In so many profound ways, the last year at Wellthy has been a banner moment. We’re now covering nearly two million sponsored lives, working with more than 160 companies and organizations to provide caregiving concierge benefits, and celebrating a year where national media coverage and increased investment of our mission took center stage.
As we head further into 2024, we’re also taking stock and looking at some of the data and numbers that have fueled Wellthy’s growth, and represent how families and employees are turning to us for support in navigating their caregiving journeys.
We call it the “State of Wellthy Data” — and the insights and numbers speak volumes about how families and employees today are experiencing caregiving.
“The big theme over this past year has been growth,” says Kelly Burdine, Wellthy’s Director of Data Science and Analytics. “Our growth in care projects and members increased to new heights, and we’re learning more and more how care touches the lives of so many families and employees.”
That includes a deeper look at the demographics of Wellthy members, the types of tasks that members are turning to Wellthy for support with, and what medical conditions are most often experienced by Wellthy families. Let’s take a look.
The medical conditions shaping care
The most frequent medical conditions that families turned to Wellthy for support with in 2023 covered a variety of issues that families experience with regard to care: cancer, dementia, depression, anxiety, diabetes, arthritis, and hypertension.
Those last two — hypertension and arthritis — saw some of the sharpest gains year-over-year in Wellthy’s data. Nationally, we know that more than 53 million U.S. adults have been diagnosed with arthritis, and that more than half of adults over 65 years of age who have also been diagnosed with dementia, stroke, heart disease, diabetes, or cancer also have a reported diagnosis of arthritis.
The rise of care projects focused on hypertension also mirrors national data showing that heart disease is slated to become far more common among care recipients. As the Washington Post reports, “Cardiovascular disease — the No. 1 cause of death among people 65 and older — is poised to become even more common in the years ahead, disproportionately affecting Black and Hispanic communities and exacting an enormous toll on the health and quality of life of older Americans.”
We also know that the vast majority of caregivers working with Wellthy are caring for a loved one with multiple chronic conditions. Many of the top medical conditions we support families in navigating are common comorbidities, which we see in this data.
The type of caregiving tasks Wellthy helps families solve
Wellthy’s Care Team works with families to navigate and solve a wide variety of caregiving tasks and challenges, supporting families with childcare, eldercare, self-care, and caring for loved ones with complex care needs. The most popular caregiving task, which has remained the top task for the last two years, is working with families to find vetted, trustworthy medical or mental health services.
Other common caregiving tasks over the last year that Wellthy’s team has tackled include: finding in-home support for loved ones who need care, reviewing employee benefits, identifying community or local support groups, verifying insurance coverage, researching and identifying financial assistance programs, and managing medical bills.
We’ve also seen a sharp rise in the number of families needing support with finding a living facility for a loved one with care needs — becoming one of our top three tasks over the last year. We see national data that underscores this type of need, with nursing and living facilities facing increased staffing shortages and many of them limiting new admissions or creating waitlists that can become a real challenge for families to navigate.
The impact of Wellthy Community and connecting family members
Wellthy launched its Community platform — our peer network enabling Wellthy members to connect online to others with shared caregiving journeys — in 2022. Since then, we’ve seen steady growth as members look to connect with experts and other families to discuss caregiving.
Year-over-year we saw a 66% increase in the number of Wellthy members creating Community accounts, and the number of Community posts increased by ~50% compared with 2022 numbers. The most popular Community forum was Aging, which corresponds to the most frequent task category for all caregiving projects at Wellthy.
As Wellthy member Chris shared about his Community experience:
“I leaned on Wellthy Community for advice. I was looking for some guidance, things to think about, what needs to be done, just kind of general support along the way. There is a good source of resources there … I found great comfort in knowing that I wasn’t the only one, and there were so many other people in the same situation trying to balance a full time job with caregiving duties."
A look at care projects
Wellthy sees a wide array of caregiving projects, underscoring the fact that every individual or family who uses Wellthy has their own unique caregiving needs and stories. That’s why Wellthy is committed to personalization — matching families with specialized care experts best positioned to help them with their unique caregiving journey. Some care projects are more tactical and take shorter amounts of time to complete, while others can involve heavy amounts of research or administrative and logistical coordination.
The average member at Wellthy will have 50 touchpoints with Wellthy’s Care Team — that can be everything from calls to emails or platform communication. As we work to take the logistical and administrative responsibilities off of families, we also prioritize keeping them in the loop, consulted, and aware of their care project’s progress.
We also see that when it comes to starting care projects for family members, 65% of our active projects were started by women — with ‘daughter’ and ‘mother’ being two of the top roles for Wellthy members. That tends to reflect national numbers on how caregiving continues to be a particular issue for women, with a 2023 report from the American Medical Association (AMA) showing that women are 2.2x more likely to take on unpaid caregiving roles.
A look ahead at what the market and families are telling us
As the past year has shown us, care is touching the lives of more and more families. Wellthy saw double digit growth percentages last year in care projects and members, and we know that national trends are pointing to a care crisis that only continues to expand. As we move deeper into 2024, we’re seeing that:
- 37.1 million families are now providing unpaid eldercare, and they’re spending at least 4 hours a day doing so;
- 46% of parents say they have a harder time finding childcare today than just four years ago;
- 51% of households say they live in a childcare desert — areas that contain either no childcare providers or so few options that there are more than three times as many children as licensed childcare slots;
- 77% of adults over the age of 50 prefer to age in place;
- Millennials are absorbing caregiving responsibilities at some of the highest rates, yet when it comes to the impact of caregiving across generations, only 16% of young people say they are aware of the costs involved with caring for a loved one
That all points to both an enormous challenge, but remarkable opportunity to make an impact in a care economy that today is worth more than $6 trillion. For Wellthy, that means that we can expect 2024 and the coming years to be even more pivotal in reaching our mission of touching the lives of as many family caregivers as possible.
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