Maybe it stems from what we’ve been accustomed to when it comes to home service, any kind of home service. When you get a kind of service from an establishment, they can somehow reduce the cost of their service because of the economies of scale. But when it comes to home service, that kind of personalized service usually charges a lot more, because the one that provides the service is limited to taking in just a few number of customer so that the service provider can continue to provide a consistent quality of service.
It is true that medical care being what it is, it is hard to control cost, but that doesn’t deter us at Centerlife, because we’ve primed ourselves to prioritize the care of our patients. At Centerlife, we’ve always tried our best to work with the families so that their ILO’s could be well taken care of. When a family calls us for the care of their ILO, our specialist comes for an initial assessment, where he does a full medical check-up of the ILO and talks with the family concerning the ILO’s health history. After this initial determination, our specialist determines the manpower and equipment needs of the care, puts this in writing and sends this proposal to the ILO’s family. This proposal helps the family plan for the care of their ILO.
There are some things that Centerlife has no control over when it comes to the cost of caring for the sick. Medicines, especially antibiotics, can be a big factor in the rise of the cost of care. While there might be cheaper alternatives, our specialist must always balance the cost of such medicines with their effectiveness in the control of a disease or a complication. Medicines and drug delivery systems will always be something of the “non-negotiable” among the items, because we will never compromise on the care of the ILO.
So where do we find the things that will keep the cost of caring for the ILO low? Whenever we can, we work with the family so that we can use the senior citizen discount on the medicines they need. Then we look for strategic partnerships – right now we have one with a medical equipment supplier. We try for a mutually beneficial relationship – any equipment inquiry to them and they mention our services and any patient that needs some medical monitoring device, they’re the one we call first.
There are a lot of other ways we’ll try so that the caring for an ILO becomes affordable to the families, after all we are after the same objective that of providing the best care for an ILO.