Raising Tech

Welcome to Raising Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Amber Bardon and today our guest is Hoyle Koontz. Hoyle is a senior living industry veteran with over half of his career dedicated to senior living. It's quite an accomplishment. The Vectre, his latest venture incorporates 15 years of experience. 

The Vectre's sales enablement platform called YourTour is utilized in over 60 communities to drive sales efficiency that helps sales teams make the best first impression. So welcome to the show Hoyle. 

Thanks so much Amber. Thank you for having me. 

So tell me a little bit more about your background. How did you get into senior living, having been at, been in it for so long, where did you start?

Sure. My background is I like to say that my background is all about storytelling. I started my career as a TV news photojournalist and that progressed into starting my first company. In 2002, believe it or not, in virtual tour photography certainly bleeding edge at that particular time.

Hard to believe that's been over 2 decades ago now, but virtual tour photography, of course, [00:01:00] showcasing the locations and various I did a lot of work for hotels. I did a lot of work for master plan real estate. And so I live in North Carolina. We did a lot of work in master plan, real estate in the mountains of North Carolina and the coast of North and South Carolina.

In 2008, I started an agency called Frogman Interactive with a buddy of mine. And we were doing a lot of work in that master plan space, but 2008 was not the time to start a company in that space. So when things went sideways, we pivoted into senior living. We did our first project, which was building a website

for a senior living community here in our backyard of Winston Salem called Salem town retirement community. And then from there it really progressed. So we built Frogman Interactive working primarily with life plan communities throughout the country, [00:02:00] building highly interactive, very rich, very engaging websites.

Largely which had interactive map technology embedded into the website. From there in 2017, we were acquired by a large national agency. I went to work for that agency as vice president of product development, where we iterated on a number of the digital products that we built for the senior living space over the course of the next couple of years.

We were part of a reduction in force from that group just before the pandemic hit in 2020. Fortunately, we were able to start the Vectre at that point just before the pandemic. And then we built YourTour shortly after the pandemic hit largely to respond to the challenges that all of our senior living clients were having relative to the sales challenges that COVID created.

 Thanks for sharing all that background. I always [00:03:00] think it's so interesting to find out how people got into senior living, because a lot of times it's just an accident and then you get in it and you just end up staying in it for your whole career.

So I'm really curious to learn a little bit more, your background coming from videography and digital platforms and things like that. We know that this industry is very invested in the sales and marketing side from just that in person, high touch mentality. So how have you seen this evolve over the last couple of years?

 Are you seeing like a wide embracement of different ways of doing things more virtually and more digitally across the board, or do you still think this is a struggle for a lot of organizations? 

I do think it's a struggle for a lot of organizations simply because, as we all know, technology has lagged in the senior living space.

That's no secret. And so it's certainly gotten better. I think largely in part to the work that folks like Parasol Alliance are doing with communities across the country in terms of helping to [00:04:00] create some digital transformation, but I think, in terms of the senior living sales perspective in particular, it has lagged and it still is lagging and that's, I think, part of what we have seen in the space are quite honestly opportunities here in the sales

arena for senior living communities. What's interesting is that, we've seen a lot of investment in technology on the marketing side of the equation. So many communities have created beautiful websites. They've tied marketing automation to them. There has been a substantial amount of investment on the marketing side.

What we still see, though, is a very analog sales experience, and so that is ultimately what we're beginning to see. We know that our prospects are changing, right? Our prospects will never be less technologically savvy than they are today. And we've seen that primarily [00:05:00] as part of the pandemic as a catalyst to technology adoption and older adults.

I think the other piece of that is in many communities that we work with. We're seeing a 3rd, maybe even half in certain markets of prospects coming from outside of their primary or secondary markets within these communities. When we're working with clients who are in destination spaces, that is a major dynamic where we're seeing prospects come from well, outside of that market. And what we really try to challenge our clients to think about is. How do you take the community to them versus them coming to the community? And of course, doing that virtually is a major win for those clients. 

That was one of the questions I was thinking about when you were speaking earlier, I was curious, do you see any differentiation and the thought process and [00:06:00] approach between different sectors of.

Senior living for example, for profit versus not for profit. More of like the CCRC versus the assisted, memory care. How are you seeing, like, how are you seeing that breakout? I know, obviously the destination places, like you mentioned, but I think, my experience having been to like 70 different communities is a lot of people are local.

They want to stay where they grew up and they want to, go to those communities that are in their area. 

Sure, and I no doubt about it. There are reasons that these communities have those primary and even secondary markets that might be in a concentric circle just out outside of that primary market.

Most of the work that we do is with life plan communities. Where there is a very rich focus on lifestyle 1st and foremost I think it's interesting that the shift that we've seen in the senior living space. What kind of not emphasizing the care focus as much with life plan communities as they are the lifestyle focus 1st and foremost.

We do some [00:07:00] work with assisted living and memory care communities. I think what's interesting there is, of course, the prospect. In that case, for AL and memory care communities, typically the prospect is the adult child. The adult child is often struggling because of that immediate need that a loved one might have in terms of figuring out what is the right fit for their loved one.

And that, of course, is where technology can come into play to create that sort of short list. If you will, we often talk about how client communities need to be more transparent relative to showcasing their particular community and their amenities and so forth. So I think it's an interesting dynamic.

So a couple of the communities I've been at actually one was in Winston Salem and one in Santa Barbara, and they have really long waiting lists.

Like in, The community in Santa Barbara is like a five year waiting list. So when I'm talking to them and I'm talking about, [00:08:00] companies like yours and what are some of the innovation and things we can do differently in sales and marketing? And they say we have a five year waiting list, so we don't need to do anything differently.

What are your thoughts on that? What are the opportunities for the fortunate communities with that situation what could they be doing differently? 

1st and foremost, they should be master planning for more opportunities to to build new inventory. And that's really where YourTour

kind of comes into play. It's interesting. We work in 2 different segments. In the senior living space, we work, of course, with operational communities that are simply looking for sales efficiencies. They may be to your point, they may have long wait lists, or they may have great occupancy, but they're looking for ways to create efficiencies within their existing sales process.

But we also work largely with communities that are engaging in some sort of new development. Perhaps it's an expansion, perhaps it's a sister community. , on an [00:09:00] ancillary community, or maybe, of course, we're seeing a lot of a lot of mergers and acquisitions, even in the senior living space where communities are acquiring other communities.

And so they're bringing those. Up to par, if you will, with sales process. I think there are a lot of different ways that communities can create those efficiencies on the sales and marketing side using a virtual platform. And I think that's really what we've tried to hone in on is that we're not trying to help communities necessarily revolutionize their sales process.

We want to help them figure out ways to work smarter, not harder with their sales process by injecting some of the technology that we've built into the platform in their existing sales process. 

Yeah, that makes sense. And actually that leads me to another question. I was curious, when I go to an organization's website and I'm often going on our clients websites just to learn more about them, a lot of the websites look the same.

So they have a lot of the same kind of information [00:10:00] about this is our communities, this is our services, this is our team. What are your thoughts on like additional content and types of information that. People could that communities could start putting on their website to be a little bit of differentiator.

