Wellness Check: Found Elderly Mother Safe in 6 Hours
- Category: Wellness Check
net synergies realized above the initial target in the first year
Client Background
Our client and her mother had a ritual of speaking every single day. When Wednesday passed without a return call, and Thursday followed with total silence, the daughter knew something was wrong. Living three states away, she felt helpless. She had called neighbors and local police, but the neighbors weren’t home and the police couldn’t guarantee a timeline for a “wellness check” due to high emergency call volumes. By Friday morning, convinced her mother had suffered a fall or a medical emergency, she contacted our firm to physically verify her mother’s safety.
Challenge
Geographic Distance: The client was in Colorado and could not physically reach the residence, making her dependent on third-party verification.
Ambiguity of Silence: Two days of silence for a senior living alone is a major red flag for medical emergencies, such as strokes or falls, where time is of the essence.
Police Prioritization: Law enforcement often classifies wellness checks as low-priority calls, meaning a response could take 24 hours or more during busy shifts.
Verification without Intrusion: The goal was to confirm safety without causing undue stress to the mother or damaging property unless a life-threatening emergency was visually confirmed.
Investigations
We deployed an investigator immediately to the mother’s residence in The Woodlands:
Visual Assessment: Upon arrival, we confirmed the mother’s vehicle was in the driveway and mail was not piling up, suggesting she was likely home.
Tactical Verification: We attempted contact through knocking and the doorbell. When no answer was received, we performed a perimeter check. We looked through windows for signs of distress and called the mother’s phone while standing at the back door. We could hear the phone ringing inside, which heightened our concern.
Direct Contact: We persisted with the doorbell and knocking. After a few minutes, the mother answered the door. She had been in the shower during the initial knocking and was safe but confused by our presence.
Problem Solving: We explained the daughter’s fear. The mother revealed she had “lost” her phone two days prior and couldn’t find it to answer the calls. Our investigator stayed to help, eventually finding the phone wedged deep between couch cushions.
Results
The investigation provided a best-case scenario for a worried family:
Immediate Confirmation: Within six hours of the daughter’s first realization that she needed professional help (and only 90 minutes from the call to our office), she was speaking to her mother on the phone.
Prevention Plan: We didn’t just leave once she was found safe. We sat with the mother and daughter (via speakerphone) to recommend a backup landline, a medical alert button, and a “neighbor system” to ensure this wouldn’t happen again.
Resource Coordination: We helped the family set up a Ring doorbell system so the daughter could remotely see that her mother was active and moving about the house, even if the phone went unanswered.
Family Relief: The daughter, who was about to book an emergency flight to Houston, was able to stay home, knowing her mother was healthy and the “crisis” was simply a misplaced device.
The Bottom Line: For families living far apart, a missed phone call can be the start of a nightmare. Professional wellness check services provide the rapid, physical presence needed to turn panic back into peace of mind.
The Results
Customer orders remained steady during the sales transition, and financial performance in the impacted business units exceeded internal forecasts.
Sales representatives were shifted toward the future-state, guided by the new organization structure, territories, product coverage, and compensation design in both North America and Europe.
The combined company was also on track toward full integration of sales enablement tools, including revised training programs, rationalized sales IT systems and updated sales dashboards and performance metrics.
Identified net synergies for the third year expected to exceed expectations at 1.5 times the initial target.
Guide the Process and Solve Problems
A weekly, executive-level decision mechanism to guide the process and solve problems as they arise.
“We wouldn’t have gotten to where we are today without Finovate. The Finovate spent time with us to better understand our processes and where our bottlenecks were.”
