BOSTON, MA – Torchlight, a pioneer in cloud-based, caregiver benefit solutions, announced today that more than 900,000 employees -- a 60 percent increase -- across numerous industries now have immediate access to the latest evolution of its platform.
"The growth and momentum that Torchlight has experienced over the past twelve months is impressive," said Patricia Houpt, Executive Director of the New England Employee Benefits Council. "But it's not surprising. More and more, employers are beginning to understand the value of the Torchlight platform and the role it can play in supporting the multitude of employees in the modern workforce who are responsible for caring for children with special needs and elderly loved ones."
The SaaS caregiver platform is available through employers and features a number of strategic enhancements designed to enable employees who are caregivers to navigate and identify the most appropriate and cost-effective services inside and outside their benefit plans.
Based on more than one year of research and discussions with employers and employee caregivers, the new release includes:
An extensible architecture that will enable other employee benefit programs and caregiver resources to integrate into the Torchlight platform.
An intelligent, dynamic recommendation engine that better personalizes and guides the caregiver through the identification of the challenge they are facing to targeted content and advocacy strategies to finding and accessing the right tools and resources. Whether addressing the specific needs of a child who is struggling, or an aging loved one requiring more care, the Torchlight platform intelligently guides the user throughout the entire caregiving journey.
A modern, intuitive interface for navigating the platform and other resources available to caregivers. With this interface, users can easily learn, keep track, access support networks, register for programs, and request expert help to solve any caregiver challenge the moment the user signs on and identifies a challenge through its resolution.
With these new features in place, employees that have access to the Torchlight platform can now more easily navigate the thousands of actionable plans that can be personalized and localized for the caregiver and also have access to a community of experts across a wide range of subject-matter areas. The Torchlight platform has tracks for caregivers of children with special needs and elderly loved ones. In turn, the platform helps employers provide a unique and valuable service to employees that dramatically offsets the costs that employers incur in retention, absenteeism, productivity, as well as the costs that employers incur when employees fail to choose resources that are more cost-effective.
“As we continue to engage more employers, it becomes increasingly evident that the biggest problem we are solving for them is helping their employees navigate the complex world of caregiving resources more efficiently and cost-effectively,” said Torchlight founder and CEO Adam Goldberg. “And by demonstrating the amount of money that can be saved by simply reducing the risk of employees making the wrong decisions -- and transferring the costs to more appropriate programs -- we’ve been able to prove the ROI through data-supported outcomes.”
The ROI of Employee Caregiving Benefits
In recent years, caregiving costs in modern economies have skyrocketed, falling disproportionately on employers and employees who are caregivers to children with special challenges and elderly loved ones. According to Ceridian’s report Double Duty: The Caregiving Crisis In The Workplace, the demands of caregiving and resulting absenteeism cost employers $38.2 billion in lost productivity each year. Employers have also been exposed to costs incurred when employees fail to find services -- that are often free -- either inside or outside employee benefits plans, bringing the overall costs to businesses in the US to exceed $50 billion.
"With an initial focus on supporting employees who are caregivers of children with special needs, Torchlight has rapidly made progress supporting an even larger community -- employees who are caregivers for elderly friends and family members," said James Weil, a national leader in eldercare who advises many organizations. "They now have a solution for employers that covers the lifecycle of services that their employees require. It's one of several reasons Torchlight continues to grow."
By providing personalized, yet scalable, caregiver benefits that enable employees to get the right services at the right times, and at the optimal cost, employers will be able to drive ROI on a number of fronts, including getting greater value from benefits like employee assistance programs (EAPs).
About Torchlight
Torchlight is a pioneer in caregiver benefit solutions, a new approach to managing the costs and complexities of caregiving for employers and employee caregivers today. We do this by enabling employees -- many who have caregiving duties for children with special needs and elderly loved ones -- to more effectively navigate and identify the resources that are available to them, including cost-free services that exist outside of employee benefit plans. With Torchlight, employers have an ROI-driven model for managing caregiving -- a $50-billion challenge in the US alone -- so that they can be both compassionate and competitive in the evolving labor market where more than one in three employees today is a caregiver. Today, Torchlight covers nearly one million working families at leading enterprises throughout the US.
Based in Boston, the company was founded by caregiving pioneer Adam Goldberg, M.Ed. For more information, contact sales (at) torchlight (dot) care, phone 844-693-3477, or visit Torchlight.care.
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