Connect for Healthcare: Helping Care Providers Communicate with Families

I can hear objections already about Connect for Healthcare: yet another tool for adult children to avoid talking with or visiting aging parents? But founder Neil Moore, who has many years under his belt in Health IT, may be onto something. This new subscription-based service enables care providers to use a structured and secure way to communicate status to family members about their loved ones who are receiving some sort of long-term care.

How Connect for Healthcare Works

A family member can select up to 10 wellness attributes from a structured list of 40—sleeping, eating, mobility, and medication, for example—that providers like nursing homes, home care agencies, assisted living facilities, or a home care aide update and provide in secure and recipient-selected mechanisms once a week ($15/month). Free-form comments can be included and the pricing goes up if the information is updated more than once a week or the recipients include multiple family members.

How It Helps Care Providers & Families

Two aspects of this offering can be quite compelling. The first is a win for care providers: if reliably up-to-date, Connect for Healthcare can augment or replace the phone tag and multiple sibling calls requesting the same status update. Second, although some families do a great job of nominating a spokesperson who communicates well with all siblings, with this service, the family benefits from the structure of the information, versus a free-form telephone chat with an on-duty nurse or aide, followed by additional calls to get an answers to the needed-but-not-asked questions.

Who Should Pay for It?

In the long run, probably providers should pay. Although the pricing structure is for individuals or families there is a clear benefit for providers to purchase the Connect for Healthcare service, using it as a care management application, on behalf of all the patients and/or residents in their care. For some providers, this may be the only system-structured record keeping they would use in otherwise paper-based and free form note-taking setting. Recognizing this, Connect for Healthcare provides printed forms in which status can be circled and then multiple data entry forms entered as a batch.

Integrating the Service with Existing Care Management Systems

In the future, the information should be integrated and loaded from an existing system—for example, Resource System's CareTracker—treating Connect For Healthcare as an adjacent output system. According to founder Neil Moore, Connect for Healthcare offers provider pricing that would make it sensible to just give the capability to family members at no charge. The Good, the Bad & the Balance

When updated properly, a system like Connect for Healthcare can eliminate the cumbersome status update family phone tag with administrators, aides and nurses. In that regard, it looks appealing as a tool for rehab facilities and hospitals, especially if the information is easily derived from another already-deployed system. It can also eliminate clumsy exchanges among a large group of relatives.

Just as these are positives, there is a risk that providers will miss an update, or that one or more family members won't trust the information and will call anyway, or that the information is inaccurate or out of date, and that the resident is far more ill than indicated. Any of these factors will dilute or even eliminate the benefit of a system like this.

On balance, however, there is a great opportunity with a system like Connect for Healthcare, which should really be part of an overall care management and communication solution. By improving otherwise shaky communication and by forcing everyone's focus toward the same information and same goals, Connect for Healthcare could actually improve care.

Posted in Aging in Place Technology, How Can Care Managers or Others Help?