About the practice

What an advisory practice is

We are an advisory practice, not a placement broker and not a directory. Helping a family find the right community is one of the things we do. Evaluating whether in-home care is enough, arranging a respite stay, or connecting a family to an elder law attorney, a VA benefits specialist, a financial planner, or a move manager are equally the work.

Most families who reach us are not shopping. They are somewhere in the middle of a bad week: a fall, a hospital discharge with a date attached, a spouse who can no longer manage alone at home. The first thing we do is slow it down and separate what actually has to be decided this week from what has only felt urgent for months.

Sometimes the answer is that nothing needs to move yet. We say so when it’s true.

Louisiana only

We work in one state, parish by parish. That means checking what a community is actually licensed for, asking what availability really looks like rather than taking a waitlist at face value, and weighing whether a place fits a particular person rather than a particular budget line.

It also means chasing the things that never appear in a brochure. Whether a parish Council on Aging picks up the phone. Where a waiver waitlist genuinely stands this month. Whether a memory care unit is staffed the way its marketing implies.

A national referral service can hand you a list. Working one state is what makes it possible to tell you something about the places on it.

How we are paid

Families pay us nothing. Not a consultation fee, not a retainer, not a percentage of anything.

Providers pay us only where Louisiana law allows it, and many of the referrals we make cannot carry a fee at all, either because the law forbids it or because that profession has its own rules. We accept no fee on Medicaid-funded care.

We would rather explain this on the first call than have you wonder about it on the fourth. The full accounting is on our how we are paid page, including the statutes that govern it.

La. R.S. 46:438.2 · 14:70.5 · 37:1745

Who you’re talking to

This practice was built around a simple observation: families are usually given clinical advice by people who don’t understand the money, or financial advice from people who have never assessed a patient.

Shane Bray is a former Air Force nurse who spent the second half of a career on the other side of health care, in executive leadership at a regional health plan and in benefits consulting, where the daily work was understanding what gets covered, what it truly costs, and why families are so often blindsided by both.

Clinical judgment tells you what level of care a person needs today. Understanding how the payment system works tells you whether the plan survives contact with reality eighteen months from now. Most families get one of those and not the other. We think you should have both, and that you shouldn’t have to pay for the privilege.

Bayou Senior Advisors is a veteran-owned Louisiana LLC, seated in Baton Rouge.

Clinical review

Nothing here that touches medicine goes out on our word alone.

Dr. Alex De Moraes, MD, is our physician advisor. Everything on this site that crosses into clinical territory is read by a practicing physician before it is read by a family: what a blood thinner means for a parent living alone, how dementia actually progresses, what a hospital discharge summary is really telling you.

He is board certified in family medicine and has practiced for close to two decades, including as an associate medical director. He has also served more than ten years as a flight surgeon in the US Air Force Reserve.

That review is not a formality. Plenty of senior care websites publish medical explanation written by marketers. Ours is checked by someone who would have to answer for it.

What we won’t do

• We won’t take your information and hand it to a dozen communities to call you.
• We won’t recommend a community we can’t tell you something specific about.
• We won’t accept a fee on Medicaid-funded care.
• We won’t tell you to move someone who doesn’t need to move.

Start wherever you are

Some families call us with a discharge date three days out. Others are eighteen months ahead of anything, trying to understand what’s coming. Both are the right time.

If you’d rather begin without talking to anyone, our MyCare Recommendation asks eight questions and gives you a starting point. No name, no phone number.

And if you’d rather talk, an advisor will answer.

By you through every turn.