Elderlaw Attorney Archives ⋆ Cathy Cress

How Do the Benefits Not Features Get 3rd Parties To Refer To You ?

June 6, 2023

Benefits you bring to the 3rd party and their aging client.

What makes 3rd Parties Refer to Geriatric Care Managers? The Benefits You Offer 3rd party and their aging client.

Why would third parties like trust officers, elder law attorneys, conservators, or guardians refer a care manager to their aging client and family? If you have an Aging Life or GCM business you need to know.It is the benefits you bring to the 3rd party and their aging client.

Benefits you bring to the 3rd party and their aging client.

The Journal of Aging Life Care its March 2017 issue gives care managers some critical clues to solve this question. The first benefit you offer is a practice that meets your client’s needs and major referral sources. Many clients- usually adult children, call you to start services independently. But a good majority of clients will call you because their attorney, bank trust officers, or CPA referred them. These third parties need to know what benefits you offer them and their clients if they are to make referrals to your agency. On the feeding chain of referrals, they are one of your most important sources to feed income for your business. You have to deliver what benefit you offer where they make money.

Great Research Results on What 3rd Parties Want in Benefit You Offer

The Florida Chapter of Aging Life invested in a 7-year research project to get some of these benefits you bring to the 3rd party, and their aging client answers about the best benefit you offer, published in the Aging Life Journal. in March 2017. This is the first research study on Aging Life Care that pinpoints what third parties who refer clients want and value in a care manager. It is groundbreaking.

Reading this tells the care manager, not only what benefit you offer to include in your services but in your marketing material and sales pitch or elevator pitch to the third party. The study tells you what 3rd parties are looking for in a senior advocate for them. They found the number one reason third-party clients use care managers is they keep the client’s health care stable by assessing and monitoring their clients. So the important benefit to selling is keeping the client’s health care stable so the client is not calling the 3rd party.

The second benefit updating the third parties regularly. The benefit you bring to the 3rd party and their aging client is communication so the 3rd party always knows the client’s status. This can be through texts, email, phone calls, or a regular monthly report, which would also be done for the family. So use the key benefits of “constant updates “when you market to third parties, like wealth managers, elder law attorneys, guardians, assisted living, and doctors. Get a copy of this important Journal if you belong to ALCA or join, as this type of information is one of the many many benefits of the Aging Life Care Association by joining.

SIGN UP FOR MY FREE WEBINAR

Sell Benefits, not Features &Grow Your$ Bottom Line

Even if you cannot make the class, if you sign up, you will get a recording the next day

When: July 20 2023
2 PM-3:30 PM PST
Learn

A feature is a fact

A benefit tells customers the advantages of those facts

YOU WILL LEARN

How to create a winning sales pitch to a third party

The difference between selling features vs benefits

How to sell the benefits of your services for each 3rd party you serve

What benefit you offer makes your sale to wealth managers, elder law attorneys, and concierge physicians to get referrals for new clients

The Benefits that make your sale to upscale Assisted Living, accountants, financial planners, Hospice

Step by Step on how to set up meetings with 3rd parties to make the sale

Even if you cannot attend, you will get the recording of the webinar the next day if you sign up

SIGN UP And Take of One-time Low price offers of Classes

Why a Financial Planner Would Work With a Caremanager

September 20, 2022

Why Would a Care Manager Work With a Financial Planner?

Why a financial planner would work with a caremanager and why do you need to know this? First, you need to create a practice that meets the needs of third-party referral sources like financial planners, and wealth managers. They both work with older adults to plan and then manage their retirement assets, which often involves future or present care management.

What is the difference between a wealth manager? Forbes magazine suggests that wealth managers, who are actually a subset of financial planners, deal with high net wealth – perhaps the upper 2 %. Financial Managers deal with retirees who have large assets, not stratospheric wealth. However, they both help retirees plan their retirement, and part of that retirement becomes the cost of care as they age after retirement. Generally, clients who use a financial advisor are pre-planners so the care manager can help the financial planner and the client think through future care situations in advance which helps the financial planner provide the advisor with a roadmap for potential expenses

But financial planners need to know what you will do to benefit their clients. This means how will you benefit their practice? On the feeding chain of referrals, financial planners can be an important source of income for your business. But you have to deliver what they need in benefits to make money.

Benefits and Features

Features and benefits are very different. Features often directly address common problems experienced by users. Benefits are the outcomes or results that users will experience by using your product or service – the very reason why a prospective customer becomes an actual customer.

Features Care Managers Bring to Financial Planners

Why a financial planner would work with a care manager is Financial Planners are not often experienced with the full cost of future health care expenses. A feature of a care manager practice is understanding Medicare and its severe limits on paying for long-term care. Care Managers understand approximately when ADLs and IADLs will get more difficult for seniors, leading them to need some level of private pay home care. They also know Medicare does not cover long-term care like Private Duty Home care.

