I'm struggling to balance work with providing the care that my mother deserves. The most challenging aspect is handling healthcare coordination tasks that must be done during standard business hours, including contacting doctors, insurance companies, and pharmacies. Has anyone discovered strategies or tools for managing both a full-time job and caregiving?
I saw cembla.com manages appointments and does daily wellness phone calls. Has anyone used this?
Her RAZ Mobility phone is controlled by an app on my phone.
All her portal PWs (and mine!) are on my 1Password app.
In my email I flag anything that may need attention/action and I look at that briefly every morning.
I use text alerts (and I put those numbers in my contacts so they show up on caller ID as: CapOne Alerts, WFBank Alerts, BCBS Alerts, etc.).
Other than that you can hire a Geriatric Care manager. I don't have experience with daily wellness phone calls but I see more of that type of service being promoted lately. Rather than pay a stranger to do this, why not ask one of your Mom's neighbors to do it and "pay" them with GCs to stores or services (Target, Amazon, etc). I did this with my in-laws. They only lived 6 miles from us but we were still working full-time in our family business and had 3 sons in school (and my own Mom next door). I discretely asked a very nice and capable neighbor to get their mail in the winter, put their newspaper on their doorstep (from the driveway), and keep an eye on them to alert me if anything seemed off. This worked really well for a long time. I regularly gave her a Target GC and asked her to get necessities from my inlaws and also to buy her own groceries with it. She was happy to do so. I even hid a copy of my inlaws front door key outside, just in case.
Medical offices started doing their own "portals" to save time and trouble dealing with patients (late arrivals, cancellations, reminders) and staying organized. It eliminates a full time Receptionist.
Medical offices use their own specialized software to track patients, their personal info, insurance, billing and payments, plus their medical summaries, labs, test results and more. There's no "patient" type software available to my knowledge.
Why it's so hard to manage caregiving and work full time. Even harder to handle the hands on care included. Why relatives get placed in professional facilities to get 24/7 care, since one person simply CANNOT do it. They need to sleep 8 hrs a night for starters!
... And a year later, when I need to retrieve some information or test result, I of course can't find the password anymore!