And I'm specifically interested in the technology aspect. So 1 of the questions I ask at all the organizations I work with and I talked to you is I asked the sales and marketing team. Are you getting asked questions about technology as part of the decision making process for? Which community to move into. Are people asking questions like, how do you know if I fall or how do you make sure I got up in the morning and just like life safety questions and how technology can enhance that. I know I'm got a long question here, but do you see things like that being, having a place on websites and what other content or like differentiating ideas do you think we'll start to see emerging in the next couple of years?

Yeah, I think, technology and honing that in on the website. 1st and foremost, I think communities need to really understand what their website is meant [00:11:00] to do. And often we talk about that concept of, The front door of the community is the website. And primarily it is designed to of course, be prospect facing.

Secondarily, often it is focused on careers, and recruitment and that sort of dynamic. And I think if we can get, that, that focus first and foremost, Is where websites should be for the senior living space. Now, there, we do believe that there should be secondary websites for instance, internal portals and resident portals, maybe even depositor portals that are very focused on communication to those respective audience groups.

I think what we're going to see in terms of community website focus is a large focus around personalization. And certainly that's where YourTour is positioned. But I think, our [00:12:00] prospects are trying to answer the question, what's in it for me. And to your point, I think Amber, So many communities have websites that do look very similar.

But the communities that, that I think shine in that regard are doing the exceptional storytelling that lift the resident voice to talk about ultimately what that value proposition means to them. And in many cases. There are a substantial amount of prospects that fit that same sort of profile, if you will, that are trying to answer those questions.

And they really want to hear from the residents, tell their stories versus quite candidly, the sales team saying, you know what you really should move in sooner rather than later. 

Yeah. I really like that. A couple of points that you hit on one is having the website, not just be a place that Is for prospects and families, but it's actually useful for people in the community for both staff and for [00:13:00] residents.

Having it be more interactive and more of a source of information for people to go to on a regular basis. I think the other really interesting thing you said was storytelling because I feel like this is just like a trend, across the world and all industries is to have a lot more storytelling and video marketing and just like personalization and engagement.

 Let's talk about how does YourTour enable all of these things that we're talking about? 

Sure. YourTour is very focused around the concept of personalizing the sales process for each prospect that comes through the sales funnel.

And so the platform truly is a sales tool. Now we do have elements that do live out on the marketing website for our communities including a very robust interactive map that Allows prospects to take that deep dive into the community and really begin to see the community well before they may ever step foot on the community's campus.

But YourTour is really focused [00:14:00] on showcasing the community's lifestyle value proposition and enabling those sales counselors. To get away from the concept of feature dumping, which I think goes back to your other question about how community websites look so similar, right? Our sales teams often get into a scenario where they feature dump.

And what I mean by that is, Hey, we have a bistro. Hey, we have a pool. Hey, we have a fitness center. Every community Has those items, right? Ultimately it's how you're going to differentiate with your prospect so that you're aligning their interests with your lifestyle value proposition. So the whole concept here is aligning those two taking the sales discovery that that the sales team member has to do in order to learn who that prospect truly is.

And really aligning it and showcasing the various [00:15:00] programming that they do within those fitness centers that enables that sort of life enrichment And that ultimately is helping the prospect understand what their day in the life might look like, right? So we really try to focus

our efforts on selling the lifestyle first and then the residential element. And so enabling that sales team member to hone in on what that lifestyle interest of that prospect might look like from a residential perspective. Maybe they need a 2 bedroom, maybe they want a 2 bedroom with den, or maybe they're looking for a cottage, right?

And so being able to showcase the exact inventory that may be available within that community, or if they're in process with a new expansion or new development, really honing in on the opportunities that prospect would have to potentially even personalize [00:16:00] their own residence by selecting features and finish selections within that respective residence.

Yeah, that really ties a lot of the themes all together with not only creating the website as a more interactive, personalized. But to take those pieces of storytelling and individualize.

So what is it really like to live here outside of just the generic information that you can get, like you said, at any community and that differentiator. So I'm curious. One of the things I talk about all the time is technology culture. So what's the technology culture and organization?

How do people think about technology? How do we change that? And this is making me think about what is the sales and marketing culture? And what does the industry need to change the way that they think about this and start thinking about. Making this shift in just like mindset technology, the tools we're using, what are your thoughts around like the challenges around that and how we can get there?

I think our sales teams need to, certainly we know that they have empathy [00:17:00] for the prospect first and foremost, but they may not know that some of the barriers that they're going through the prospect is going through to make their decision can be mitigated or can at least be reduced.

To a certain degree. And so one of those things that we coach our clients about is the concept around the paradox of choice where too many decisions will inhibit a decision. And really the best way to illustrate that Amber is if you've ever been to the cheesecake factory and you know how thick that menu is, right?

You go through a very acute case of the paradox of choice where you've just got too many decisions. To make that final decision. So that's 1 element that we really try to coach our clients on relative to their prospects. The other is a very interesting thing called the forgetting curve and the forgetting curve has a bit of a misnomer relative to the senior living space and that we think that.

That may be [00:18:00] relevant to just simply older adults. But it has truly nothing to do with older adults. It has to do with the human condition of how we learn new information and ultimately how we recall that information. And so our prospects, sadly, we'll forget about half of our presentation. Within the 1st hour, 70 percent of it within the 1st day, 90 percent of it within the week.

Unless they have very powerful visual reinforcement to the content that they learned. And so I think that's really where, when we talk about this sort of technology culture, it's, How do you overcome some of those barriers that you face by using technology to truly help them either figure out how to make a decision more quickly or how to remember some of the content that you need to share with them so that they can make a more informed decision.

Yeah, that makes sense. [00:19:00] So What do you feel are differentiators between YourTour and other products out there on the marketplace? 

Yeah, I think there are a lot of differentiators relative to YourTour, we only work in the senior living space. And so the platform that we've built is solely focused on the senior living sales process.

 Part of that is. Selling lifestyle over the residential aspect. That's a critical piece to YourTour is really that lifestyle value proposition then I think as it relates to the platform itself. Our clients can make changes within our platform instantly.

And part of that you would think is table stakes, but, a lot of platforms certainly don't have that capability to make. Instant changes in the platform. They often have to have support tickets that get resolved over the course of time by the company. We want to empower our clients to make [00:20:00] changes rapidly without ever contacting us.

And so that's part of what we do. And then I think the other piece of it is. We want to democratize, if you will the use of the tool. We want to empower the sales teams that, that use YourTour to do it from wherever they are. So that doesn't mean that they have to be in the sales discovery room, for instance.

To be able to use YourTour, they can truly use it from wherever they have their device, as long as they have internet access. And so that might be at a coffee shop where they're meeting with a prospect, or maybe they're actually even going into that prospect's home to make an in home visit.

And so they're essentially able to take the community with them to make a meaningful advancement in the sales process. So I think utilizing the platform truly from anywhere is a major advantage of YourTour. 

