Outpatient Blog

Unique Employee Benefits

#DidYouKnow that one of the biggest challenges facing working adults, and their employers, is Caregiving?  In other words, taking care of a family member or close friend. We all know people who’ve been in this situation, if not ourselves. The real impact and scale of this problem, though, may surprise you.  Read more below about caregiving and the unique employee benefits to employers…

So, it turns out there’s a high likelihood that if you’re a caregiver, you’re also working full time and have other daily responsibilities as well. The reverse is also true. If you’re a working adult, there’s a good chance you’re currently or have been involved in caregiving in some way. If it sounds crazy to you, ask your friends and co-workers. The numbers don’t lie and they’re astounding.

Several well-known firms have recently published reports on this topic – including Harvard Business School (@HarvardHBS ), AARP (@AARP), Pew (@PewResearch) and the National Alliance for Caregiving (@NA4Caregiving‏). While there are small variances, they all show the same trend. This is a big problem and getting worse.

Statistics About Caregiving Employees:

Companies are looking at their people and realizing they need support. The risk of not doing so is much worse. In fairness to employers, this hasn’t always been such a dramatic problem. But an aging workforce (i.e. baby boomers) and a super tight job market accentuates the challenge. Add in the female workforce, and you start to see this major trend. Regarding caregivers, women tend to be primary in this role and either way, the impact of job + ‘other job’ is compounded.

Employees Are Caregivers And Caregivers Are Employees

Without tools to help them, employees miss work, pass on career opportunities, and too often drop out of the workforce completely. Obviously, this impacts the talent pool and increases hiring and retention costs dramatically. The studies show that “Presenteeism” costs employers two to three times more than direct medical care! Presenteeism is your mental state in the job, and understandably can be a significant problem in these situations.

Enter Outpatient

The Outpatient App is designed for caregivers, people who are voluntarily helping a family member or a friend. It’s a productivity tool for us to coordinate and manage the logistics and communication of looking after someone.

Companies provide Outpatient for their people to address many of the difficulties of caregiving. The App is very easy to use, and all the information is private, secure, and HIPAA compliant. Here’s a cool part – it’s for you and your families, however, extended or global they might be. Today, there are Outpatient users in all 50 states and 15+ Countries. The modern family is distributed and Outpatient makes it easy to stay in touch.

Features inside the app address the challenges of caregiving head-on. The employee caregiver is then able to manage their family obligations while also maintaining focus at work.  Even in the most difficult situations, maintaining partial involvement in the job is far better than the alternative.

In the more routine daily health situations (i.e. daughter’s dentist, son’s nut allergy, husband’s past history), Outpatient is a cinch. How nice is it having all this information in one central place?

It’s like getting a huge chunk of time back in your life and a lot less anxiety.

So many of us are overwhelmed and stressed, Outpatient is a simple answer to many of the problems that employees and employers are facing.

Some of the recent news highlighting this trend:
WSJ: Employers need to address Caregiving Crisis
Forbes: How businesses can support caregiving employees
Inc: Employers are overlooking big workplace crisis
Huffington Post: Caregivers quit jobs
HBS: Managing the future of work