eFuneral Partners with Hospice of Dayton | Video

In this video, Mike Belsito, Co-Founder of Cleveland, Ohio-based eFuneral, discusses eFuneral’s new partnership with the Hospice of Dayton. Find out how the teaming up of the Hospice of Dayton and eFuneral will make it easier for hospice patients and their families to research, plan, and arrange a wide variety of funeral related services for free.

For more resources related to end-of-life care, caregiving, or arranging a funeral service, check out eFuneral’s online resources center.

Video Transcription:

I’m Mike Belsito, Co-Founder of eFuneral. I am very excited and honored to share a piece of news with you that was made official about a week ago: eFuneral and Hospice of Dayton have officially partnered together to help families in the Dayton and Miami Valley area. To my knowledge, this is the first time ever that a hospice organization has partnered with an Internet company like ours to help families find funeral homes in their area.

This partnership is so meaningful to me because we’ve been trying to build up eFuneral as a way to help families find, compare, and select funeral homes in their neighborhood. We’ve had the opportunity to meet all kinds of professionals in all different communities, but especially within the hospice community. The hospice community is something that’s pretty special to us because we know 42% of individuals that pass away are served by hospice. Many of those times they don’t have a funeral home picked out. So the stress upon the families of those individuals is already high, and now when they have to scramble together and find a funeral home, if they don’t have one to go to it just makes things worse.

So we’ve always thought that our service could help these families and kind of ease at least a small part of that stress. And Kent Anderson, CEO of Hospice of Dayton agreed. In fact, we have met several times and met with senior management at Hospice of Dayton, which happens to be one of the largest independent hospice agencies in the country, and certainly one of the most innovative. When you walk into their hospice house, it’s apparent that they do a great deal to take care of the individuals that they’re serving. They spend money on real things that they believe can improve the comfort level and actually make the experience just a little bit better for their patients and families – and it definitely shows when you’re there. So when Kent shared with me that he thought eFuneral could help his families, and he agreed that a partnership made sense, we were really taken back. It’s pretty humbling when an innovative organization that takes care of families the way that Hospice of Dayton does, it’s pretty humbling when they think that your service can actually help their families.

So we’re really excited. What this means for us is we’re now expanding again, this time into the Dayton and Miami Valley area. We’re now in many parts throughout Ohio, but we soon will be expanding outside of Ohio as well, which we’re pretty excited about. This partnership means a lot to us. We hope that hospice organizations throughout the country will take notice and realize that eFuneral can help them as well and help the families that they’re serving. We certainly are honored to help those families as well. We’re excited for this partnership; we are excited that within the next few months we’ll be able to help these families and hopefully we can continue to help families throughout the country.