 4,000 entries.  But OurParents is so much more than that.  We also give consumers a free comparison report with details about a given senior care provider and the surrounding community. Some sites sell less complete reports for $25 to $90. Ours are absolutely free, and the response we’ve gotten from families about them has been great.”

One critical element needed to paint a more complete picture about a given facility is feedback from existing and past residents and their families.  That is why OurParents is also announcing the addition of user reviews for care providers.  “We are the only independent directory in the senior care business.  That allows us to show the good, the bad, and the ugly about any given provider.  Reading user reviews is a great way to understand more about what life is like for a facility’s residents,” said McKinley.  Families of current and past residents can rate a provider along multiple dimensions, including quality of care, helpfulness of staff, and cleanliness.

“It is simple,” said McKinley. “Our founding principle is that we are, and always will be on the side of the consumer.  For families in need of help, there is simply no better source of senior care providers on the internet.”

For more information, visit www.ourparents.com.

Contact:
Amit Shafrir
amit@ourparents.com
(571) 350-8291 x 203

Company defies current business practices of senior care websites with launch of OurParents.com, a free matching service for both consumers and senior care facilities

Washington, DC / May 26, 2009 – Millions of Baby Boomers are struggling to care for their aging parents. Many don’t know where to turn or even what their options are in making important decisions about senior care facilities for their parents.

Until now, the only online services in senior care were heavily biased towards providers paying to have business directed to them. Not anymore. Ourparents.com launched this week with unprecedented access to information about more than 65,000 senior care providers in the U.S.. The free service is totally independent and unbiased, providing ratings, price information and powerful online tools including the remarkable Care Options Advisor. The site is unique in that there is no charge to the consumer or the provider.

Ourparents.com matches aging parents with senior care solutions unique to their specific needs.

“My first-hand experiences with my aging mother showed me how broken the process of finding a senior care solution is,” said John McKinley, founder and CEO of OurParents.com. “I saw sites offering limited senior care options in my area, and little information to help me judge which ones might meet my needs. I felt that my mom represented nothing other than a sales lead that was being sold to only a limited set of senior care providers in that website’s network.”

When it comes to such an important decision as a parent’s long-term care, that bias is fundamentally wrong as a business practice, McKinley said.

“With the launch of OurParents.com, we are declaring war on the current business practices of the senior care lead generation industry,” he said.

Diane Carbo, R.N., a 35-year industry veteran and life care advocate, said that, in her work with families, it has been “frustrating” trying to find a comprehensive independent source of senior care providers.

“OurParents is the best source of senior care options I have seen,” said Carbo, owner of Aging Home Health Care in Cliffside Park, NJ. “I was also impressed by the Care Options Advisor tool. The survey was simple to use, and the responses were accurate and easy for a family to understand.”

OurParents.com has a simple but powerful search engine at its core, allowing visitors to quickly see and compare senior care options in their area. It provides immediate access to information about more than 65,000 in-home care providers, assisted-living facilities and nursing homes. It offers free detailed reports about each care provider – something currently for sale on other sites for $25 to $90. OurParents.com also incorporates the new Medicare five-star quality ratings. Families who are just getting started and unsure which care options make the most sense can use the innovative Care Options Advisor. This tool allows families to quickly describe their loved one’s current condition and the family’s senior care priorities, guiding them to viable care options that meet their needs. Ourparents.com then facilitates direct communication between the family and those senior care providers.

“We don’t charge the families or the care providers, meaning that OurParents.com will never have the problem of conflict of interest when it comes to this critical life decision,” said McKinley. “Our founding principle is that we are and always will be on the side of the consumer.”

For more information, visit www.ourparents.com.

Contact:

Jennifer Wezensky

JW Public Relations

(269) 274-4071

Jennifer@jwpublicrelations.com