Yeah, that makes sense. And of course that's the [00:21:00] future. We want to be able to do everything mobily.

Indeed. 

I have really enjoyed our conversation.

I always love talking to other people who've been in the industry a long time, who are senior living specific as well as us. So thank you for joining us today. If our listeners want to learn more, how can they find you? 

Certainly. So they can go to our website, the Vectre. com. We spell the Vectre V E C T R E.

So it's the Vectre. com. You can do a Google search for YourTour and you can also find us on linked in. And you can certainly connect both with myself. Or with the company through LinkedIn and learn more about us there. And we're going to be at major conferences smash, of course, and LeadingAge are two major conferences that we're at.

And so we're present throughout the industry at various conferences outside of those as well. 

Thank you so much for joining us today. 

Thank you, Amber. It's been a pleasure.

Welcome to Raising Tech Podcast. I’m your host, Amber Bardon and today my guest is Kasey Devine. ProCare HR is a nationwide HR managed services firm that specializes in working with senior living operators across the acuity continuum, which is very similar to what we do here at Parasol Alliance on the technology side.

So Kasey, super excited to talk to you and learn more. Welcome to the show.

Yeah. Thank you for having me. It’s good to be with a business cousin, so to speak. So I appreciate you, you having me on.

Yeah. We’re all here to just help make the industry better and keep moving things forward. So ProCare HR is a new company to me.

So can you share with me and with our listeners tell us about what the company is, what you do, maybe a little bit about your history.

Yeah, absolutely. Our founder, Brett, got us started about nine years ago, way up north in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And we found a niche early on serving folks in aging services, usually senior housing.

[00:01:00] And since then we’ve grown quite a bit. We’re in 28 states and expanding from there. And really what we’re up to is HR managed services. I know you mentioned that, but that can mean sometimes, especially for larger groups doing certain parts of the HR process. But we do have the ability to do basically everything from scheduling and labor management to talent acquisition.

Getting in there, getting our hands dirty and processing payroll and making sure you’re compliant and all the different states. So it’s been a fun thing. And like you said, we’re really dedicated to this industry. 70 percent of our staff actually come from the senior living industry. So when someone works with us,

we’re on the cutting edge of what’s going on and making sure that we can support them to the best of our ability.

Wow, that’s really interesting to hear that you are doing something so similar to what we’re doing. Can you tell me more about your typical client?

If a client is coming to you looking for your services, or if you’re going out searching for a community that would be a good fit what would you be looking for?

Yeah, I think [00:02:00] that’s a really fair question. It. There’s not really a difference between for profit or not for profit. I would say if it’s a single community, it’s usually on the bigger end of the CCRC front or something.

They typically have a hundred, 200 employees and up if they’re going to be a large single site. So typically our clients are multi site operators and they are folks who come to us and they’re understanding a couple of different things. Like number one, It is hard to go across state lines in the United States.

It’s like operating in the EU. It’s an entirely different country, almost from a labor perspective. And you want to make sure that you’re buttoned up to be a good steward of the community, be a good steward of the resources. And so they want to make sure that’s tight. The second thing, and this is the biggest thing is that.

Not a secret within senior housing margins are the margins. That’s the first thing. And then the second thing, when you look at operating expenses, depending on the acuity level, somewhere between 40 and 60 to 65%, Of that is labor. [00:03:00] So if you can do a good job managing labor expense and then we’re attracting and retaining really good talent.

You’re going to have an advantage over other communities. And that’s not from a cold hearted capitalist perspective, as much as it is, you’re going to be providing better care and a better experience for your community. And so a lot of folks are seeing that. Yeah. We are seeing, I would say an emerging niche because of that within management companies, same thing.

Like they see an opportunity to support a community. Maybe that’s not the area of expertise. We all know, I’m sure we could talk about it, what the workforce situation is these days, and they’re just wanting to make sure that everything’s as standardized, buttoned up and professionals possible. And so that’s where we’re starting to see a lot of success in helping folks.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So what would be the challenges that you’re seeing where someone might want to turn to your services? So are they having staffing challenges? Is it operational challenges, technology [00:04:00] challenges? Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Absolutely. So I’ll get the elephant in the room out of the way, but there is not a silver bullet to solve the workforce crisis.

I’m sorry. I wish we had it. We do make incremental improvements. I will say from attracting a talent, we do have some ways that we hunt that down in a little bit of a different way than you might expect. And so that’s really usually geared toward frontline employees. From there, it’s all about hR being separated into have to’s and want to’s.

And the want to’s are employee engagement and talent management, succession planning being a good steward of your resources, like understanding that, you’re in the community, like that stuff. And usually what we find is. No matter how large the organization is, they almost never get to the want to.

And if they do it’s limited because the have to stuff keeps bubbling up like one way or another, not making a political statement at all, but anytime anything changes for [00:05:00] more regulation, less regulation, clarifying regulation, that’s now something that like, it takes time for people to understand and digest and become compliant with.

And so that gets bogged down. People are inherently messy. I am for sure. I’ve got a mustache and long hair. So as we look at that, it’s like, all right people are knocking on the door cause they can’t get to their W 2 or they’re trying to get a loan and they need their pay stub or this payroll thing was messed up.

A lot of that is very risky. Like the haves to stuff in HR is very risky and it really only has It’s low return and not really high reward except for the fact that you’re expected to do it right. And so these folks are saying like, hey, Procare has a team of experts on relatively boring things for them, but like HR benefits, et cetera, that we want to make sure are done correctly.

Why that’s not boring is because that’s the stuff that provides the psychological security for an employee to come up and give their best in a day. And if you’re worried about whether that direct deposit or [00:06:00] that check is going to hit on Friday, or if I have access to a earned wage access or whether or not that medical plan is actually going to work at my doctor, like all that stuff, you’re definitely not a hundred percent at work.

And so that’s where a lot of folks are starting to come to us being like, I’ll give you the have to’s so that we can get to the want to’s. And I want you to support us with the want to ‘

s as well.

Walk me through what does this look like for an organization that you work with? Do you have staff on site?

How do they contact you? What is onboarding look like? What does this look like from an initial implementation and transition perspective? And then how does it look on a day to day basis after that’s complete?

Absolutely. We don’t know how or if we can support a group until we talk to them. So one thing to know is because we’re so bespoke, Procare isn’t a widget that you can just buy and you implement Procare.

We need to make sure that we’re mutually a really good fit because the last thing we want is someone coming to [00:07:00] us and with expectations we can’t fulfill or vice versa. So we go through a very in depth current state analysis upfront to make sure that we’re aligned because you’re very well aware on the it side, anytime you’re outsourcing a business process, it’s like you agree to get married and then you date.

And so we really want to make sure that we’re at least like walking in the same direction first. Then from there we really hold their hand. So when it is necessary, we do come on site in certain scenarios. A lot of our business model is remote because people are on the go anyway.

And even if somebody is sitting in an office somewhere, it’s. Chat, it’s email, it’s phone, it’s asynchronous because of the nature of labor. And so we really try to meet each community, each operator’s needs with where they’re at. And the idea isn’t that you partner with ProCare and you get a mountain of work.

