Here’s where helpers can get help
Wellthy assists caregivers through maze of health care
Lindsay Jurist-Rosner knows she’s a statistic: one of about 40 million Americans, according to AARP, who act as caregivers to the aging, chronically ill or disabled. Her mother has had multiple sclerosis for 26 years.
But unlike most other caregivers, Jurist-Rosner can now help others faced with the same concerns.
Jurist-Rosner is the founder and CEO of Wellthy, a New Yorkbased concierge service that helps those caregivers deal with the multiple complications of the health care system, from wading through hospital bills to organizing transportation.
“My stress and struggle and frustration were not unique to me,” Jurist Rosner says.
Wellthy, begun in 2015, offers a nationwide network of independent contractor care coordinators — “skilled, warm and empathetic,” Jurist Rosner says — assigned to individual cases who, with family members, create and implement digital care plans.
Wellthy costs between $200 and $400 a month, depending on the level of service.
Such navigating companies are a growing field. Dallas-based Compass Professional Health Services, for example, markets itself to companies to provide a similar service as an employee benefit.
Jurist-Rosner likes to tell the story of a man who came to Wellthy upon the recent death of his wife. He was deluged with hospital bills and had no idea which ones to pay. She says that over the next six months,
Wellthy was able to work to reduce his $550,000 in bills to $239.
Because Wellthy is active in all 50 states, relatives can manage the care of a patient remotely, sparing them from sudden trips and time lost from work, she says.
According to Joe Gaugler, who teaches at the University of Minnesota School of Nursing and is an expert in longterm care, the American health care system is simply not set up to deal with current conditions. “It’s largely an acute-care model,” he says, designed to diagnose and treat sudden illness or accident.
But with so many cases of chronic heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer’s, among other ailments, that model doesn’t work. The burden falls on family members. “It’s timeconsuming and it affects all parts of their life,” he says, even to the point of harming the health of the caregiver, too.
Two-thirds of the caregivers are women. JuristRosner says her figures show that a daughter is three times as likely to be a caregiver as a son, and a wife two times as likely as a husband.
“They are adult daughters, and in many cases well into middle age, with multiple care responsibilities and employment,” Gaugler says. “All those things together can be daunting.”
The value of unpaid family care for Alzheimer’s patients alone, he says, is eight times the revenue of McDonald’s. “It’s a massive economy in and of itself,” Gaugler says.
Employers are starting to catch on, and more are contracting with caremanagement services, he says.
That, in addition to individuals, is an audience Wellthy is also reaching out to. “The financials make so much sense,” Jurist-Rosner says. “It makes an employee loyal.”
This is especially attractive to companies with older employee bases and longer retention, she says.
Jurist-Rosner says she finds the work deeply satisfying. “So many people are silently struggling,” she says.