Covering Care: Long-term care planning and education tool for AD/ADRD caregivers

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Project Summary/Abstract Older adults with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and AD-related dementias (ADRD) need a trusted financial advocate to help orchestrate and oversee their care as they age. Spousal and adult child caregivers need comprehensive education around financial caregiving and tools on how to access resources to pay for long- term services and supports (LTSS). This SBIR project will create an easy-to-use online decision tree-based tool to give a caregiver the exact knowledge they need to plan for long-term care financing without overwhelming them with unnecessary information. We focus on the extremely complex problem of helping caregivers understand Medicaid while providing customized recommendations for Medicaid eligibility planning. Our financial management and LTSS planning and education tool—the Assistant—will be designed for the spousal or adult child caregiver who can navigate websites but who has very little understanding of public programs that help pay for LTSS and how to access them. Medicaid planning is extremely complex and eligibility rules vary from state to state. Most caregivers do not have the financial or prior caregiving experience to know how to navigate the process of becoming eligible for the program or how to finance LTSS in general. Caregivers often start by getting advice from friends or by searching online. Lack of tailored information can lead to financial missteps that can delay individuals with AD/ADRD from getting the level of care they need, or result in the caregiver tapping into their own savings to pay for LTSS. Other mistakes include depleting assets too quickly or improper wealth transfers that may extend periods of ineligibility. If the person with AD/ADRD has a spouse residing in the home, that individual's financial security is at risk in the absence of proper planning. To address these needs, we propose to develop an online “Assistant” that: (1) educates spousal and adult child caregivers about long-term care financing/Medicaid eligibility in English and Spanish, (2) collects information on the care recipients' assets and disability status to provide customized recommendations needed to execute the next steps in planning and enrollment, and (3) if desired, refers caregivers to planning professionals like Certified Medicaid Planners (CMPs), elder law attorneys, Agencies of Aging, or to the appropriate government office. In order to increase uptake, trustworthiness, enjoyment, and usability of the Assistant, we will use an innovative conversational agent, driven by a decision tree database and certified provider database.