The idea is you partner with ProCare and start transitioning that away. And we really take a lot of good time [00:08:00] to make sure it’s set up right the first time. There’s nothing that’s going to start off a relationship in this business process outsourcing space worse than flubbing up something in an implementation because you’re just raw together.

And so we do that and then we go from there. And then what that allows is once someone’s on board, they can pick up a new community. Like that. It’s just adding to an existing infrastructure, but I will say it’s like that is always going to be changed using the marriage example.

It’s I load the dishwasher this way. And I like to, cook our eggs this way. And you’re trying to figure out the details of what that means. And even the things of what does staffing mean or what is recruitment mean or what is good, or how do we measure the success? So we figure out all of that.

Yeah, it’s so interesting because we do the exact same thing. So we do a technology assessment and strategic plan to really assess that partnership and make sure it’s a good fit. And I’ve done assessments where I’ve actually come in told the client that we’re not the best solution for them so that’s definitely an outcome because you do want to make sure that you [00:09:00] have that right partnership because we all want to work towards being successful towards the same goals and if you can, if you find out early on like your marriage analogy that there’s just too many different things you don’t see eye to eye on.

 No one is going to be successful in that scenario. So I think that makes a lot of sense. So tell me, yeah, tell me a little bit more about the benefits that your clients have from working with you. Can you give me some general ones and then if you have any specific use cases or stories you can share with us, that would be great.

Absolutely. This all sits on, I’m going to get a little bit technical to explain this on something that’s called a co employment chassis or PEO professional employer organization. What that allows us to do is actually to share the risk of employment with the employer. And so business decisions are left on their plate.

We’re not making hire and fire decisions. We’re not telling them what to do, or we’re not to do from that perspective. What it allows us to do is to co employ for benefits administration. So why you would care. Your [00:10:00] organization has a different risk profile than the organization down the street because of how we work.

Negotiation is different. I just shared a article on LinkedIn. I forgot who wrote it, so I won’t shout them out, but insurance costs are going through the roof. That’s not something that’s a secret. And so would you rather shop for insurance as 100 or 1000 or 2000 employee group or a 20, 000 plus employee group.

It’s like shopping at Costco for these things. I don’t want like all 20 bottles of shampoo, but I do want the per unit cost of that shampoo when I just need the two, we basically allow you to do that with insurances and other business products that you need for your back office. So that’s some stuff that’s helpful because the Idea?

Is anyone listening to this is oh, yeah, that sounds interesting in I, in a perfect world, why wouldn’t you do that? It’s because it’s it’s not free because we have to make sure that we can provide good service, and then it’s up to us to figure out how can we provide a return on investment.

There’s a bunch of different levers that we do to do that, but that’s also why [00:11:00] a lot of folks really are happy with us and stay for a long time. Cause it’s, there’s very sensitive parts of the business and then the employee life cycle that sit with us, they’re trusting us to no end and we do a good job with it and we try to communicate as much as we can.

So our team is really dedicated. If you meet anyone else from ProCare, you’re going to see someone who’s equally passionate about the space and about helping people. And there’s a reason we’re not serving manufacturing companies or tech startups. Like we’re all in on, on senior care. And I think that in itself is unique.

Yeah. So tell me a little bit about how do you leverage that expertise and the wide network and how many different organizations you’re working with? So how do you leverage that into best practices new ideas, innovation, and bring that back to the clients that you work with.

So if you ran an HR or even an it department in your own community, no matter how big of an employer you are, you have one perspective.

Like you only [00:12:00] see what you see.

and maybe some of the stuff that you gather at conferences, if you go to the right places, but there’s always going to be something else that somebody out there is doing from an innovation perspective that you’re not privy to, or you’re not privy to as fast as you could be.

So the first thing as far as best practices is like you said, we serve dozens of employers in 28 different States. And so the idea is if you come to us looking to improve Employee satisfaction or reduce overtime or comply with X, Y, Z, new law, like by the time it makes it to us, we’ve already worked through that dozens of times.

And we also have access without having to give up privacy to a lot of different ideas of how this thing called employment. So like best practice wise why I would shy away from giving a specific example is because it’s so unique and it’s so personal, what we do find is no matter what, there is a measurable per occupied unit per year, cost reduction of working with a model like ours.

And you’d see the [00:13:00] same thing when, if you were to partner with tech and it is because we do this professionally and our success is 100 percent dependent on us remaining employed. And there is no wiggle room there because of that. And because we’re doing it on a variable cost model, instead of a fixed cost model, that makes it just inherently like you can go up, you can go down, not that we want to talk about down, but like COVID happened, right?

And now you’re always going to be right sized to it. So the best practices are always going to be crowdsourced with people who are actually doing this 100 percent of the time. That is their only job. Meaning that when you go to them, they’re, if they don’t have the answer, they have a lot of resources that wouldn’t necessarily be easily available to someone who’s building it in house.

Yeah. That, again, it’s so similar to what we do as well. A lot of the a lot of our clients, they’ve had one IT person or two IT people and they’re generally, really great people are really knowledgeable, but [00:14:00] like you said, they’re, they only know what they know. And when you can switch to a service like yours or a service like ours, you get advantage, you get the advantage of just having access to so many more resources and just a much broader knowledge base and best practice sharing.

So it’s just so interesting how similar our business models are.

Yeah, absolutely. Like I said, we’re cousins and to, to that point, I want to call this out. Like that model is smart and it’s not a good fit for everybody. Like not everybody will want to do that. Not everybody should do that. But in the cases where it makes sense mutually between a parasol and a community or a pro care in a community, it is so cool to see the impact of it.

So

yeah, absolutely. And I will say, we’ve had some clients that we’ve been in touch with for years and that it person has retired or left and that’s when they decide to make the change. And you actually talked about earlier, just. Doing that initial assessment and marriage assessment, partnership assessment is really just so critical and you never know, then you’re [00:15:00] available and you’re re you’re ready to be that partner when they need you.

Absolutely. So I’m sure you, you face some fear and challenges with making a change like this the same as we do. So let’s talk about maybe some like myth busters. So what do you think are some perceptions about, moving to an outsource model that just aren’t true?

I’ve been I’m glad you asked that.

MythBusters for this our employees are going to think that something’s wrong with the organization. It, the quality of the service isn’t going to be as good, or the response time isn’t gonna be there. There’s absolutely no way that you’re gonna know our organization well enough, insert person who was in the seat before the retirement or whatever else it was.

That has to be expensive and we can’t afford it. What am I missing? I feel like you, you probably hear the same things.

Is our quality of service going to go down if we don’t have in house would be another one.

They’re just not true though.

 That’s why I like to start at the fundamental, like why what is outsourcing? [00:16:00] And some organizations are like proud that they don’t outsource anything. And that is actually fundamentally not true for literally any organization. Like, all right, so you built a power plant on site and you’re generating electricity and you’ve connected to your own satellites and space for internet, like you get the points, like even for, if you have in house IT or HR, you’re still outsourcing something in the form of tools to enable those people. Cause neither of those functions are possible with pen and paper at all nowadays. So you’re already doing that. It’s just a matter of the economics of it and what you want to spend time on. My argument to all of this is to look at the mission of why we’re doing this.