A big feature is care managers can also assess the client’s level of competency to make financial decisions so the financial planner can gauge whether the client can make decisions about their own money.

Biggest Feature Care Managers Bring to Financial

Planners

The biggest feature of a care manager working with a financial planner is they can offer their clients a one-to-one concierge future health care expense plan, estimating how much long-term care will cost over time for each individual financial planning client.

So the care manager benefits the financial Planner by personally, one-to-one- working with the financial advisor’s clients helping them make both a retirement plan that includes health care realities and listening to and including their own individual health care choices.

Care Management Benefits to Financial Planners

Financial Planners are pre-planners and the care managers can help the financial health care costs and tailor that future health care to the client’s choices to help them think through situations in advance helping provide the advisor a roadmap for potential expenses. Care Managers can collaborate to create a long-term care plan for clients who wish to move or need to move to a higher level of care. They can personally collaborate with the client to create a long-term care plan for clients who wish to stay at home as financial planner plans accordingly for the cost of care. The outcome or the benefit of the collaboration of the financial planner and care managers is a fulsome more accurate financial plan for the aging client combining health and wealth planning skills.

This is like a care management benefit to a conservator. A geriatric care manager is a health professional who specializes in the physical and mental issues of an older person. So care managers benefit from a conservator or helping to map out the care of psychosocial and health care issues of older conservatees and what will be the cost of future care.

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Care Managers Marketing to Wealth Managers”

When September 27^th, 2-3:30 PM Pacific

Sign-up Understand how to market to the target and you open the door to the top 5% of

Learn how to sell your services to the gatekeepers to the clients who can pay privately for long periods of time, when you deliver your gold standard care management services.

Wealth managers and trust officers will refer their VIP clients to you if you can sell care management benefits and features to their entitled clients,

bring the right handouts and, do the perfect presentation with the winning pitch

When September 27^th 2-3:30 PM Pacific

What you will learn

Why market to wealth managers, financial planners, and trust departments
The benefits and features GCM offers to wealth managers financial planners and trust departments
Who are top wealth managers
How do you find them, set up a meeting, what to bring, what to present with the perfect pitch

Interview with GCM Patrice Harrison who works with trusts – what they want in a GCM

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Why Would 3rd Parties like Conservators or Guardians Use a Care Manager ?

March 7, 2022

Why Would a Conservator Hire a Care Manager?

Why would third parties like conservators or guardians use a care manager and why do you need to know this? First, you need to create a practice that meets the needs of major referral sources like conservators, the term we use in the west or in the east a guardian. Adult children, call you to start services on their own but a conservator calls you directly.

Why would third parties like conservators or guardians use a care manager? A conservator or guardian has the legal choice in hiring a geriatric care manager or ALCA member. But conservators need to know what you will do to benefit them with their clients if they are to work with your agency. This means how will you benefit their practice. On the feeding chain of referrals, conservators or guardians can be one of your most important sources of income for your business. You have to deliver what they need in benefits to make money.

Benefits and Features

Conservators need to know what you will do to benefit them with their clients if they are to work with your agency.Features and benefits are very different. Features often directly address common problems experienced by users. Benefits are the outcomes or results that users will experience by using your product or service – the very reason why a prospective customer becomes an actual customer.

Why would third parties like conservators or guardians use a care manager?Conservators need to know what you will do to benefit them with their clients if they are to work with your agency

A conservator is a legal entity that manages money and the legal guidelines of the conservatorship are often because of undue influence. A geriatric care manager is a health professional who specializes in the physical and mental issues of an older person. So care managers benefit a conservator or guardian by monitoring and arranging the care of psychosocial and health care issues of older conservatees.

Help with Dysfunctional Families

Why would third parties like conservators or guardians use a care manager? Conservators often work with the very dysfunctional families of the conservatee. However many guardians or conservators have financial rather than psychosocial backgrounds. Therefore the benefit of a care manager is they are skilled in interceding with dysfunctional families and can take the conservator off the hot seat. Care managers benefit the conservator by intervening with a difficult family and addressing the client’s needs, symptoms and defenses to protect the conservatee, for the guardian. This is a great benefit to the conservator, who often does not have these skills.

