Helping Families Prepare: Life Care Management Institute and Primary Record Partner to Support Families

When a parent’s health starts to change, most families feel the same mix of confusion and urgency. There are doctors’ notes, discharge instructions, medications, portals, paperwork and somehow, the family caregiver becomes the coordinator of it all.

This National Family Caregivers Month, Primary Record is proud to announce a partnership with the Life Care Management Institute (LCMI), two nurse-founded organizations united by one belief:

Families deserve real tools to plan, organize, and communicate confidently through every stage of care.

Together, we’re helping families turn overwhelm into action through LCMI’s new Family Aging Plan course, now paired with Primary Record as the Digital Playbook where all that planning becomes visible, organized, and shareable.

The Why Behind the Partnership

For more than 30 years, Jennifer Crowley, RN, CLCP, has guided families through aging, caregiving, and complex health decisions as a registered nurse, certified life-care planner, and aging life care professional.

“Families were overwhelmed,” Jennifer says. “They didn’t realize they could prepare wholly for their family member’s aging journey, or their own.”

After decades of helping families navigate late adulthood, she distilled her experience into a compassionate seven-step roadmap: The Family Aging Plan.

But she quickly discovered a gap.

“I could hand families a beautiful plan,” she recalls, “and they’d still be left asking, ‘Where do I put all of this?’ They didn’t have a place to organize what they’d learned or share it easily with family or the care team.”

That’s where Primary Record came in.

Co-founded by Jean Ross, RN, and family caregiver Jim McIntosh, Primary Record is a secure, family-friendly health hub that helps people bring their care plans, patient-portal data, and conversations into one connected place, bridging the gap between what families learn and how they live it.

“The Family Aging Plan gives you what to prepare, Primary Record gives you where to keep it safe, shareable, and updated.”

Jennnifer Crowley, Founder & CEO of The Life Care Experts

From Binders to Digital Playbooks

For years, families have relied on paper binders and scattered emails to manage medical information, methods that are easily outdated, misplaced, or inaccessible when a crisis strikes.

The new LCMI + Primary Record partnership replaces that chaos with a secure, digital playbook that travels with the family.

Through the Family Aging Plan course, families learn the “why” and “how” of:

• Organizing key documents and decisions
• Having proactive conversations about care and legacy
• Building confidence instead of reacting in crisis

With Primary Record integrated directly into the course, those who add the Digital Playbook receive:

• A secure, integrated place to add health information and keep their health story accurate
• Space to store advance directives, insurance cards, and legal documents
• Tools to track appointments, updates, and care team notes
• Secure options to share access with trusted family or professionals

“Families tell us all the time, ‘Finally!! One place where everything in my brain can live.’” says Jean Ross. “That’s exactly what we wanted to make possible with Jennifer’s course.”

A Shared Mission for Families and Communities

Both nurses have spent their careers meeting families at their most vulnerable moments and seeing how lack of preparation magnifies stress, especially in community-based care settings, where families shoulder more of the coordination work themselves.

“We’ve both been the nurses catching families off the cliff,” Jean says. “Now we want to be up on that cliff saying, ‘Here’s how to prepare so you never have to fall.’”

Together, they’re combining education and technology to help families move from reactive care to proactive coordination making planning feel not clinical, but compassionate.

“Planning doesn’t mean something bad is going to happen,” Jennifer adds. “It’s empowering. It’s about shaping the future you want.”

A Scalable Solution for Employers, Insurers, and State Health Leaders

While the Family Aging Plan course was designed for individual families, its structured, nurse-developed framework is also a powerful tool for any organization seeking to support caregivers at scale better.

This approach offers any employer, insurer, community organization, or state health system a proven, scalable way to strengthen family-caregiving capacity, a key goal of modern health transformation and health initiatives nationwide.

• Employers can use the course and Digital Playbook to support working caregivers, reduce absenteeism, and improve employee well-being.
• Health plans and Medicaid programs can embed it within member engagement or care-management models to promote early planning and reduce crisis-driven costs.
• Community organizations and aging networks can use it to equip volunteers and families with a common language and structure for care coordination.

By aligning education (what to prepare) with interoperable technology (where to organize and share it), the LCMI + Primary Record model turns individual caregiver success into measurable community resilience.

How It Works for Individuals

1. Enroll in the Family Aging Plan course through the Life Care Management Institute.
2. Add the Digital Playbook at checkout to unlock three months of unlimited Primary Record access.
3. Activate your account using LCMI’s special access code.
4. Follow along with Jennifer’s seven-step framework as you build your real, living plan inside Primary Record.

By the end of the course, families have not only discussed and decided, they’ve documented, organized, and shared everything that matters most.

Looking Ahead

This partnership launches during National Family Caregivers Month, honoring millions of Americans balancing jobs, kids, and caregiving. Both LCMI and Primary Record believe caregivers deserve more than sympathy, they deserve systems that work.

“Caregiving is hard,” Jennifer says. “Planning shouldn’t be.”

Jean agrees:

“We want to give families the same kind of coordinated visibility that hospitals and care teams have, but on their own terms, in their own hands.”

As states look for innovative ways to connect hospitals, homes, and communities, this collaboration offers a blueprint:

Empower families, connect information, and strengthen the care network from the inside out.

Learn More

Join the movement toward proactive, connected family care: Hear Jennifer Crowley and Jean Ross share how education and technology are helping families move from crisis to confidence.

For Employers, Health Plans, and Community Partners

If your organization is seeking ways to support family caregivers at scale through workplace programs, care management initiatives, or state and rural health transformation efforts, Primary Record and LCMI can help.

Partner with us to:

• Equip families with practical, nurse-developed planning tools
• Integrate caregiver engagement into existing benefits or care models
• Strengthen family-directed care coordination across communities

Contact Primary Record: info@primaryrecord.com