Like, why are you. An executive director, a CEO, a president, whoever CFO at a senior living organization, as opposed to a law firm. It’s you have to care about the mission, but like that’s the whole reason you do that on the for profit or non for profit side. [00:17:00] And if you care about the mission that has to come first.

So then you’re thinking about what is our actual purpose of being in existence. It’s to, to serve Folks as they’re aging, okay, is doing HR this way that we’ve been doing it for the last 10 or 15 or 20 years does that get in the way of or support, does it actually, how much of it has to do with that mission somewhat, maybe not so much is the actual how, or is the end result of your it process, like supporting the mission?

Yes. You have to have that work in order to support the mission, but your mission isn’t to be the best ever HR department or the best ever it department. And it shouldn’t be, it should be good enough to support the mission. And that’s that. So it’s as long as that’s getting done and as long as it’s not in a cross prohibitive way, that’s fine.

The, how it’s do you really even understand how your HR director, your it director is actually doing their [00:18:00] job on a day to day basis? Probably not. Cause you’re not an HR director or it director. So it’s okay. Just open up to see that there is another way of looking at things. And I promise just considering it, the world will not explode and it’s okay.

You can always say no.

Yeah, I really love what you said about supporting the mission. A lot of times, the way I talk about is supporting the business, which is essentially to support the mission is that, H.

R. I. T. billing, find these are all support services to enable the organizations to provide the care and take care of the residents at the end of the day. And, exactly what you said is you want to have the most professional and the most supportive Possible resources to do that to continue to enable, like you said, continuation of the business continuation of the mission.

And I think that a lot of times there can almost be like some fear or just unknown. Like you said what exactly does my HR director do every day? Technology is so complicated. People really don’t understand what goes into it. And I think there is this fear like we’ve got this guy.

He just takes care of everything. We don’t really know what he [00:19:00] does. Drilling down into what our technology assessment goes into exactly what’s going on at every level of technology written out so it’s very clear and transparent.

And I think a lot of it people try to have that transparency and communication but they don’t necessarily have the skill set to translate from technical to. The business, and it probably is something similar on the HR side. So again, just reiterating what you’re saying is to have professionalized services that can translate and clarify exactly what this department does for your business to help you just to continue to be the best you can be.

If you look at almost any other industry in the entire country, they are outsourcing business processes and they have for years and if you talk to any of the executives there, they will point to the yeah, Fact that they are doing that as a large marker of their success.

Yeah, I love it. It’s, this has been such a great conversation, getting to learn more about your business and especially about how we align. So [00:20:00] Kasey, thank you so much for coming on and where can our listeners find you for more information?

Yeah, thank you. So ProCare HR. com or find ProCare on LinkedIn.

Absolutely. Thank you so much. It was great to meet you today.

Hello, I’m Charles. I work for Parasol Alliance in the Tech@Home department. We’re going to talk about the scams that I have seen that are more common or have become more sophisticated.

Scams are very prevalent. They’ve gotten more sophisticated. They range from phishing emails to spam emails. IRS letters, trying to take a little bit of control over your computer with a hoax scam saying that you’ve got a virus. But they’ve gotten more and more sophisticated, less typos, less missed information. One of the more prevalent ones and the ones that people come across is the Microsoft/Window scam, which is called a hoax scam.

You’ll be searching for a support page or a random question. The link will redirect you to a page that says we’ve detected a virus, please contact Microsoft support. It’ll pop up with a phone number and it’ll ask you to contact them.

 Microsoft will never try to reach out to the consumer Themselves, and they will never try and take over your computer just to let you know there’s a virus. [00:01:00] Plus with windows threat detection, they tend to pop up on the bottom right side of the screen with anything that has happened.

And if you do call the number for any apparent reason, it’s best to just hang up. The way they’re talking, the way they’re saying stuff, they’re trying to scare you, hanging up is the best option. There’s no set victim for this. It’s pretty much a spray and pray attack where the attackers want to get as many people as they can in this attack and they want to have as many victims without a lot of effort. It will say your computer’s locked and it will do a pop up window. Have a voice where it’s really loud saying you’ve been hacked. In this case, it’s saying that your Facebook login credentials have been hacked or your credit card information on some of them. They’ll provide a technical support number. It’ll look legitimate just because it’s a 1 800 number, and those tends to be the ones that support uses but this is not something that is a normal use case for people for Microsoft specifically.

Sadly, I had resident where she actually got [00:02:00] scammed. She got a phone call. And they said that her daughter was in trouble. And she went through the effort. I had an appointment with her that same day and she was on the phone with the scammers.

As I knocked on the door she ended up waving me off saying that it’s not a good time. It’s a family emergency. So I ended up saying, okay, are you sure? I asked her, she’s all right. She said, yes, she’s fine.

The scammer on the phone told her that I could be one of the people trying to scam her and hack her because they were saying that they were saying that no one could be trusted because they’re the real people and they’re the ones talking to your daughter.

 The next day she called me over and I found out she got scammed out of almost 10 grand. The worst part about it is that it’s not that it was wired out or it was sent through a check. They came and knocked on her porch window and the screen door. She gave it to them in her hand and they went about their way.

It was hard find out the next day that she lost a lot of money. She was scared because they came to her door physically.

 There was [00:03:00] nothing I could do because of how much fear they put into her during the scam. That one’s related to more of an AI scam where they were a vishing scam is what they call it, where it’s a voice scam and that one’s a little bit harder to track.

Vishing scams tend to be done mostly with AI. So AI has been used in a bunch of scams. This is the reason why they’re becoming a lot harder to track and to notice the difference. Yes, there’s still grammatical errors inside of either vishing or hoax scams or maybe pronunciation with vishing scams.

Because AI is growing at such a rapid pace, it’s really hard to tell a difference, especially when you’re in a panic that when you’re worried about your loved one, it’s hard to just to hang up and say, “Yeah, I’m gonna call my actual daughter’s phone number and make sure she’s all right.”

Because you never know. Maybe it’s the hospital or maybe it’s a family friend that’s calling from someone’s number or anything like that, but it’s 1 of the harder ones to deal with. Scams are becoming harder to detect, harder to deal [00:04:00] with and harder to spot, especially with AI since grammatical errors become a thing of the past when AI has learned pretty much everything in the dictionary and how to write

sentences properly. Also if the attack becomes more targeted, they’ll use your actual name. If they figure it out they’ll attack actual sites that you use more than ever.

We recently dealt with a resident.

Luckily enough, he’s okay. And the scam that happened was stopped because he was able to pay attention. Basically, his printer had an issue with the new ink that he ordered, so it had caused them to go look for the HP support website.

He ends up talking to a person and the person’s claims to be from HP support and he tells them the issue about the printer. The technician on the phone ends up telling him that he wants to remote in to help him download drivers.

 Once he remotes in, he tells the resident that it’s a Russian hack. And they’re showing that it’s still active.

