If your elderly mom has a crippling accident and you're at a loss for what to do, Mountain View's Decision Street wants to help.
Decision Street is no mere portal for information about elderly care. Its goal is to provide decision-making tools often used by business executives to guide people through some of the toughest choices they have to make. It is called decision analysis. The site just launched.
Its initial targets are Baby Boomers faced with aging parents and care-giving questions like: "Should my mom move in with me or should we put her in a home?"
Decision Street is one of a number of companies, including elder-care resource site Agis, assisted living referral service A Place for Mom and Sequoia Capital-backed media portal, Eons, targeting the Boomer market.
Decision Street's CEO, Clint Korver, earned his Ph.D at Stanford studying the nature of decision-making. He believes that by enabling people to express their preferences and see choices others have made in similar situations, Decision Street's technology can make complex challenges more more manageable.
From Decision Street's front page, you start building a "decision plan," by selecting one of a few questions like those above. You then input the reason this decision has to be made and the time frame in which you have to make it. Decision Street then asks you, on a scale of one to five, how important it is, for example, to "minimize disruption to mom's life," or "minimze the financial strain of mom staying put."
There are a total of eight factors, and once you've finished, you get an initial score for three possible choices: "No, mom should stay at home," "Mom will move in temporarily," and "yes, mom will move in permanently."
This provides an initial conclusion. Then site lets you further refine the decision making process with more options -- which is actually meant to be the meat of the site.
For example, you can invite the people involved in making decisions to view the plan, and create a central point to list all the websites with pertinent information. More importantly, you can see, edit and add to the list of preferences and choices and, in an evaluation page and change the weights assigned to each one.
In many of these's steps, there is a "learn from others" link. The idea is to have a community of people adding their own preferences and posting information relevant to the questions at hand, essentially building a repository of knowledge that anyone can use.
While we find the concept of having a computer help people decide whether or not to put their parents into nursing homes to be moderately terrifying, Decision Street is trying to offer a way to give structure and logic to what can often be the chaotic, ad hoc processes that define these turning points in our lives.
