Care3 PACE Success Stories

Elderly Woman with Heart Failure and COPD

One story is of an elderly woman with heart failure and COPD who lives at home. Even though she went to the PACE center to receive medical care and recreational activities twice a week, her family still needed to make sure she could take care of herself to avoid going into a nursing home.

Her family used Care3 to track the housekeeping and fluid intake to avoid falls and over-hydration. Over the course of three months, her falls reduced and she stayed out of the hospital.

Chinese Participant Family

A Chinese woman went to the PACE center three times a week and needed home-based therapy to complement the care in the center. The problem was that the doctor couldn’t make contact with the woman’s family, mostly for scheduling reasons. The elderly woman took a flyer home about Care3 (we offer Chinese as one of our languages) to connect with her doctor and the care team.

The woman’s family began using Care3 to send messages and indicate completion with home-based care tasks and therapies. Care3 was the conduit for helping optimize the home environment for the patient and gave insight about care in the home that the doctor and other care team members were blind to and would eventually lead to problems.

Home Care: Parkinson’s

There’s the story of the 70 year-old man with Parkinson’s and onset of dementia who had been hospitalized twice in the last two months because of falls. His 74 year-old brother was his caregiver and needed an app to manage the home care aide he had hired for his brother.

He found Care3 and started a conversation with the aide to track the care tasks to be completed. His brother was reluctant to allow his aide to use a mobile app while taking care of him. After 60 days on the app, there were no more falls and the brother began using the app himself to connect with his brother and other family members about his care. Care3 helped bring the family together, improve the brother’s care, and help the home care worker track her work.

Participant with Family Out of State

A participant in California had two adult children living in Texas. The adult children employed a home care aide to look in on their mother a few days a week in addition to the PACE care she was receiving. The problem was communication. Phone calls and voicemails from the adult children went unanswered because of time zone issues, scheduling issues, and other obstacles that made correspondence nearly impossible.

The PACE program began using Care3 for text messaging with participant family members. The Texas family was ecstatic. They could finally be in touch with the interdisciplinary team in a timely manner. They could schedule calls when they needed to happen. Most importantly, they could quickly get answer to questions from IDT members and not have to wait for a return phone call that often never came. Think about the level of frustration avoided just by offering a texting solution—reduced anxiety from the participant family members who are remote and much less clinical burnout for IDT members due to inability to respond.