How Home Care Starts — Our Edison Process

Most Edison families come to us in the middle of a stressful week. A parent has been in the hospital, an adult child has flown in from another state, a household has been wrestling with a slow change for months and finally needs help. The point of our process is to get the family from "we have a problem" to "we have a working plan" without making the path any longer or more complicated than it needs to be.

This page walks through the steps. The total time from the first phone call to a caregiver in the home is typically 24 to 72 hours. For an urgent post-discharge situation, it is shorter.

Step 1 — The first phone call

A senior care coordinator picks up. The conversation is short and concrete. The coordinator asks a few orienting questions:

• Who is the call about?
• What town or neighborhood is the household in?
• What has been changing — a hospital stay, a new diagnosis, a slow change, an incident?
• What are the family's biggest worries right now?
• What kind of help has the household been thinking about?

The coordinator listens, then walks through what a first week of care could realistically look like. The call typically takes five to ten minutes. There is no sales pressure and no commitment requested on the call itself.

If the situation calls for a free in-home assessment — and it almost always does — the coordinator schedules the visit at a time that works for the family.

Step 2 — The free in-home assessment

The senior care coordinator visits the home. The visit takes about an hour. The visit covers:

• A walk through the house to look at the practical environment — the bathroom, the stairs, the bedroom, the kitchen, anywhere the older adult spends time. Fall-risk hazards, medication storage, lighting, and seating all get noticed. For households where falls are already a concern, this leads naturally into a fall prevention service plan.
• A conversation with the family about the household's actual day. What time the older adult wakes up. When meals happen. What the morning routine looks like. What the afternoon and evening look like. Where the gaps are. Where the family is already doing the work and where outside help would matter most.
• A conversation with the older adult when possible. The older adult's voice is the most important voice in the room — what they want, what they are willing to accept, what they would push back on. The coordinator talks to the older adult, not just about them.
• A written care plan, drafted at the kitchen table or in the living room, with the family. The plan names which services start (drawn from all home care services), on what schedule, what each visit will cover, who the family's point of contact will be, and what the cost will be. The plan is meant to be a working document, not a finished one — it is reviewed and adjusted in the first weeks of care.

There is no contract to sign at the visit. There is no obligation to start care.

Step 3 — The first day of care

When the family decides to start care, the first care visit is scheduled within 24 to 48 hours of the in-home assessment. For urgent post-discharge situations, the timeline can collapse to the same day. The longer-form post-discharge context lives in the Edison post-hospital discharge guide.

The first care visit is typically a longer one. The caregiver settles into the home, meets the household, learns the daily routine, and works through the first day of the care plan with the coordinator's support. The coordinator may stop by for part of the first visit to make sure the handoff is clean. The team that delivers the work is described in detail on our care team page.

The same caregiver returns for the second visit, and as much as practical, the same caregiver stays as the household's primary caregiver for the duration of the plan. Continuity is the point — a parade of new faces does no household any good.

Step 4 — The first two weeks

The first two weeks are the highest-touch phase. The senior care coordinator checks in with the family at the end of the first week to walk through what is working and what needs to change. Most plans get adjusted at this point — a visit time gets moved, an additional task gets added, a coverage block gets extended.

By the end of the second week, the household has typically settled into a stable routine. The coordinator steps back from weekly check-ins to biweekly, then monthly once the routine is well-established.

Step 5 — Ongoing care and evolution

The plan is meant to evolve with the situation. A change in the household — a new symptom, a fall, a hospital visit, a change in the family's availability — triggers a plan review. The coordinator is available for these conversations whenever they come up.

For long-running plans (chronic disease care, dementia and Alzheimer's care services, ongoing aged care), the rhythm typically settles into:

• Daily or weekly visits from the same caregiver
• Periodic skilled clinical visits (when ordered, through in-home nursing services)
• Monthly check-ins between the family and the coordinator
• Quarterly plan reviews to make sure the schedule still fits the situation

For short-running plans (post-surgery recovery service, post-surgery rehabilitation), the rhythm is:

• Higher-touch in the first weeks
• Tapering as the patient regains function
• Either ending care or stepping down to a maintenance plan

What we will not do

The process is built around a few things we will not do:

• We will not pressure a family to start care on the first call.
• We will not pressure a family to commit at the in-home assessment.
• We will not list a license badge we do not hold or claim a certification we do not carry.
• We will not put a fake clinician headshot on this page or invent named bios for our team.
• We will not promise outcomes we cannot deliver.

The way we earn trust is by doing the work. The first conversation, the first assessment, the first care visit, the first month — each of these is an opportunity to show the family what working with us looks like in practice.

Talk with a coordinator