Comfort Keepers Home Care Review

Our Verdict

Comfort Keepers offers a standard range of lower-level companion care services including help with meals, light housekeeping, and transportation, with some locations offering higher level personal care and even skilled nursing. For those needing basic companion care, however, Comfort Keepers offers some useful extra services, such as a partnership with Lyft to provide transportation, a company-supplied medical alert system, and a mobile tablet specially designed to be easy for seniors to use. If you or someone you care for is in the market for lower-level companion care, Comfort Keeper’s quality—and their extra offerings—make their local office worth contacting.

Services Offered

Comfort Keepers Home Care Review

For seniors dealing with illness or mobility issues, home care agencies present an excellent middle ground between living completely independently and possibly risking their health and safety as a result and leaving home for an assisted living facility. For many seniors, especially those recovering from surgery or injury, home care may be a necessity, while for others, home care may be a means of remaining independent and relatively healthy for the long term.

Comfort Keepers is a franchised company with locations across the country, and offers many of the services seniors need for home care, including companionship, housekeeping, and even skilled nursing care, while also offering a number of innovative extras, including a number of electronic devices designed to improve seniors’ socialization, safety, and health.

Company Background

 Comfort Keepers was founded in 1997 and is currently headquartered in Ohio. The company claims to be the number one home care company in the US, with around 630 locations nationwide. The company’s approach to care and additional services are available at all locations, and its franchisees take care to screen employees by running background checks. Employees generally regard the company positively as well, with ratings from current and former employees running a little above average for the industry at the employment sites Glassdoor and Indeed, and with nearly two out of three reviewers at Glassdoor saying that they’d recommend the company to their peers.

Services and Offerings

Daily Living

Depending on the location, Comfort Keepers offers several services that can help a senior living on their own perform routine daily activities, such as grooming and laundry. Comfort Keepers employees can also perform light housekeeping, prepare and plan meals, perform errands, and provide incidental transportation as well as simply offer companionship.

Skilled Care

Comfort Keepers can also provide more demanding care (again, depending on location). The company offers specialized Alzheimer’s and dementia care, end of life care for those dealing with terminal illnesses, and skilled nursing care, in which RNs and LPNs offer medical care to those who need it at home.

“Interactive Caregiving”

Comfort Keepers touts a special approach called “Interactive Caregiving,” which focuses on keeping seniors as engaged and active as possible, including, if appropriate, physical exercise, mental engagement, monitoring diet and hydration, and inspecting the home for threats to the client’s safety.

Specialized Equipment

The company offers the use of its proprietary medical alert system for clients who meet a certain threshold of hours, and runs its own call center to respond when clients use their systems to summon help. In addition, the company uses pressure mats and motion detectors to keep tabs on clients even when employees aren’t present.

GrandPad

Synergy also offers use of a mobile tablet for around $60 a month. The tablet’s interface is designed specifically to allow seniors to easily to use them to keep in touch with friends and relatives, and operates on a cellular network only, so seniors don’t have to maintain an in-home wireless network in order to remain connected.

Transportation Services

In another innovative blending of technology and caregiving, Comfort Keepers has also entered into a partnership with the ridesharing service Lyft, acting as tech-savvy middlemen for seniors who need transportation, and giving them access to the ease and convenience of getting a car online.

Word on the Street

In our survey of online reviews, we took care to get responses from several locations with a fairly widespread geographic range. And overall, customers were reasonably happy with Comfort Keepers, giving them a weighted rating of 4.4 out 5 stars. We also noted the following trends:

Front-Line Employees Received Praise

Overall, customers gave some of the most consistent praise we’ve seen to their home care providers, with many people feeling that the employees they worked with made a significant positive difference in the lives of their loved ones, and the vast majority of clients praising the work of the people they interacted with.

Administration An Issue?

Comfort Keepers’ administration did come in for some criticism, with customers confessing that they had issues with the company’s scheduling practices—a common complaint for those dealing with home care companies, but something that came up a little more frequently for Comfort Keepers clients than some of its competitors. At the same time, customers offered specific praise for administration in some locations, and even singled out local franchise operators for by name for their excellent service.

Trust And Dependability

 It’s always a challenge for local franchises to make sure their caregivers make it to scheduled appointments and hold them accountable for their work while with clients. Comfort Keepers landed in about the middle range of companies in this respect, with a roughly average amount of reviewers faulting them for scheduling issues or problems with employees on site.

Cost

Costs for home care vary considerably depending on what type of area you live in, just as costs do in general. So just as we did with consumer reviews, we took pains to survey costs across a number of locations. We found that in general Comfort Keepers’ rates came in at about the median for the states and regions we surveyed, and right in line with its competitors in the field. In addition, Comfort Keepers provides a significant amount of flexibility: it doesn’t require contracts, and offers a free initial consultation (as well as an online questionnaire) in order to help clients and Comfort Keeper staff get a realistic estimate of the costs involved in home care before a care provider starts to work. And since the company offers a free medical alert system for clients who use a set number of hours, it can help customers save money even as they hire a caregiver.