Too many Americans who provide care to elderly or disabled family members are not recognized or compensated for their considerable efforts. This isn’t a small problem. The number of unpaid family caregivers in the U.S. increased by 9.5 million between 2015 and 2020, from 43.5 million to over 53 million. In Missouri alone, family caregivers provide $8 billion in critical, and unpaid, help each year. They spend, on average, nearly 24 hours every week doing so.
While more needs to be done to support family caregivers, a handful of states have taken action to provide relief by establishing compensation programs for qualified caregivers. These programs are administered by federal, state and local government entities. However, it falls on private companies, like FreedomCare, to establish effective, accurate and secure methods of payment delivery to individual caregivers.
However, replicating their success in New York wasn’t as easy as simply applying known processes to compensation programs run by other states. In order to extend their services to Missouri caregivers, FreedomCare had to first learn and understand the complex set of rules and regulations governing the Consumer Directed Services (CDS) program administered by the Missouri Division of Health and Senior Services. Then, the company had to rethink and reconfigure its existing processes to accommodate new operational realities.
Figuring out how to service the Missouri program required starting from scratch. It also required a capable and trustworthy technology partner. Fortunately, FreedomCare and Empeon already enjoyed such a special relationship, one based on mutual respect and a proven track record of innovation and customization. FreedomCare was one of the few customers we trusted to beta test our new payroll software, and the first to roll out the Empeon platform. As FreedomCare’s enterprise payroll processing provider of choice, Empeon was honored to step up and help with the heavy lifting from the very beginning of the Missouri expansion.
“Missouri has a unique iteration of the consumer directed service program, where each service recipient is recognized as an independent employer. This designation creates a lot of extra work in payroll processing."
Lewi sat together with the FreedomCare team through countless hours-long presentations by Missouri tax experts, learning the painstaking details and legal requirements of the state’s CDS program. Then, Empeon’s development team went to work tailoring a custom digital solution – designing, building and supporting an automated, fail-safe payment platform to benefit Missouri caregivers and the family members under their care.
“We worked closely with FreedomCare’s team to identify all relevant procedural differences,” recalls Lewi. “At the end of that process, we were able to create and implement an elegant technical workaround that saved the company hundreds of labor hours and assured timely and accurate delivery of funds to the caregivers.”
As a result of this partnership, FreedomCare became one of the very first home care providers to enter the Missouri market, earning a reputation as the leading fiscal intermediary for the state’s family caregivers. Today, FreedomCare enables compensation for 750+ family caregivers in Missouri every week.
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