And luckily enough, he was like, “okay if I’m hacked get out my computer.” Then he [00:05:00] cut off the remote session.

He ended up calling me and I came over. I listened to his story and the things that stood out to me that the technician said is that he got hit with a ransomware. Which means that any files or any data on the computer gets locked and it’s inaccessible. And I could, I was telling him, I told the resident that I could access all his files.

It doesn’t seem like he got hit by ransomware.

Remoting in, there’s a couple of ways to do it. The easiest way you’ll download an application. A lot of people like using AnyDesk or TeamViewer.

 It will allow the other person to look at your content on your computer. You’ll give them access to the desktop to be able to type or move the mouse and they’ll be able to have control over it.

The benefit is that you can get family members to help you out with issues if they’re across the world. The other benefit is that it allows for technicians like us to actually help you with an issue a little bit more. But the downside is that the person that has access to your computer has complete access to [00:06:00] it.

 If they open up any files they’ll be able to see it and they’ll be able to take those files and look at them and be able to send anything.

So If you have your browser open with like your email signed in, they’ll be able to send emails on your behalf without really having much effort or having to sign in. The reason why it’s not recommended is because with that much power on your device, whether you think you have

nothing on your computer or not, you always have some information, like a name, an email, an address, maybe someone else’s address, someone else’s phone number. Maybe you have a picture of your credit card on your computer for some reason. Basically, you have sensitive information that you don’t think that it’s very prevalent, but a lot of The scammers and hackers they work off of information as little as just a phone number.

 The best use cases to just not let anyone remote in and have them physically either come over to help you if it’s possible or ask someone else for help. But remoting in shouldn’t be used by everyone.

 The other [00:07:00] 1 that I had, she ended up calling me the day after it happened and she was trying to deal with some banking issues. The way she explained to me was was that she was dealing with some banking issues late at night.

She ends up trying to find information through a website about how to fix the banking error and it ends up redirecting her and she gets hit with the hoax scam. She calls the number, the person on the line tells her that he’s from Microsoft.

She’s been hacked. She has a virus and same script. Because she was dealing with a bank issue at the time. She also informed them that she was dealing with a bank issue and she asked them if that has anything related to it. What they did was that they created a 3 way call or a conference call and they.

Looped in the “bank security”. So they were saying that they got the bank on the line and this is the secure line and she ended up giving them her account number, her name and her address. And this one, they got more information than actual money.

She ended up calling her bank, freezing her accounts. She said that they took [00:08:00] out $1,500. But what they really took was more information.

 One ending piece of just if it sounds to you to be true, it’s too good and you should avoid it as much as possible.

You should never reach out to numbers that you don’t know, or aren’t 100 percent sure about. When in doubt, don’t be scared to ask a family member for help. I know it might sound like you’re bothering people, but it is important to reach out to people that you can trust and have a conversation with because I think we’ve all been scammed at 1 point.

 If you’re suspected of being hacked, first step is either turning off the computer or just getting it off the internet.

 The other thing that would help with not getting scammed and not getting hacked is don’t save your passwords in the browser. A password manager is 1 of the best ways to go.

You’ll be able to to also keep track of what accounts you have. Because they save the name of the website, and then every account tied to that address. Sign up for LastPass or Dashlane or Bitwarden, which is [00:09:00] free for personal use.

Welcome to raising tech podcast. I’m your host, Amber Bardon. Today, our guest is UprightVR. UprightVR offers advanced virtual reality technology for precision balance assessments and personalized fall prevention strategies, enhancing mobility, safety, and quality of life for the elderly .

We have two guests joining us today from UprightVR. Ramiro Maldonado is the director of business development, and we also have Geoff Wright, who is the chief science officer. Welcome to the show.

Thank you.

So I am, Really looking forward to hearing more about UprightVR.

I think falls management and falls technology is such a cool area of technology in the senior living space. I think we’re seeing a lot of new companies come out into the space. We’re seeing a lot of attention paid to it, which is really nice. And I know a little bit about your company and about your product, but I don’t know exactly how it works.

 Let’s do introductions and then let’s talk a little bit more about what UprightVR [00:01:00] is.

Ramiro Maldonado: Cool. Yeah. So thank you so much, Amber. Yes, my name is Ramiro. I’ve been a physical therapist. For wow, probably a little bit over 15 years now at this point. Practice clinically for a little over 10 and I geared my clinical education towards vestibular and neuro therapy. What that basically means that I just catered my education towards.

What causes balance impairments and what causes business impairments? And that was very much. So just where my passions lied and in clinical world I then moved over into the world of rehabilitation technology. Bounced around there for a little while and then found out about what they were doing at UprightVR.

 I’m coming on my first year with them, in August will be a year.

Amber Bardon: Congratulations on a year.

Ramiro Maldonado: Thank you.

Amber Bardon: Thanks for that background. Right over to you, Geoff.

Geoff Wright: Yeah. So I’m the co founder of the company and inventors. So I had been working with virtual reality technology for Probably over 25 years now, way back before it was even affordable. My background is in neuroscience and [00:02:00] engineering, and I’m currently a professor at Temple university in Philadelphia.

 We started the company back in I think 2018, I think officially incorporated 2019. And the focus has been on fall prevention but really my background is in studying postural control and we call it posturography. So balance control. And I’d been doing that for a couple of decades after training with physical therapist, neuroscientists engineers, and people who have really looked at all the different aspects of what

Geoff Wright: contributes to how we keep ourselves upright and how we balance. And because we’re two legged creatures, we’re constantly unstable. And this gets worse with age because we’re dependent on regular feedback from our vision, our vestibular system, and our tactile sensors to keep us upright. The idea is we use virtual reality and we also use some of the built in gyroscopes and cameras that are built into the headset in order to track whether [00:03:00] someone’s moving unusually while we’re testing their balance.

And so that’s the main underlying idea of what UprightVR is doing is it’s testing person’s ability to keep their balance in unusual situations and in common situations.

Amber Bardon: So one of the things I’ve learned about as I mentioned earlier, there’s so many false technology products out there is that each company seems to have a really different approach.

So there’s cameras, there’s AI devices there’s the lamp, so why did you decide to go in the direction of VR? What’s the benefit of that? How did you come up with that idea as to take as your approach?

Geoff Wright: Yeah, it’s a great question because people don’t intuitively recognize what’s going on with balance and the fact that virtual reality is actually manipulating your visual input.

So it’s trying to create representation of your environment, which is information that you use to keep your balance. When you’re standing in a room and you may not know it, but unconsciously your visual [00:04:00] system is taking in information about orientation cues like the orientation of the door and the horizontality of the desk and unconsciously your brain is using that to help you keep balance while simultaneously your vestibular system is giving you

it’s like a little gyroscope in your inner ear. That’s telling you whether you’re leaning to the left or the right or you’re moving forward or backwards. Okay. And interestingly, with virtual reality, it’s actually specifically designed to either have to solve that problem for you or to be able to manipulate that.

