Giving a Helping Hand to Assisted-Living Search

Daniel Sagal has started a website to help people like himself who need an assisted living facility in the San Fernando Valley. Last year, the 26-year-old Valley native was working as a commercial real estate broker when his grandmother suddenly needed more care and the family frantically began looking for options. Sagal grew up in the senior care business. His parents owned two small residential care homes, commonly called “board and care” facilities. And at age 18, Sagal got certified by the state as a residential care administrator to work in the family’s homes. But despite his experience, when the family started looking for an assisted living situation, Sagal was astounded at the lack of easy-to-find information online. “When the time comes for assisted living, nobody knows about the industry,” he said. “People don’t look until there’s a need, and then it’s immediate. That’s why you need a site to simplify the search.” With personal savings, Sagal hired a web developer to build TotalSenior.com, the name of the site and his company in Tarzana. While there are many competing websites for senior care referrals – including Seattle-based A Place For Mom Inc. and Care.com Inc. in Waltham, Mass. – Sagal believes his site has the best search capability since it can screen facilities by cost, medical specialization, geography and other criteria. TotalSenior.com is free to users. It charges facilities in its database a referral fee equal to half the first month’s rent for each placement. Sagal asserts some large competitors negotiate different fee structures with every provider, a practice he thinks gives the website operators an incentive to steer customers to higher-paying facilities. “My goal is to establish a brand that represents the no-bias model,” he said. “I don’t have a financial incentive to push a family one way or the other.” Sagal estimates there are more than 400 assisted living providers in the Valley, charging between $3,000 and $7,000 a month. TotalSenior.com plans to expand its coverage to Santa Clarita and the Conejo Valley, and eventually to the L.A. region, once the company has employees. For now, Sagal is a one-person shop. UCLA-Fund Integration The handoff of the Motion Picture Television Fund’s outpatient operations to UCLA Health System is complete, with the five clinics now bearing both the UCLA and the fund’s name. UCLA’s takeover of management at the clinics was announced in October. Under the final arrangement, the centers will continue with the same primary care doctors and staff, now employed by UCLA. And Dr. Janice Spinner, former chief medical officer at the fund, will assume the same job title with UCLA Health. For marketing purposes, the clinics will be “co-branded” by UCLA Health System and the fund. “Entertainment industry members and their families can continue to receive the highest-quality health care … with the added advantage of being able to access UCLA’s world-renowned specialty care and inpatient services,” Dr. David Feinberg, president of UCLA Health, said in a statement. In addition to the five outpatient centers, UCLA will operate the fund’s Health Wheels medical vehicle, which drives onto studio lots to deliver care; physical therapy operations; and the Bridge to Health program, which offers a low-cost medical visit for entertainment industry members who are uninsured. The fund will still own and operate the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills, the not-yet-open Samuel Goldwyn Jr. Center for Behavioral Health and the organization’s social programs. Autism Research The Center for Autism and Related Disorders in Tarzana has signed an agreement with Chapman University to collaborate on research about treatments for autism. The for-profit center and the school, based in Orange and affiliated with the Disciples of Christ church, will analyze data collected during treatment of autistic children using the center’s Skills: The Online Autism Solution, a website designed to help parents, behavioral health agencies, clinics and school districts to manage autistic patients. Chapman’s Erik Linstead, assistant professor at the school of computational sciences, and Dennis Dixon, the center’s chief strategy officer, will work together, with the center providing data and the school the number-crunching expertise, to look for patterns that could make autism treatment more effective. “It gives funding agencies, such as insurance companies, insight into how their members are progressing and allows them to compare it to reasonable expectations. Also, it allows for a good level of quality control so we can identify providers who are achieving results and those who are struggling,” Dixon said. From a cost-benefit perspective, the use of data mining to advance research without the need for expensive clinical trials will save money. Dixon expects to publish results from the analysis in a peer-reviewed journal several months from now. Staff Writer Joel Russell can be reached at (818) 316-3124 or [email protected].