While working for a large national home-care company in the ’90s, registered nurse Joel Theisen decided there was a better way to help seniors thrive. His growing frustration with what he considered the wait-till-it’s broken-then-fix-it mentality of the health care industry only added to his resolve. In 2004, Theisen raised seed money from family and friends to launch Edina-based AgeWell Home Care, a company devoted to keeping seniors healthy and living independently.
“I felt strongly that we had to start working with our senior population with more of a preventive, planning model that included not just the medical piece but also psychosocial aspects of service,” says Theisen, who cofounded AgeWell with Carole Overby and Beth Nemec. (Overby, the company’s director of operations, works mostly remotely, from California; Nemec is the general manager.) “Current models of care were not delivering the kind of value and outcomes that I wanted to see and that my parents and grandparents wanted to see.”
Most companies that provide services to seniors, Theisen asserts, “build very definable need-driven or payer-driven models: ‘If Medicaid pays for that, I can build a business around it.’ What’s different about us is that our model is built on a platform that isn’t need-driven. It’s about how to create a quality of life.”
AgeWell’s holistic Life Care Management model focuses on seven elements of life, including physical health and well-being, cognitive health, social support, and finances, as well as the activities and plans a senior wishes to accomplish in his or her life.
After interviewing a senior and his or her family, AgeWell’s team builds a priority list and action plan around these seven elements. AgeWell then brings in services and resources to help the senior live the kind of life he or she wants to live. “Just because you’re old doesn’t mean that you can’t have fun and find a lot to get excited about,” Theisen says.
According to Theisen, most seniors don’t come to AgeWell until a health crisis forces them to. “Our society is more reactive than forward-thinking and planning,” he notes, adding that almost all of AgeWell’s roughly $9 million in annual revenues comes from private-pay or long-term care insurance. “We’re trying to educate seniors and communities to get us involved earlier so we can put a plan in place before a crisis hits. That will help them maintain a higher quality of life instead of being subjected to the rollercoaster phenomenon where there’s a crisis, the family rushes in, the system fixes them, they plateau for a while, and then they drop down into another crisis.”
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