So you can make someone seem like they’re moving all over the place, even when they’re not. And your brain has to figure out, wow, am I moving the way the vision is saying, or am I moving the way my Somatosensory and vestibular system is saying that I’m moving. And so if your brain can’t solve that problem then it’s at greater risk for not being able to keep balance and

even though we’re not constantly in a world that’s being manipulated and spun around. We actually are encountering these [00:05:00] types of things all the time. Like you could be standing on a street corner and a big bus passes by you and that captures your visual system. And it says either something is moving in front of me or I’m moving and my brain has to figure out very quickly whether it’s me that’s moving or whether it’s something in the environment that’s moving.

And this gets worse with age is that we can’t resolve that conflict that our brain is subjected to regularly.

Amber Bardon: That’s really interesting. Walk me through if I were to put on your VR headset, what would I experience? How would it feel for me as the person being assessed?

And what is the staff person seeing? And who’s typically doing the assessment? Is it a physical therapist? Or tell me a little bit more about those processes.

Ramiro Maldonado: Can definitely have a clinician perform the test if you’d like, but the beauty around the test is that it’s a very clean and understandable interface. So what you effectively see as the person undergoing testing procedure is, you’ll wear these set of goggles that look like goggles.

If you’re not familiar with the [00:06:00] world of VR, and then you’re put into an environment that looks a lot like a space capsule. It looks like you’re out in space. You could have a look around. It’s like a bit of a Star Trek scene. And you’re looking out of a window. You get to see this nice galaxy and earth and all this kind of stuff.

So it’s just a nice, calming environment. And that’s what the individual kind of experience in that VR world. And then the individual that’s performing the test again, they can be a clinician, but it could really be anybody that just knows how to safely guard an individual because 1 of the things I love about the tool is that everything is wonderfully standardized. So when we start to test, it just starts this cascade of events where it starts out with saying ” Hey, listen, welcome to the upper VR scene. Have a look around. Isn’t it cool what you’re looking at? Understand that we’re next to you the entire time and we won’t start until you’re ready.”

 Once they get used to the testing procedure. And then once they get use that environment, they get used to the testing procedure. And then even notifies the individual what’s going to happen during each 1 of the test. For the very 1st, 1, it’s just ” okay, for this condition, all that’s going to be happening is you’re going to have [00:07:00] your eyes open and you’re just going to try to stay as still as possible.”

And we do that for every single 1 of the conditions, which there are 8 of they take 20 seconds total for actual data gathering. So the actual testing procedure is relatively short. It’s around 3 minutes or so test itself. Takes about 10 minutes, but again, because so standardized, you could have someone who’s not necessarily with a clinical background do that testing procedure.

Everything is stored in a cloud so that a clinician could then review the results later if necessary, or if they want to be the 1 going through that test, they could do that. And testing relatively takes about 10 minutes or so. So that’s what they’re seeing.

And there’s some unique things about some of the environments that we introduce that individual that really helped to help us tease out if this person is highly visually dependent, or if they have an impairment and what’s known as the vestibular system, which is what people will call their equilibrium or if they have anything where they.

Have difficulties with integration of these systems. Are those 3 components that Dr [00:08:00] right mentioned before somatosensory visual and vestibular, they all communicate with each other. And sometimes the issue is integration and how those systems communicate with each other. And we expose individuals to environments that allow us to tease that out a bit.

For instance, 1 thing that we could do in the world of VR we had manipulate the environment in such a way. That 1 of our conditions, we actually spin the environment a bit, which sounds scary at 1st. But what we often find is that people see that they’re like, whoa, this is cool and interesting.

It’s not a fast spin. It’s just a nice, slow spin. And what that helps us to do is tease out those integration issues that I was just mentioning. And so we could pull all this information out. Takes about 10 minutes to perform and overall the overwhelming experience has been people just being like, wow, that was really interesting and cool.

And, I can’t believe that I was able to do this entire thing. That’s going to give me information about my balance in just 10 minutes. And all I had to do was just stand right here and perform this test. So that’s the whole thing in a bit of a nutshell.

Amber Bardon: Okay, that makes sense.

I can visualize myself going through it as you were describing [00:09:00] it. So I’m not an expert, I’m not a clinician, but my general understanding on how, falls management the components of it. So there’s the assessment piece which you’re doing. And then after the assessment’s completed, there’s the care planning and how do we address this? And then there’s the actual, tracking if a fall occurs and what’s the follow up. So I’m curious, are you focusing on just that first piece or what happens next with the information? And are you able to incorporate any of the other pieces of falls management into your product?

Geoff Wright: Yeah, and it’s another really good question because it doesn’t stop with just identifying that there is a false risk and we actually have now added in rehab modules so that we can say if we identify specific fall risk Factors and they are modifiable fall risk factors, then we can address them by either doing some standard physical therapy, a balance training course or Tai Chi or even dance classes, which really can help with balance.

Or you can do our virtual reality rehab [00:10:00] modules, which we’ve designed specifically for addressing whatever deficits we’ve identified by doing the assessment. But in any kind of fall risk I guess matrix, you have the individual who is. Trying to keep their balance. You have the environment, which is not actively trying to make them in balance, but is the source of so many falls.

It’s like just a simple trip over a change in the over a curb or a change in the surface. So things like that can obviously be useful. amended or changed to and modified to make it a more agreeable environment. And then the third thing is the types of tasks that we have the individual, the environment and the tasks that they’re doing.

And sometimes the tasks such as activities of daily living, which you really need to do to get through your day versus things that are perhaps more challenging. And can you Change your behavior so that you’re not doing the most risky things. But are there compensations that you can work around? So the goal is to [00:11:00] address the whole problem, which is the individual, the environment and the tasks that they’re doing and seeing if you can get them to where they can function in a way where they’re happily and independently getting through their day.

Amber Bardon: Can you talk a little bit more about the environment? How do you incorporate that into the assessment? Is that just more of a, like a physical look or does your product actually have a way to assess that?

Geoff Wright: Yeah, no. So we leave that to impart to working with the experts of environment design.

But just through working with physical therapists and they make modifications to the environment just through the natural course of their training. So our device itself doesn’t identify that or doesn’t identify environmental. Problems or issues that need to be addressed, but it does identify that this individual may be at greater risk if they’re in a dark environment.

If we see that they are highly visually dependent, then we say you might want to put some active lighting into the room so that when they get up in the middle of the night to maybe [00:12:00] use the restroom, then, you a nightlight should be on so that they have some visual feedback to help them.

Because it turns out that they maybe have really weak tactile senses and that they’re at risk if they’re trying to depend on just their sense of touch and their vestibular system. So that kind of thing we can identify and then that guides the the facility manager the person who is trying to create rooms that are really ideally designed for seniors that that have certain risk factors.

Amber Bardon: Okay.

Ramiro Maldonado: To add to that bit is I forgot to mention that at the end of this test that we perform, this wonderful report is created. That’s instantly generated. That identifies any area that, might have a. A risk concern exactly where in the balance system there might be an impairment.

