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Aging • Caregiving Looking Back… and Ahead

From our House to yours, we hope you have enjoyed a restful, happy and healthy holiday season. Before we bid farewell to the year, we want to share with you some of our proudest accomplishments of 2018 and give you a preview of what’s in the works for 2019.

If you are not familiar with HouseWorks, we are the leading in-home care company in Greater Boston and MetroWest. With private home care at our core, our diverse team is inspired to take aging to the next level by developing in-home care solutions that support and engage seniors through every transition.

This year, our work investing in our Caregivers and listening to our customers, along with our laser-focused approach to service delivery, is clearly working. Highlights for 2018 include:

New Caregivers

  • Our new Chief People Officer Bill Holmes and his extraordinary HR team hired more than 100 experienced Caregivers in just five months, 3x the number for the same time last year.
  • A fresh energy was created around onboarding and training Caregivers with our new online training tool Care Academy, a learning management system focused on helping Caregivers in the field learn new skills and deal with real-life situations.

Growth

  • The addition of new investors sparked our creativity and fueled our growth.
  • In January RAB Ventures, LLC acquired a significant interest in HouseWorks. The group is led by veteran health care industry executives Richard Barasch, Gary Jacobs and Tony Wolk.
  • In September, Tony Wolk was named executive vice president of development for HouseWorks.
  • Last summer, HouseWorks expanded beyond Greater Boston to MetroWest—enabling us to develop new relationships in several senior housing residences in a new geography.

Advancing Our High-Touch, Personalized Service

  • In 2018, we refined and expanded a unique model of service management made of interdisciplinary teams dedicated to a single group of clients and their families.
  • This service model ensures stronger Caregiver-client matches and a single point of contact for families or senior housing partners. Caregivers feel more connected, which in turn leads to better care outcomes and happier days for our clients.

Alzheimer’s and Dementia Training

  • Within every team at HouseWorks, there is an intensified focus on helping clients with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia.
  • We launched a Certified Dementia Practitioner (CDP) training program which ensures staff stay current with trends, ethics, regulations, medications and new developments pertaining to dementia.
  • HouseWorks Caregivers participated in a project funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and conducted by Hearthstone Alzheimer Care. The study, called HOME 4 CARE™, tested a unique app that teaches Caregivers new ways to interact with dementia clients using an iPad. Reports from the field are very positive.

Technology, Innovation & Thought Leadership

  • HouseWorks sponsored the first Innovation in Caregiving conference in Boston in November, bringing together pioneers from home care, managed care and aging technology.
  • HouseWorks’ Founder and CEO Andrea Cohen, along with HouseWorks’ new investor Gary Jacobs, emphasized that to deliver innovation in homecare at scale, “… culture, values and mission have to permeate the entire business.”
  • Andrea and Gary joined other nationally-recognized thought leaders in aging, innovation and technology at Aging 2.0 OPTIMIZE in San Francisco.
  • As a board member of Caregiver Action Network (CAN) Andrea was very moved by CAN’s  “Creating the Voice,” event where several family caregivers from around the nation were honored for their compassion, courage and commitment. 
  • A newly appointed advisory council member for the Homes Renewed Coalition, Andrea has joined a cross-industry group that drives policy to create home update incentives—an issue that aligns with our vision that integrates service delivery with environmental design.   

 Staff Self-Care

  • We introduced Life XT an initiative which provides a set of interactive, personalized life tools to optimize energy and productivity. 
  • The Life XT customized one-on-one well-being coaching helps our team manage stress in all parts of their lives.

2018 has been quite a year, and we have only just begun! Next year—in addition to expansion into new geographies—we are launching a dementia product using our Certified Dementia Specialists and digital tools that will empower our clients to lead their best lives. We will be heading up several technology trials that will benefit our clients and our strategic partners as well as enable us to predict and measure outcomes. HouseWorks’ focus on our Caregivers will continue—early next year we are rolling out a mobile app that gives Caregivers access to more than 3,000 physicians wherever, whenever. AND…. stay tuned for a new look, more functionality and useful content on the HouseWorks website.

Thank you for joining us on this incredible journey. We could not have done it without you. We know our shared vision will enrich the lives of our clients, their families and our strategic partners in the year ahead. From everyone at HouseWorks, we wish you a very happy, healthy and safe New Year.