Some other examples of benefits you bring to a conservator

You can act as a ‘medical information hub,’ attending doctor appointments and providing the conservator with physician notes, current vital signs, medications information, and treatment directions.
You can assess whether care in a facility is delivered as contracted by the conservator.
You monitor the physical and mental health issues of an older person and report back to the conservator
You can staff a conservator’s case with excellent care providers if the conservatee needs caregivers at home or in a higher level of care

How Do you Sell Your Services to a Guardian or Conservator – Benefits

SIGN UP FOR MY FREE WEBINAR

Sell Benefits, not Features &Grow Your$ Bottom Line

Even if you cannot make the class if you sign up you will get a recording the next day

When: March 15, 2022
2 PM-3:30 PM PST
Learn

A feature is a fact

A benefit tells customers advantages of those facts

Find out More

YOU WILL LEARN

How to create a winning sales pitch to a third party

The difference between selling features vs benefits

How to sell benefits of your services for each 3rd party

What Benefits make your sale to conservators or guardians wealth managers, elder law attorneys, and concierge physicians to get referrals for new clients

The Benefits that make your sale to upscale Assisted Living, accountants, financial planners, Hospice

Step by Step how to set up meetings with 3rd parties to make the sale

Even if you cannot attend you will get the recording of the webinar the next day if you sign up

SIGN UP And Take of One-time Low price offers of Classes

Join me in my new FREE Webinar

Avoid Aretha Franklin’s Fate- Help Elders at Risk of Covid & Prepare End Of Life Docs Fast

January 30, 2021

Preparations for Death a Hard Step for Some

Everyone must prepare for the end of life. When Aretha Frankin died a tribute to her was an armada of 100 pink Cadillacs at her funeral. But in spite of the glittery homage to her storied life and career, she died without a will.

According to Aretha’s ‘lawyer, Ms. Frankin was aware she needed to take care of this but ” never got around to it”. This left her estate liable for potentially millions of dollars of taxes and attorney fees and a drawn-out timeline for her 4 sons to inherit the proceeds from her estate.

Franklin was, as many have said, ” a force of nature” and a woman who would be hard to sway. But care managers specialize in working with VIP clients and the rich and famous. These clients are often uber difficult to work with- entitled, narcissistic equally hard to sway. Aretha Franklin’s attorney might have convinced her that she needed to work with him to protect her family and her estate before she died.

In the Year of the Plague Care Managers Preparing Clients For Death More Urgent

You as a care manager must take a more urgent approach by yourself or with the client’s attorney because the stakes are so much higher as now elders are likely to die with this virus rampaging throughout the world, striking the people with comorbidity, like people over 65, the hardest

Most geriatric care managers work with the wealthy top 10% if they want to survive as a business as Medicare does not cover long term care. Only the top 10%, like Aretha Frankin, can afford it. But what comes from being a good care manager is knowledge of death. End of Life care is one of their jobs. Making sure their client has all their legal documents ahead of time is critical at this minute. With COVID-19 that clock runs on speed.

, these documents- one a living will- are an important job of the geriatric manager, as death

may be shrouded and waiting around the corner for many of your clients

Advanced Care Planning Discussions In Covid Critical

Once the COVID-19 is known with an elderly client, the care manager who has added “end of life services” to their agency, is often the one who will initiate and guide advance care planning discussions. The problem with COVID-19 is that the onset of the disease can be rapid. As difficult as these discussions may be, the burden on the family is significantly lessened if decisions about advance care planning are made before the client’s condition worsens.

Hopefully, this has already been done but many people put it off for fear of death. A recent study found that less than 50% of severely or terminally ill patients had an advance directive in their medical record.

Advance directives are legal documents that allow clients to make decisions about their health care and finances in advance of when they are not mentally or physically able to do so. These documents must be signed, dated, and witnessed naming another person to make decisions for you.

Your job as a care manager is the make sure your older client has these documents before they have COVID-19:

A durable power for an attorney for healthcare
A living will
A do not resuscitate order DNR (efforts to restart the heart after it has stopped

If No Advanced Care Documents & COVID Strikes Elders Wishes Unfulfilled

If the client does not have these legal documents and wishes to create them, the Geriatric Care Manager will suggest that the documents be put in place with the oversight and consultation of an elder law attorney.

But During Covid-19 could rush an elderly client towards death like a mammoth mudslide sweeping them into a hospital where no one can enter, even the family.

Care Managers play a big role at end of life issues. They are their navigators through all five stages of dying, which is the time before COVID-19 could be long before palliative care or hospice are called.

But in this plague reign, there is little time to plan so the five stages of death are on steroids. So, talk to your clients now before they get into a screaming ambulance to the hospital where no one can follow the including you, and may never return.

GCM Care Planning Stope Elders From Dying Without a Will Like Aretha Franklin

Proactive discussions and legal planning now can help to reduce the risk of dying like Frankin leaving the legacy of her music, a soundtrack to her life but a family both shattered and at war with each other. The COVID-19 clients you see now could be in this position and their families will be left with no rituals no funeral no advanced directives and only hopefully a zoom family meeting to say their last words. Good legal guidance can also help clients make better decisions, avoids all this other legal horror on top of the torturous death of coronavirus. Making a will or a trust now will save the family from adding to the burden of a lonely painful death.

