For eleven years, Age Safe® America has trained the people who go into older adults' homes to make them safer. Today we're giving those professionals a new tool, and the country a measurement standard that didn't exist before.
Today, Age Safe® America is announcing two products that, together, change how home safety is measured, documented, and acted on across the aging-in-place industry.
The Age Safe® app is a guided home-safety assessment tool, available exclusively to certified Senior Home Safety Specialist® (SHSS) professionals. It replaces the paper checklists, the hand-written notes, and the inconsistent reports that have defined this work for decades. In a single home visit, an SHSS professional can complete a 240-point assessment, document recommendations, and produce a branded client report on the spot.
The Age Safe® Home Score™ is the first standardized 0-to-100 measure of residential safety for aging in place. It's generated automatically by the app from the assessment, using our proprietary methodology. Every home gets a score. Every score is comparable. The same home produces the same score whoever conducts the assessment.
Think of it as a FICO score for home safety.
Why we built this
Falls are the leading cause of injury-related hospitalization for older adults. They cost Medicare, private insurers, and families more than $80 billion a year, and 80% of those falls happen at home. Decades of research show that home modifications work. The methodology to assess and reduce home risk has existed for years.
What's never existed is a standardized way to measure it.
That's the gap we set out to close. Without a number, payers can't tie home-safety interventions to outcomes. Without a number, families can't tell whether the home they're moving a parent into is actually safe. Without a number, certified professionals can't show clients the value of the work they're doing in any concrete way.
The Home Score gives every stakeholder in the aging-in-place economy something they've never had: an objective, comparable measure of how safe a home is, and a projection of how much safer it becomes if specific recommendations are addressed.
A decade of work, in the hands of the people who do the work
Since 2015, Age Safe® America has trained and certified home-safety professionals across more than 60 occupations. The Senior Home Safety Specialist® certification is approved for continuing education by AOTA, NACCM, NAHB, ASHI, and InterNACHI. It's earned by occupational therapists, home-health nurses, aging-services professionals, real-estate agents, fire marshals, certified remodelers, and many others who already have access to older adults' homes.
That's the differentiator. Age Safe® America does not supply the workforce. We certify the workforce that's already in the home.
The new app is exclusive to those certified professionals. It puts the full Age Safe® assessment in their pocket, automates the scoring, and produces the report in real time. No paper. No transcription. No back-office delay. The professional finishes the assessment, sits down with the client, and walks them through the score and the recommendations in the same visit.
What this means, and the bigger opportunity
For health systems and payers, the Home Score is a measurable, documentable outcome. Medicare Advantage plans, MCOs, PACE programs, and long-term care insurers can now tie home-based interventions to a specific number, and show risk reduction over time.
For aging service organizations, the score gives Area Agencies on Aging, senior centers, and community-based providers a measurable way to document the outcomes of the home-safety work they fund or coordinate.
For families and the people advising them, the score gives a single objective answer to a question that's been hard to answer well: is this home safe for someone to age in?
For real estate, mortgage, and remodeling professionals, the score becomes a property-level signal that can guide decisions about buying, selling, lending, and renovating.
For our SHSS-certified workforce, the app is a tool that makes existing work faster, more documentable, and more valuable to the clients they serve.
But the bigger opportunity is national.
The country is aging. By 2030, every Baby Boomer will be 65 or older. By 2040, the population over 80 will nearly double. Most of those Americans want to stay in their homes for as long as possible, and most of them will. The question is whether those homes will be safe enough.
Falls cost the country more than $80 billion a year. They put more older adults in the hospital than anything else. They're the leading cause of injury death for people over 65. The overwhelming majority of those falls happen in homes where the risk could have been measured and reduced.
Imagine a country where every home with an older adult has a Home Score, and every Home Score has a clear path to a higher one. Where families can see, in a single number, whether the home is ready for the years ahead. Where insurers, providers, and policymakers can measure the impact of what they're funding. Where moving from a 65 to a 90 doesn't just feel safer. It is safer, and the data shows it.
That's the country we believe a national home-safety standard can help build. Not overnight, and not by us alone. But every assessment that ends with a Home Score, and every score that improves because someone acted on it, is a small step toward a country where fewer older adults end up in the hospital from a fall, and more get to age the way they want to: at home, with the people they love.
That's the work we're committed to. The reach we believe is possible is genuinely enormous.
A note from Dan
My path to this work was personal. Like a lot of people in our industry, I came to home safety through my own parents. Watching them try to stay in the home they loved, and trying to help them do it well, made the questions in this business real for me before they were ever professional ones.
I've also always been a measurement person. Whatever the topic, if there's a number that captures it, I want to know it. The home-safety conversation has been frustrating on that front. The questions are big and important. Is this home safe? Is it safer than it was last year? How much safer could it be if we did the things the professional recommended? But the answers have mostly been opinion.
The Home Score is the answer I've been waiting for.
When I became CEO of Age Safe® America last year, the company already had eleven years of work behind it. Fritzi Gros-Daillon and Steven Bailey, who founded Age Safe in 2015, built the methodology and the credential that have become the industry standard. My job has been to put a modern tool in the hands of every professional who's earned that credential, and to give families and the industry a measurement standard everyone can build on.
That's what today is about. And there's a lot more we want to build, all of it on top of the foundation Fritzi and Steven created.
What's next
Over the coming days, we'll be rolling the Age Safe® app out across our community of professionals who currently hold the Senior Home Safety Specialist® (SHSS) credential. If your credential is current, watch for instructions from us about how to get access.
Access to the app requires a current SHSS credential. If you held the credential at one time but it's since lapsed, you can renew it at agesafeamerica.com/re-certification and your access will follow.
If you're not yet SHSS-certified and you want access to the app and the ability to deliver Home Scores to your clients, you can get certified online at agesafeamerica.com/certifications. The certification is the gateway to the app and the Home Score.
We'll be in close contact with the field as the rollout progresses, gathering feedback and iterating quickly.
For organizations that want to put a measurable home-safety standard at the center of their work, our team is ready to talk. Whether you're a health plan, a home-services company, an Area Agency on Aging, or a fire department running a fall-prevention program, the SHSS credential and the Home Score are now available together as a deployable system.
We're proud of what we've built. We're more excited about what it makes possible for the millions of people who'll benefit from it.
Get the app. Keep your credential current.
The Age Safe® app is exclusive to professionals with a current Senior Home Safety Specialist® credential. The certification is online, self-paced, and CE-approved by AOTA, NACCM, NAHB, ASHI, and InterNACHI.
Looking for a certified professional? Visit the Age Safe® Directory.