Why almost no one uses your EAP — and what working caregivers actually need instead

When a University of Pennsylvania health-policy team looked at why effective caregiver support so often goes unused, they landed on a line worth pinning above every benefits decision: the gap is delivery, not knowledge. We mostly know what helps caregivers. We just don't get it to them in a form they'll actually use.¹ Your Employee Assistance Program is the cleanest example in your own benefits stack.

The number nobody on the buying side likes to look at

EAPs are nearly universal and barely used. Roughly 82% of employers offer an EAP, yet average utilization sits around 5%, with traditional programs commonly cited in the 2–5% range.² A utilization rate considered "good" is only 10–15%, and many organizations never reach it.² One striking gap: most employees with an EAP don't know what it covers, and a large share don't recall having one at all.

This is worth sitting with if you're deciding whether your caregiving strategy can just lean on the EAP you already have. You're not leaning on a benefit employees use heavily for caregiving — you're leaning on one most of them have forgotten they have.

To be clear, and this matters: none of that means the EAP is a bad benefit. For acute distress — grief, a new diagnosis, a mental-health need — an EAP is one of the most cost-effective supports available. The counselors are competent, the line works, the referrals are vetted. The question isn't whether the EAP is good. It's whether it's the right tool for the caregiving load, and whether low utilization is a poster-campaign problem or something deeper.

Two reasons utilization stays low

1. Awareness — the fixable part. Employees don't use what they don't remember they have. Better communication, manager prompts, and well-timed reminders genuinely lift EAP utilization, and vendors will (rightly) tell you so. If your only problem were awareness, the answer would be a better internal campaign.

2. Delivery, not knowledge — the part a campaign can't fix. Here is the deeper issue, and it's exactly what the Penn LDI researchers named: coaching, support lines, and care coordination work, but most caregivers never get them in a usable form.¹ An EAP's core offer is counseling and referral — it helps the employee cope and points them to options. For a working caregiver, the bottleneck isn't coping or knowing the options. It's that someone has to do the work: request the records, schedule the cascade of appointments, chase the authorization, coordinate the home services, keep the family aligned — almost all during business hours. An EAP can refer your employee to a geriatric care manager. It cannot make the referral call for them. So even a fully-aware employee, handed the EAP number mid-caregiving-crunch, often doesn't call: they can already see the output would be advice and a list, and they don't have time for more advice. They have time for the thing to be handled.

That's why, for caregiving, low utilization is partly a delivery problem, and no amount of promotion fixes a delivery problem.

The pattern: advice-based resources underperform for execution problems

Step back and the pattern is general. Resources that inform the employee — advice lines, directories, navigation apps, counseling sessions, resource guides — share a quiet assumption: that the employee will take the information and do the work. They're valuable when the gap is knowledge or emotional support. They underperform when the gap is capacity — when the employee already knows roughly what to do and simply has no hours to do it.

Caregiving is overwhelmingly the second kind of problem. The administrative/coordination layer is the largest single category of working-caregiver activity, and about 56% of working caregivers already report arriving late, leaving early, or taking time off to handle it.³ A Forbes analysis captured the corporate cost of leaving that unaddressed: caregiving "doesn't show up on a claim line," but it surfaces "in the performance improvement plan, in the leave that follows and, eventually, in the resignation" — and only about half of caregivers ever tell their manager.⁴ Handing that person another resource to manage adds to the pile; it doesn't reduce it.

This is the distinction worth holding onto when you evaluate any caregiving offering: does it inform the employee, or does it offload the work? Informing benefits earn low utilization from busy caregivers for the same reason the EAP does — they leave the work in place.

What working caregivers actually engage with

The benefits caregivers use are the ones that take work off them. A care-coordination benefit does exactly that: a Care Continuity Partner — a real person, working remotely and at the family's direction — handles the non-clinical administrative load. They organize and request medical records, schedule and confirm appointments, follow up on stuck referrals and authorizations, coordinate home services, and keep the family aligned with written updates. It's non-clinical and family-directed: it coordinates, organizes, requests, and follows up; it does not diagnose, treat, monitor, or make decisions.

Utilization follows usefulness. A caregiver in a hard stretch doesn't have to be reminded to use the benefit that makes the records request go away — they reach for it, because it solves the problem they actually have. And a coordination benefit doesn't replace your EAP; it sits alongside it, covering the operational layer the EAP was never built to handle. (For how the two fit in a stack, see EAP vs caregiving benefits.)

How to think about it as a buyer

If you're asking "why buy something new when I already have an EAP," the honest reframe is: you're not choosing between the EAP and a caregiving benefit — they do different jobs. The EAP is your coping-and-counseling layer, worth keeping and promoting. A coordination benefit is your execution layer for caregiving, and it's the one that addresses why your senior caregivers are quietly struggling. The test for any addition is simple: after the employee uses it, who does the records request, the scheduling, the follow-up? If the answer is still "the employee," you've bought another resource that will sit at 5%.

With Averyn Keystone, the coordination layer can be funded, co-funded, offered at a preferred rate at no employer cost, or routed through an LSA. Employer reporting is aggregate utilization only. See how the funding flexes →, or size the stakes with the cost calculator.

Related reading

• EAP vs caregiving benefits — how the two fit in a benefits stack.
• Eldercare benefits explained — the inform-vs-offload axis across all benefit types.
• The hidden administrative burden of caregiving — the execution layer, mapped.
• The caregiver-benefits gap checklist — see whether the coordination layer is in your stack.

Sources

1. Penn LDI (University of Pennsylvania), America's Caregiver Crisis is Burning Out Millions of Families — "Coaching and Support Can Help But Are Rarely Used" (May 28, 2026). ldi.upenn.edu.
2. Industry EAP-utilization research, 2025 (~5% average; traditional 2–5%; "good" 10–15%; ~82% employer adoption): SHRM, Managing Employee Assistance Programs toolkit. shrm.org.
3. AARP & National Alliance for Caregiving, Caregiving in the U.S. 2025 (admin/coordination is the largest activity category; ~56% workday impact). aarp.org.
4. Geri Stengel, Caregiving Doesn't Show Up On A Claim Line. That's Costing Companies And Employees, Forbes (Apr 28, 2026). forbes.com.

Non-clinical note: AverynCare provides family-directed administrative coordination. We do not provide medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or emergency monitoring.

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