Measuring Outcomes:
Quantifying the Value of Aging Life Care™
Most care managers can tell a story about the crisis that didn’t happen. Far fewer can present it as an outcome of their work with a client. Families paying every month likely want to know what they’re getting, and being able to show it is an important credibility signal for the profession. Satisfaction is a great metric, but it’s only the starting point. Ideally, care managers should also be able to show how their work drives improved outcomes for clients and their families.
I recently interviewed more than a dozen care management leaders and asked them to share stories of families they’d helped, and the specific outcomes they were able to achieve. Everyone had stories, but few had a way to measure the changes. Below is what I heard, along with four metrics you can use to start tracking outcomes for your practice today.
Two hours of work, six years of savings
Anne Sansevero had a client with MS who had been denied long-term care insurance. Anne asked the insurer to take another look, and got the denial overturned.
“She needed care 12 hours a day. Imagine the price tag on that with her being denied, versus me spending two hours with the insurance company doing a revisit. And she’s still getting care six years later.”
That story is easy to tell because the numbers are sitting right there. Most of a care manager’s value isn’t. It’s the fall that didn’t happen, the infection caught at home instead of in the ER, the daughter who kept her job and didn’t burn through her PTO. When things go well, there’s nothing to point to.
What I heard
Some of the people I spoke with run practices today, and some have in the past. I asked how they describe their work to prospective clients, and for stories of families they’d helped through the financial, logistical and emotional strain of caregiving. Then I asked what specific outcomes they were able to improve.
Amber Davis was the most direct. “I can only say the return on investment is what we gather from our clients and what we hear from their family members.” Her families tell her what lifesavers her team is, she said, “99% of the time.” That’s real. It’s also hard to put in front of anyone who wasn’t in the room.
The profession has research to back up those types of positive sentiments. In a 2025 national study funded by ALCA, researchers at Virginia Tech and the University of Washington, including Jullie Gray, surveyed clients and family members1: 99% said they would recommend their care manager, 97% said it brought them peace of mind, and 93% said the value outweighed the cost. That’s strong evidence of how families feel about the work care managers provide. What the study didn’t set out to measure is what changed for the client or their family: the falls, the hospital stays, the dollars saved and time reclaimed. That’s the piece that’s still missing.
Sarah Bourque tracks billable hours, staff utilization and which referral sources send clients who are ready to sign. Those are business metrics, not client outcomes. “At this point, I still feel mostly like I’m collecting the data,” she said.
Kathy Heery, a nurse and former geriatric care manager now working as a Care Systems Strategist, was the exception. Over 25 years she collected outcomes data for every client she saw, and aggregated that data to spot trends.
What a before-and-after can look like
Kathy built a report like this for every client before 2020. In one case, an 88-year-old man with advanced dementia was stuck in the hospital with no plan for what came next. She scored his situation each month across health, finances and care. Over three months, his health score rose from 40% to 88% and his finances from 46% to 100%. By her estimate, moving him home with hospice and private care cut acute-care costs by more than $100,000 and his monthly costs by more than $1,200. He died peacefully at home, as he and his family wanted.
It may seem odd that a hospice patient’s health scores went up. Kathy’s explanation: he finally had the right level of care, consistent support and clinical oversight. “When care level, support intensity, and financial reality are mapped correctly, people stabilize,” she said. “The data isn’t surprising, it’s predictable.” She sees that as the heart of the profession: “To me this is the core value of Aging Life Care Professionals®, they prevent the common mismatch that hospitals see every day: frail, complex patients placed in environments that cannot manage their needs.”
Why this matters now
People are unlikely to know up front what working with an Aging Life Care Manager® is worth, or the value it could provide, especially when they’re not in crisis. Referral partners and families now also have free, Medicare-funded options to consider.
Casey Rausin put it plainly. Medicare and Medicaid already have codes for chronic care management, and “the companies that are going to be able to participate in those are the ones that can show data on what they are able to do. Not just that I can say this family’s stress (went down).”
Kathy’s reports already worked this way. She organized client outcomes around the same quality measures Medicare uses for its coordinated-care programs. Hospital case managers and physicians were especially receptive.
Casey also described the conversation every practice eventually has, with a family member who’s been paying for months and wants to stop. What would you show her? Casey’s answer: “Your dad was going to the hospital six times a year before we were involved. And now that’s not happening.” Jullie Gray’s ALCA webinar offers a simple formula for that conversation:
“Since we started working together, we’ve seen fewer ER visitsthe change you saw, which has meant fewer missed work dayswhat it meant for them for your family.”
What to measure
Casey’s advice is the simplest version: “We should (capture) the way the situation was before and then how we’re able to improve that.”
Across the interviews, four kinds of change came up again and again. Pick one to start. Jullie Gray suggests choosing something you already notice and that matters to families. As she puts it in her webinar, “Outcomes illustrate the difference your presence makes.”
Fewer health events. At intake, note falls, ER visits and hospital stays in the last six months. As Casey put it: “Seven falls in the last six months...and six months later we’ve had zero.”
