Parent Check sees booming market ahead

Health care professionals are well aware baby boomers – those born between 1946 and 1964 – are a huge generation that will soon need extensive senior care services.

Parent Check, a local senior advocacy and check-in company, is still small and focusing on adults in their 70s and 80s, just beyond the baby boomer demographic. But Cameron and Yadi Goodpaster, the founders and owners of the company, are well aware that now is the appropriate time to set a foundation to care for the boomers in another decade or so.

Cameron Goodpaster, who grew up in North Texas before going to California to attend college, was exposed to senior issues as he was growing up. His father was in the senior housing industry, and Goodpaster also worked in the industry a bit while he was in college.

His father and a friend came up with the idea of a check-in company that would send people to seniors’ homes to check in on them if their family couldn’t, and Goodpaster started thinking about how to implement the service. Being an “ombudsman” may be what many seniors need, Goodpaster thought; the clients may have plenty of physicians or home care help, but who was making sure the home was safe, bills were being kept up with and the client wasn’t lonely? Who was keeping family members abreast of their loved one?

“Sometimes, people don’t want someone to worry,” Goodpaster said about seniors. This is a dilemma; in order to keep their adult children from worrying, many seniors may not tell them about health issues or other problems. Parent Check could act as a sort of communicator, relying information on to children or other family through online tools and other media, and also by helping seniors find local assistance if they need it, like finding affordable transportation or a house cleaner.

Parent Check would not provide medical services, but it would assist in coordination of medical help as well as other life necessities, Goodpaster said.

“There is a need for more than just the medical,” said Dr. Janice Knebl, Dallas Southwest Osteopathic Physicians’ Endowed Chair in Clinical Geriatrics and chief of the division of geriatrics at the UNT Health Science Center.

By 2012, an estimated 10,000 Americans a day will turn 65, Knebl said, and so there will be an increased demand for services that will help seniors, especially those who may

be isolated, living in their own homes and with no family nearby.

Increasingly technology is playing a part in keeping families connected with each other; Knebl mentioned “granny cams,” or video cameras that can be set up in a senior’s home that can be watched on a computer to check in on a relative. Obviously there are privacy issues to be dealt with, she said, but she believes there will be an increasing market for companies that can bridge the gaps between seniors, their families and their other providers.

“People are getting to live so much longer, and what are we going to do with that?” Yadi Goodpaster said.

She and her husband met when they were both working in the entertainment industry in California, where they lived until the summer of 2008. Yadi Goodpaster was doing wardrobe and fashion work, and Cameron Goodpaster focused on photograph production (and both worked for a time at the Playboy Mansion), and they said their time working for themselves was good training for Parent Check, which they currently run out of their home.

Economically, a service like Parent Check makes sense, Goodpaster said; the National Family Caregivers Association estimated family caregivers provide about $306 billion in free care each year, almost twice as much as what is spent on homecare and nursing home services.

“We’re less expensive than taking a day off work,” Goodpaster said.

Yadi and Cameron Goodpaster said they started turning Parent Check into a reality about two years ago and really committed to it a year ago. While working in Los Angeles may hold a glitzy appeal for many, both said they were happy to be in an area where they could focus on something that was both beneficial to others and personally rewarding.

“It wasn’t an industry where you went home at the end of the day and felt you’d done something good for people,” he said of their previous careers.