SIGN UP FOR MY LATEST FREE WEBINAR

Deliver a Good End of Life- Add Death and Dying to Your Care Management Agency

Serve Your Client Until Death Do You Part

Join me Thursday, March 11 and learn why End of Life Services Are a perfect new service for care managers

In this 1 ½ -hour webinar you will learn how to

1.Transition the patient/family through the five stages of death.

2.Help clients be active participants in their care

3.Give the family/caregiver tools to manage care

4 Provide family center care to caregiver and family

5 Choose the right support services through all stages of death

6.Introduce Hospice and Palliative care and work with their team

7 Use ALCA End of Life Benefits During COVID

8.Use COVID -19 Family Coaching for GCM

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If you really want to add End of Life to your care management business sign up for this webinar now

Recommendations

Cathy is a great consultant who has helped me remain focused and balanced while developing my business and juggling other responsibilities. I highly recommend using the operations manual as a guide for businesses, especially startups. Also, tools such as Cathy’s competition survey, marketing survey, and Cathy’s book entitled Handbook of Geriatric Care Management are great resources to use now and future. Cathy is the business coach/business consultant I needed. I will always be grateful for the time and money she saved me during this process. Thanks, so much Cathy for all that you do! I appreciate you!

Patrice Harrison LMSW, IPR

Presented by:
CATHY CRESS, MSW

The 2 Deadliest US Sites of COVID-19 Nursing Homes & Prisons

May 2, 2020

PRISON INMATES AND NURSING HOME PATIENTS NOT 6FT APART – 6 FEET UNDER

70% of inmates in federal prisons have COVID-19. In Kansas, the Lansing Correctional Facility had a riot of inmates over COVID-19 lack of care or protection It took the rebellion to get the coronavirus testing PPE and care. The Bureau of Prisons in Kansas confirmed finally that 79 staff have coronavirus and 88 prisons and prisoners dead.

Older residents in nursing homes cannot rebel like prisoners. Many can’t even walk. The Atlantic Magazine just published an article, We are Killing Elders Now. The writer states “In at least six states, these fatalities account for half of all COVID-19 deaths, and according to the World Health Organization, half of all coronavirus fatalities in Europe have been traced to nursing homes too. Some of this mortality is linked to long-term-care facilities that are shoddily run or that violate health standards. But most of them are doing the best they can with what they have. And they don’t have much”.

KAISER FOUNDATION NURSING HOME STAFFING AND USE OF PPE NOT REQUIRED IN MOST STATES

Kaiser reports -Staff Screening. It is more common for states to recommend rather than require daily screening of staff for illness in NFs (24 states recommend, 16 states + DC require)

Use of PPE. More states recommend (23 states) than require (7 states + DC) staff to use PPE

Two States that require testing for coronavirus of ALL residents of nursing homes are Maryland where 556 have died as of the Washington Post article. and Tennessee

THE FEDS HAVE NO CMS FEDERAL GUIDELINES OR REPORTING

We have no federal guidelines for safety testing according to an article by the Kaiser Foundation

It is now estimated that 16,000 deaths have occurred in nursing homes and that is without the federal government revealing any numbers and not making available any testing. But the numbers are probably huge- if we could just do testing.

CMS announced it would have a meeting of a “panel” of experts “ sometime at the end of May”. After probably 20,000 older people died and the feds did nothing this shows their sense of urgency about this pandemic’s national “elder cleansing”.

WHAT CONNECTS PRISONS AND NURSING HOMES – CONCENTRATION CAMPS

So, what is the connection between the viral spread of COVID-19 in nursing homes and prisons- 6 feet ? Prisoners and residents, in nursing homes, and prisons cannot social distance. Jails and prisons have human beings crammed together with no choice. Nursing homes have 2 beds or if you are on Medicaid three to a room. Neither group has a choice to social distance. They are ” concentrated” as in concentration camps or death camps.

Do SOMETHING – HELP NURSING HOMES PREVENT MORE CARNAGE

So, as someone who has spent her career in aging, I am calling out to everyone, especially professional in aging – do something. Since the feds appear to be doing little- call your congressman, write a letter to the editor.

BE KIND LIKE RACHEL MADDOW REPORTS LA JEWISH HOME LA WAS

Rachel Maddow suggests calling your local nursing homes and see what they need. Be kind like the LA Jewish Home was to a smaller nursing home LA Brier Oaks. They wanted to test their residents and had no tests and the larger LA Jewish Home had tests and shared them with the smaller as a good neighbor. What they found was ravaging but it also showed caring and generosity. Care and be generous and show the helpless elders in nursing homes in your town you are opposed to -nursing home being prisons or concentration camps.