How Senior Helpers Solved One of Home Care’s Most Pressing Needs Through its New Comprehensive, Data-Driven LIFE Profile™ Assessment

When putting a care plan into place for a loved one, it can be difficult to gain a clear understanding of the specific type of care they truly need. That’s why Senior Helpers developed LIFE Profile™, a data-driven assessment tool that provides a holistic view of the risks and factors that influence a loved one’s ability to age in their own home.

In a field where there isn’t any set standard for quantifying the social factors that influence patient health, LIFE Profile draws on more than 18 years of research to provide a measurable means of assessing a patient’s safety and autonomy, the first tool to ever exist in the home care space.

Senior Helpers Vice President of Strategic Development Michael Hughes was one of the minds behind the development of the revolutionary LIFE Profile tool. For him, the motivation to take on a project of this magnitude was rooted in the desire to provide the fullest scope of care possible.

“The spark that ignited the development of LIFE Profile was the same one that simmers underneath all that we do, which is our mission to deliver a better quality of care to our clients in the most consistent, data-driven way possible,” Hughes said. “As it stands, even the highest-quality in-home care provider can only care by feel, meaning, they do what they believe makes sense based on that individual’s unique circumstances and our experience in the field. But to really take care of people in a way that improves their quality of life in a measurable way, we need data.”

It was the journey to find that data and apply it in a meaningful way that set Senior Helpers on the course to develop what would become LIFE Profile, a first-of-its-kind comprehensive assessment that considers five key factors that are most important for successful aging—safety; independence; medical condition management; burden of care; and quality of life—to develop an actionable plan of care that is safe and empowering, above all.

LIFE Profile considers these factors that influence hospitalization rates and health outcomes of the aging population—environmental, individual and task-related risks; ability to reliably perform activities of daily living; ability to manage symptoms of chronic conditions; and feelings of being, belonging and becoming—to come up with scores that form a benchmark on which to gauge the success of the care Senior Helpers provides.

The safety assessment is comprised of activities that evaluate each of the five key factors: safety; independence; medical condition management; burden of care; and quality of life. Individual scores then create a single base score to which care is applied with an objective to reduce the score over time. The second score, the autonomy score, assesses a client’s ability to manage their medical condition. Improving this autonomy score, meaning to increase it over time, leads to a decreased hospitalization and re-hospitalization risk. The LIFE Profile autonomy score, Hughes said, is considered the “cornerstone of Senior Helpers’ philosophy of care,” and can accurately show what quality care looks like in action.

“LIFE Profile is a consistent way of assessing and measuring the risk associated with clients based on the social determinants of health, meaning, the way their environment, behaviors, and circumstances impact their overall health,” Hughes explained. “Through the assessment, we can identify risks associated with social determinants of health that may lead to hospitalization and a lower quality of life for our clients. It was something that was really needed in home care, and we are the first to create a means of doing so.”

And with the development of the LIFE Profile assessment, Senior Helpers has the potential to change the field of home care forever.

“We’re the first in-home care company to have a comprehensive data-driven approach to measuring care needs of clients,” Hughes continued. “It’s common sense that’s been present in healthcare for decades, but was never quantified before now. What we’re doing is more necessary than ever because this work keeps people out of the hospital.”

LIFE Profile is a framework that considers all of the relevant social, behavioral, functional and environmental influencers of patient health, identifies and measures their related risks and reveals a model of care that effectively reduces them. Its results suggest that the quality and appropriateness of support is more important than having a certain amount or type of assistive care, allowing Senior Helpers to develop customized, holistic plans for the individuals its caregivers work with.

“[With this assessment], we’re elevating ourselves to care consultants as opposed to just warm bodies in homes,” Hughes said. “We are giving families and clients a blueprint for care needs, providing them with a formalized model of care that is focused on building autonomy and celebrating quality of life, above all.”

As for the future of LIFE Profile, Hughes said Senior Helpers has big plans.

“We are building software around this assessment that will allow us to be able to collect new types of data about social determinants of health and effective care delivery, data we can share with our network and the broader healthcare space to develop best practices and demonstrate how we can move the needle as it relates to comprehensive care,” Hughes said. “We don’t know what it is going to look like yet, but it’s really exciting and potential is huge.”