Money saved. Note benefits found or recovered, and costs avoided by choosing the right level of care or living situation. Anne’s two hours with an insurer bought six years of covered care.
Family time recovered. Note the hours a week the family spends coordinating, and the work days missed. Jennipher Ama described an out-of-state daughter traveling so often she was about to lose her job.
Stress lowered. Ask the client how things are going, 1 to 10, and ask the family about their stress. Kerry Davis described intake calls where distress “started at a 9 or a 10, and I’ve brought that down to a 3 or a 4.”
One caveat: a before-and-after shows contribution, not proof. Casey made a great point: “chances are it’s probably something I did, or maybe they’re going to PT at the same time.” Families understand that. They’ll still be glad to see the change.
Start at your next intake
Measurement has to fit into a care manager’s day. “You don’t want to create things that are administratively taxing to collect this information,” Casey said. If measuring adds an hour a week, nobody will keep it up. Jullie Gray’s advice from her ALCA webinar: start with one outcome, one simple tool and one place to write it down. If you’re an ALCA member, her webinar comes with a free workbook of simple questions and tracking templates.2
You don’t need a formal study. The team at Alder presented a poster at ACMA’s October conference on how care management reduces ER admissions. It’s built on three well-documented case studies.
Think of three clients whose story you could tell with a before and after. Then start building new ones at your next intake. Ask two questions and write the answers in the note: “In the last six months, how many falls, ER visits or hospital stays?” and “On a scale of 1 to 10, how are things going right now?” Ask the second question again at 90 days. That’s your first before-and-after.
Where AI and automation help
Most of these numbers already live in your case notes and client records. The fall in March. The ER visit you met them at. The call where the daughter mentioned she’d used her last vacation day. Nobody has time to go back through six months of notes and count.
- Case notes
- Emails
- Call notes
- Intake forms
| Before | Since | |
|---|---|---|
| Falls | 3 | 0 |
| ER visits | 2 | 0 |
That counting is what AI does well. You can ask a question of everything you’ve already written about a client and get the answer back with the notes it came from. The before-and-after is ready when the family asks. Care Clarity can help your practice set that up. Reach out if you’d like to learn more.
You already know which changes matter for each client and family. The next time a family asks whether to keep going, or a new client hesitates over the cost, you’ll have the numbers to show them.
Appendix: Free tools for tracking outcomes
You don’t have to invent your own scale. These standardized, research-backed tools are free and widely used.
| Tool | What it measures | Use it to show |
|---|---|---|
| CDC STEADI “Stay Independent” checklist | 12 yes-or-no questions on fall risk; a score of 4 or more signals higher risk. | Fall risk going down |
| Katz Index of Independence in Activities of Daily Living | Six basic self-care tasks, like bathing and dressing. | Daily self-care holding steady or improving |
| Lawton Instrumental Activities of Daily Living Scale | Eight everyday tasks, like managing medications, money and the phone. | Everyday tasks holding steady or improving |
| Modified Caregiver Strain Index | 13 questions on how the family caregiver is holding up. | Family caregiver strain going down |
| Geriatric Depression Scale, short form | 15 yes-or-no questions on mood, designed for older adults. | Client mood improving |
| NCOA BenefitsCheckUp | Screens for benefits a client may qualify for, an easy way to document money found. | Money found for the client |
| Work Productivity and Activity Impairment questionnaire, caregiving version (WPAI:CG) | Work hours missed and productivity lost because of caregiving, over the past seven days. | Family work time recovered |
A simpler option for family time. The WPAI covers work time only. To capture the hours a family spends coordinating care, ask directly at intake: “How many hours a week do you spend managing your parent’s care, and how many work days have you missed in the last three months?” Ask again at 90 days.
Thank you
Thank you to all of the people who contributed to this article, including:
- Anne C. Sansevero, RN, MA, GNP, CCM
- Amber Davis, BA, CMC
- Casey Rausin, RN, CCM
- Elizabeth Savage, LICSW, CMC
- Jennipher Ama, RN, CMC
- Jullie Gray, DSW, MSW, LICSW, CMC (for pointing me to her ALCA webinar and workbook on measuring outcomes)
- Kathy Heery, RN, MS (former Geriatric Care Manager and Care Management / Home Care Executive, currently working as a Care Systems Strategist)
- Kerry Davis, RN, BSN, CMC, CDP
- Sarah Levin Bourque, RN, MSN, CMC
Notes
- Source for the survey figures: Shealy, Teaster, Sands and Gray (2025), Virginia Tech and University of Washington, presented at ALCA’s 2025 Annual Conference. Summary from ALCA. ↩︎
- Webinar and workbook on measuring outcomes: Gray, J. (2026). Outcome Measurement for Aging Life Care Professionals®. Aging Life Care Association®. Available to members at aginglifecare.org. ↩︎
Disclosure: I run Care Clarity, which helps Aging Life Care Managers® use AI and technology confidently and compliantly in their practices. Some of the care managers I interviewed are Care Clarity clients. Care manager quotes come from interviews and email exchanges between August and October 2026.