A few years back, I was on a Zoom call with the Regional Vice President of Sales for a Fortune 50 financial institution when his cell phone rang. I watched his face change. “Hold on — I have to take this now.”
He didn’t mute. I could hear him asking questions, fast and anxious, and not liking the answers. After about two minutes he came back to the group and said, “That was my Dad. They’re taking him to the hospital and I have to go now — I’m his primary caregiver.”
And he was gone. The meeting was instantly over, with six people wondering what just happened.
Here’s the thing. There’s no way around moments like that. No benefit, no policy, no app makes that phone call not happen. But there’s an enormous difference between an employee who gets that call with a plan already in place, and one who’s trying to figure out what a durable power of attorney is while driving to the emergency room.
If you’re in Human Resources (HR) and you’re evaluating caregiver benefits, that difference is the whole ballgame. And yes — full disclosure — I founded one of the three companies I’m comparing. I’ll be fair to the other two, because they’re doing really good work and meeting a need in the marketplace. But you deserve to know how differently we approach employees who are caring for their parents.
The market for caregiving employees, in brief.
The numbers are bigger than most benefits teams realize. According to the AARP and National Alliance for Caregiving’s Caregiving in the US 2025 report, 63 million Americans are now family caregivers — a nearly 50% increase since 2015. That’s one in four adults.
Now connect that to your workforce: 70% of caregivers under 65 are employed, and half of them say caregiving affects their work obligations. Nearly a third are “sandwich generation” caregivers, raising kids while caring for aging parents at the same time.
Do the simple math on your own headcount. If you employ 500 people, about 125 of them are caregivers right now — and roughly 80 are caring for an aging parent.
These aren’t people at the margins of your org chart. They’re your directors, your top salespeople, your regional VPs on Zoom calls. Most of them will never tell you they’re caregivers — until the day they resign, or the day you watch them leave a meeting mid-sentence.
How companies have been addressing employees providing care for their parents in the past.
Mostly? With an Employee Assistance Program (EAP) built for something else.
The traditional EAP is a phone number. An employee in crisis calls, gets a few counseling sessions and maybe a referral list, and goes back to Googling or chatting “memory care near me” at midnight. It’s reactive by design — nothing happens until the employee is already drowning. Add the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which protects unpaid time off but doesn’t help anyone use it well, and a wellness stipend or two, and that’s been the standard playbook.
The results speak for themselves. Harvard Business School’s The Caring Company research found that 80% of employees say caregiving responsibilities affect their productivity — while only about a quarter of employers believe it affects performance. That gap is where good people quietly burn out, scale back, and eventually walk out the door.
Employees weren’t asking for a phone number. They were asking for help carrying a second job.
The emerging players in the market: Wellthy, Cariloop, and ElderHonor.
Over the past decade, a new category has emerged to fill that gap: dedicated caregiver-support benefits. Sixty-three million caregivers and an EAP that wasn’t built for them — that’s not a gap, that’s a market. Three names come up again and again — Wellthy, Cariloop, and ElderHonor.
All three exist because the traditional EAP wasn’t built for caregivers. All three are serious about the problem. But they take different approaches — and if you’re choosing among them, the differences matter more than the category label.
Briefly what each of them do.
Wellthy is a care concierge. Your employee tells Wellthy what’s going on, and Wellthy assigns a dedicated care coordinator — think social workers, nurses, and care experts who take tasks off the employee’s plate: finding in-home support, untangling insurance, tracking down legal and financial resources. They work with hundreds of companies, including 30 of the Fortune 500.
Cariloop pairs employees with licensed care coaches — full-time professionals holding credentials like Registered Nurse (RN) or Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) — through their Caregiver Support Platform, alongside backup care and planning tools. Cariloop reports members save an average of 12 hours per request.
ElderHonor is a caregiver education and competency program, led by a Certified Senior Advisor (CSA) — me. Our Caregiver Competency System EAP trains employees before the crisis: 15 modules, 30-plus assessments, the C-A-R-E framework (Conversations, Assessments, Roadmap, Education), a live community with elder law, Medicare, and dementia care specialists — and access extends to the employee’s whole family, siblings included.
How they are different.
The simplest way I can put it: Wellthy and Cariloop do caregiving tasks for your employees. ElderHonor teaches your employees to run their family’s caregiving with confidence.
Both models have merit. When an employee is mid-crisis, a concierge who can make calls on their behalf is a real relief. Wellthy and Cariloop are built for that moment, and they’re good at it.
But think back to that VP on my Zoom call. A concierge can’t take that call for him. What would have changed his day — and his next six months — is if he already knew which hospital had Dad’s records, who held the healthcare proxy, and what the next steps in care would be. That knowledge can’t be outsourced. It has to be built, and it has to be built before the phone rings.
That’s the ElderHonor bet: planning ahead — knowing what to do and when to do it — beats calling someone you don’t know in a panic — someone who has to look up your records, catch up while you’re waiting, and make a recommendation, all while you’re driving 70 in a 35 mph zone. Been there too many times. It’s the difference between handing an employee a life raft and teaching them to read the weather, and know how to paddle.
There’s a practical difference too. Wellthy and Cariloop grew up serving enterprise clients. ElderHonor was built for individuals first — caregivers like me — and moved into the corporate space second.
How to choose if you’re an HR person.
Ask yourself three questions:
- Where are your people on the caregiving curve? If your workforce skews toward employees already deep in crisis, concierge support delivers immediate relief. If you’ve got a large population of 40- and 50-somethings whose parents are just starting to slow down — the ones who haven’t had “the conversation” yet — competency-building prevents the panic instead of managing the crisis.
- Do you want to rent relief or build capability? A concierge helps for as long as the subscription runs. ElderHonor training lasts a lifetime — for your employee, their parents, and eventually themselves. Education compounds. An employee who’s worked through a care plan with their siblings keeps that competence forever — and so does their family.
- What will your employees actually use? The best benefit is the one people engage with before they’re desperate. Look hard at each vendor’s engagement model: does it require an employee to raise their hand mid-crisis, or does it meet them earlier?
Honest answer: some organizations should pick Wellthy or Cariloop. Some should pick us. Some large employers could sensibly pair concierge support for acute cases with competency training for everyone else. I’d rather you choose well than choose me.
The end goal of helping employees reduce anxiety and stress at work.
Because that’s what this is really about. Not benefits-brochure bullet points — the regional VP staring at his ringing phone, and the version of him who answers it calmly because he knows exactly what happens next.
Caregiving stress doesn’t stay home. It shows up as the distracted meeting, the declined promotion, the quiet resignation. The VP from my Zoom call? He ended up taking a different position so he could spend more time with his Dad. Half of working caregivers already tell researchers it’s affecting their jobs. The ones who feel prepared carry it differently — and everyone around them can tell.
You can’t stop the phone from ringing. You can decide whether your people answer it in a panic or with a plan.
And because we were built for people before we were built for committees, ElderHonor launches in five business days with simple per-headcount pricing and no demo-call gauntlet — whether you’re a benefits team of one at a 200-person company or a committee at a Fortune 100.
If you want to see what preparedness looks like for your specific workforce, we’ll build you a custom workforce assessment within 48 hours. Start here.
Your caregiving employees are already carrying two jobs. Help them get good at the second one — so they can keep being great at the first.