SNAPforSeniors - Renton Reporter

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Need a New Home for Grandma? It's a SNAP!

By Leyna Krow
Staff Writer

    Debbie Meyer began her search for a new retirement home for her mother-in-law in the usual ways.
    “I looked on the Internet. I made phone calls. I drove around a lot. It was all very time consuming,” said Meyer, who lives with her family in Everett.
    The struggle to find the right care facility for an aging relative is a familiar one for many Americans. The National Alliance for Caregiving estimates that one in six working adults are currently caring for an elderly relative. That figure is expected to rise to one in four within the next six years.

    Fortunately for Washington seniors and their families, King County residents Derek Preston and Eve M. Stern have developed a new Web side called SNAPforSeniors.com, which they home will help to streamline the search.
    “There are other senior housing sites out there, but many only list advertised facilities,” Stern said. “SNAPforSeniors provides an objective listing service that lets users match both lifestyle and care needs.”
    Stern, the President/COO of SNAP and a board member for the Bellevue Network on Aging, has worked in the healthcare industry for many years. She’s heard the same story over and over from patients’ families who Struggle to locate long-term or short-term care for their elderly relatives. But it wasn’t until Stern had to find housing for her own mother that she got serious about improving the way people look for care facilities.

    "My mom broke her hip and had to have it replaced,” Stern said. “I had to help her find appropriate housing while she rehabbed. I learned a lot about how the process worked and I wanted to help others who were in the same situation.”

    Likewise, Preston’s family struggled to find the right home for his grandmother. “Both Eve and I have family experience where we had been involved in placing relatives in care, and we were both extremely frustrated by the lack of information. Most frustrating was just not knowing what was available,” said Preston, CEO for SNAP.

    This frustration became the impetus for creating a better way for consumers and care givers to connect. The Web site, which launched Oct. 1, allows seniors and family members to browse through listings of every housing provider in Washington. It is free to use and, much like many real-estate or job-search sites, SNAPforSeniors.com lets users search for facilities by specifying their wants and needs, such as 24-hour staff availability, private rooms or even a dining room that serves kosher meals. The site then lists all the care providers that match the users’ stipulated criteria within a given region and also shows which facilities have vacancies

    “I had heard someone at the office talking about it, and I thought this is something that has been needed forever,” Meyer said.
    Although users, searching for information about elder care in Washington, are likely to get the most extensive results, SNAP is expanding to include detailed descriptions of facilities throughout the country. According to Preston, the site gathers data from 218 sources in 50 states and is already the most complete database of adult-care facilities in the nation.

    “We have a full-time staff that does nothing but manage that data,” Preston said.
Although only 2 months old, SNAP has already proved to be an asset not only for seniors and their families, but also for care providers.
    Linda Crome, the director of Geropsychiatry at Northwest Hospital & Medical Center uses SNAPforSeniors.com to find housing for patients.
    “The majority of our patients are at a point when they can no longer live at home,” Chrome said. “Snap makes us much more efficient in terms of being able to get people into the right kind of facilities, because we can see right away who has vacancies and who doesn’t.”

    However, Chrome stresses that although SNAPforSeniors.com is a wonder resource, it should not be used as a substitute for speaking with a facility’s staff members or touring the grounds.

Leyna Krow can be reached at leyna.krow@reporternewpapers.com or 253.872.6683.

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