* * Staff Writer
Most everyone knows about hospice care, a service that helps families get through someone's tough end-of-life illness. But do folks know where to find hospice services in Volusia or Flagler counties?
People know 24-hour pharmacies fill prescriptions, but do they know, in an emergency, where to get a wheelchair or a walker?
When a Volusia or Flagler county senior can't live alone anymore, but the children live in another state, how can they find a suitable assisted living center without a protracted stay here?
Finding health-care help is available for free at a new Web site designed by George Eastman of Edgewater, a former Army medic and Bert Fish Medical Center Intensive Care Unit case manager and discharge planner.
Eastman created LOSpro.com -- LOS stands for "length of stay" and other information used by the "pros" in health-care coordination, he said.
The 45-year-old began gathering information for himself a few years ago, and ended up creating a Web-based portal that functions like a search engine specifically for health-care information in a designated area. The site lists agencies, services and facilities, among other resources useful to medical professionals and the public.
After two years as a case manager and discharge planner for Bert Fish, I realized there had to be a better way to store medical resources than a cork-board and scattered fliers and brochures falling out of drawers," said Eastman, a New York native who finished high school in Palm Beach Gardens. He was an Army medic from 1983 through 1991, completing a nursing program at Fort Sam Houston in Texas.
"I started bringing stuff home and storing it on a thumb drive and bringing it to work, to manage my own day," Eastman said. "I realized I should do this on a bigger level to help the community."
A few years ago he began devising a Web site and at first called it "discharge pro," with free listings, but many in the industry encouraged him to turn his resource into a business, he said.
"The day I decided, I remember looking out the window and saying, 'I can't do it within this brick and mortar building.' So I resigned," he said. "My wife works, so I was able to maintain health benefits."
Eastman trademarked and copyrighted his service and has partnered with Karen A. Kershaw, a longtime registered nurse, to grow the business outside Volusia and Flagler counties, to Brevard County and the Tampa Bay area.
Kershaw, 47, also a New York native, moved to Ponce Inlet with her family at 13. She attended Seabreeze and Spruce Creek high schools and completed the nursing program at Daytona Beach Community College (now Daytona State College). She worked 25 years in local hospitals, skilled nursing facilities and home health care.
"I met George when he was a home-care coordinator and discharge planner at Bert Fish," she said. "I was thrilled when I was working with him because he was always right on it. His level of professionalism was appreciated, but I wondered how he stayed so organized."
When Eastman decided it was time to build a business, he thought of Kershaw.
They attended a business entrepreneur class together.
"After the class, we realized a few things -- that we had a great product, a global product that was much bigger than we had anticipated," Eastman said. They hired a Web designer and moved forward with their new site. The two work from their laptops, and there is no brick and mortar office.
While the Web site maintains free listings of every local facility listed with the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration and links to the state's rating system, it also has drawn advertising with virtual video tours of facilities, seminar listings and numerous other medical-related resources. Free listings are marked as such. The paid listings cost $500 to $700 annually.
The materials are useful to medical professionals as well as patients and their families.
Jennifer Pouliot of Ormond Beach, representative of VITAS Innovative Hospice Care, said it takes a lot of traveling to hand out flyers at assisted living and nursing care facilities, health care agencies and private physicians' offices to let people know about her company. In April, she became a sponsor of LOSpro.com.
"I have people calling because they saw us advertised on LOSpro," she said. "There's been a 10 to 15 percent increase in awareness. And it's much less expensive to advertise with LOSpro."
Registered nurse Susan Ferguson of New Smyrna Beach is a licensed clinical social worker and often is asked how to find nursing care or assisted living facilities or where to get a walker or a wheelchair.
"Before LOSpro, I would sit down with the phone book and go through the various things available in the community," Ferguson said in a recent phone interview. "I belong to a few medical groups, like Parish Nurses Council, for exposure and would hear about different programs from them. But now I refer to LOSpro."
Ferguson said one middle-aged client had an elderly mother with dementia. "She made an appointment with me because she felt her mother needed assisted living and skilled nursing care, but her sister opposed it. I sent them to the LOSpro site which was able to demystify the process of skilled nursing care."
Desiree Culver, owner and operator of Tiffany on the River Assisted Living Facility, a six-bed New Smyrna Beach home with 24-hour care, touts her place on the LOSpro Web site.
"I am a small business and don't have the time or funds of a large corporation to do networking, marketing and keep up a Web site," Cluver said. "This enables me to do the networking and marketing, and it enables me to have a Web site while I am in my facility working."
Carol Payton, a sales representative for Orange Belt Pharmacy in DeLand, said her store is always trying to get the word out about their available medical equipment, including television advertising."I think we have seen some increase in sales from it," she said.
audrey.parente@news-jrnl.com
