The Business of Aging

How to Manage, Operate and Market a Senior Housing Facility

Benjamin Pearce from Potomac Homes emailed me about his new book,  Senior Living Communities. It is a guide book on Operations Management for Assisted Living, Congregate, and Continuing Care retirement communities. It was just released in its second edition by Johns Hopkins University Press. 

Contemporary Gerontology describes the book as an " in-the-trenches approach to the administration and marketing of assisted living, congregate and continuing care facilities".

As the demand for senior residential communities continues to rise with the aging U.S. population, this is a great idea for a book and one that will prove useful to the many administrators and staff members who often are forced to learn by trial and error the complicated task of delivering high-quality and consistent services to elderly persons. It's also a must-read for the many facilities who have been plagued by a variety of administrative and financial difficulties.

Mr. Pearce offers a wealth of sound advice and practical solutions, discussing resident relations, operating methods, staffing ratios, department management, cost containment, sales and marketing strategies, techniques of financial analysis, budgeting, and human resources. New chapters address issues particular to dementia care and architecture, and the appendix contains a department-by-department audit of senior living operations.

Day Care - for Older American's

An article last week in the Wall Street Journal titled Finding Day Care -- For Your Parents  discusses how choices are growing for increasing numbers of Baby Boomers who have frail relatives they are reluctant to leave alone. Here are some interesting facts pulled from article:

- There are over 3,500 "adult" day-care centers in the US.
- Demand for these types of centers is growing at between 5% and 15% a year.
- The National Adult Day Services Association reports that these centers care for about 150,000 residents daily.
- By some industry estimates, adult day care serves at least 400,000 people nationally.
- The national average cost for adult day care is about $61 a day compared to about $152 per day for a home-health aid (8 hour day).
- Medicare & Medicaid Services allows a portion of Medicare home health-care benefits to go toward adult day care.   
- MetLife for the first time included adult day care as a distinct category in its annual report on costs in the long-term care industry.

The industry has also spawned franchising. Sarah Adult Day Services Inc., based in Canton, Ohio, had six centers before it began franchising its 22-year-old operation in 2004. Now it has 54 SarahCare Adult Daycare Centers either open or in some level of development in about a dozen states. Each center serves between 40 and 50 people a day, and offers day-spa services such as salons.

Look for more employers to begin offering adult care employee benefits - much like they have been doing so with child care work-life benefits. Some have already done so as evident by this release from LifeCare, a provider of work life employee benefits.