It’s written in such a way that someone without a technical background could very clearly understand where the deficit is. But then also on that report is a very kind of scientific. Breakdown of what’s going on, and that’s meant for the clinician to [00:13:00] then guide their practice. And then overall, what I think is great about the tool is this wonderful fall management piece of it.

So we could track all of this information. We store all of this information and we can see how many people were. High risk for falls month by month. And were you able to pull them out of of high risk to medium risk to low risk? And so say, Mrs Smith comes in at high risk and you’re able to pull her through ideally to low risk by following maybe some of our rehab protocols as well.

Some of the protocols that you may put in place. But if you suddenly were to see a drop and Mrs Smith drop, she we got her to low risk and now all of a sudden we test her. She’s back to high risk again. That would be also an indication for the individual to say, okay, what happened here?

Did is there a change? Was there a change in medication? Was there a change in medical status for this individual? So you could get ahead of any issues before ideally she’s had that fall. So you could go into it. It’ll give you that that impetus basically to deep [00:14:00] dive and figure out what’s going on here.

Okay.

Amber Bardon: Yeah, that makes sense. So that kind of leads me to ask you my next question, which is, I’m imagining that 1 of the benefits to using Geoff, versus other falls management tools is the portability and the size. And that’s probably a, less of a barrier to entry and cost of the system as well.

And then it sounds like. it’s also allows you to do frequent testing. So can you tell me a little bit about, what are some of the other advantages of your product versus others? And then how often do you recommend doing these assessments and testing? And I’m assuming that would be an advantage over some of these other systems that are a little bit more cost prohibitive or have to be operated by a skilled clinician.

Geoff Wright: Yeah that really is one of the things that was in the main thrust of of This device is there are some really great equipment that’s been around for decades. And yet, if you go into clinics or you go into c. R. C. S. You’re not going to see this equipment. It can cost over 100, 000, and it has this huge footprint.

And once it’s [00:15:00] set, it’s not moving. What? What if we could take that type of research grade and clinical grade equipment and make it portable and Then be able to take it to the room of a resident or take it to take it on the road. If you needed to go do home care. So it is just the headset and a little piece of of clinical foam that we use to manipulate the stability of the ground.

So that’s all you need. And it’s it’s all weighs all of a couple pounds and you can carry it anywhere. So that means You can test somebody as frequently as you want. If you if you have somebody that has changed health status or change medication, or they came in saying I recently fell and I’m scared to get going again.

And so you can assess what might have caused this fall and determine whether they have some sort of sensory motor deficit, and then you can start addressing that. And then you can test them again every week or so. And you could do it in the safety of their home, or if they’re able to get to the [00:16:00] clinic, then that’s certainly an advantage.

Yeah we call it we call it ultra portable because portable is now being co opted by people that have giant pieces of equipment that is, if you’re a heavy weightlifter, then you can actually move this equipment around, but you don’t need to be a weightlifter for ours, you just need to be able to carry an attache case or something like that.

Ramiro Maldonado: And I definitely want to downplay that because the doctor I mentioned so this tool is capable of performing an advanced test. That in order to perform this test, you would be out in the field looking for something called computerized dynamic posterography. And as Dr, I mentioned, the tools that are currently in the world that could perform that.

Are extremely large take by the entire room and again, started around 100 to 150 K and this is. As sensitive as a tool as that, they could bring it directly to the resident right in their room. A fraction of the cost, which is just a reason also why I was very drawn to the team and the product and its capabilities to put the sheer power that is as portable.

Amber Bardon: That’s [00:17:00] really incredible. We don’t have to get into it, but I’m really curious. Like how did you do that? That’s so innovative to be able to take that technology and make it so portable and accessible.

Geoff Wright: Yeah. It’s funny that the technology is moving in. I mentioned that I’ve been working with VR for A quarter of a century but some of the things that were innovated by others, I realized could be applied to these other applications.

So the built in we call them IMUs, inertial measurement units, which are really gyroscopes and accelerometers, the kinds of things that you might have seen in jet rockets just 25 years ago, but now they’re making them so small. They can fit them in this commercially available headset. But what we had to do is.

Then compare that to other really using expensive equipment that I had in my laboratory, we compared how reliable that was. And we showed that it really is just as good as some of this expensive equipment. So now we need to develop our own algorithms to see if we can then [00:18:00] quantify. The change in postural control and we use I’m trying to have to throw out fancy words, but some of things like kinematics, which is the measure of your body movement, and we can quantify that down to the millimeter accuracy and say, Oh if you’ve got a change in your kinematics, then that means that you’re.

Probably showing some deficit in your sensory motor system that wouldn’t be detectable by just visually inspecting someone. So you can watch somebody try to keep your balance. And you can say only if someone is wobbling around like a drunken sailor, can you tell that they probably have a balanced deficit?

Whereas with this device, you could have very subtle deficits that we can pick up on and and quantify them. And then. And then get an actual fall risk ratio.

Amber Bardon: It’s amazing. Does your technology then integrate with any of the medical record system so that you can have data going back and forth around the assessment and then any follow ups and outcomes and then, progress.

Geoff Wright: Yeah so we have looked at a [00:19:00] number of the EMRs and because there’s no standardization out there and there’s a lot of competing electronic medical record systems, we felt that we weren’t going to be able to accommodate all of them. So what we did is we designed our own. What it basically is a cloud based database that gives you an electronic report that then you can you can either manually integrate with someone else’s E.

M. R. or you can use that in order to track an individual. So we store all this information in the cloud. So it’s accessible to the user, such as the clinician or the retirement community managers.

Amber Bardon: Makes sense. So looking ahead, are you able to share what are the plans you have for future development of UprightVR?

How do you see this technology evolving? What can you tell us about that?

Geoff Wright: Yeah we’ve been having some really great brainstorming meetings over the last few weeks that we’ve had like a five year plan for. For a while and it’s constantly evolving, but we currently have [00:20:00] so we started out as just an assessment and the goal was to develop then these rehab modules, which now we have a suite of rehab modules.

A dozen of them that you use. They’re like games. But they’re specifically designed for treatment. And then we also we’re currently Developing machine learning algorithms that are going to take those assessments and match them with the most effective rehab to say, okay, if you’ve got this pattern of deficit, then what you need to do is it automatically tells you what rehab you need to do.

We also have number of other assessments, which are important to the clinicians. There’s a balance assessment, but then there’s a lot of other types of assessments that are related to keeping your balance that may involve just sensitively testing the vestibular system, sensitively testing the visual and we call it the ocular motor system.

So your visual motor system. And so we’re designing. Other assessments, which we’ve been [00:21:00] validating in some studies that I’m doing in my lab. And now we’re just incorporating them into our commercially available offering. So those are really close to on the they’re more than on the horizon.

They’re actually, some of them are ready pretty close for release and they just need to go through some internal testing and others are going to take a little bit longer to develop, but I think that, reasonably some of these can be integrated within the next six months.

Amber Bardon: Wow. Exciting.

Ramiro question for you. We’ve covered a lot in a very short period of time. Is there anything we haven’t talked about that you want listeners to know about Geoff?

Ramiro Maldonado: Yeah, for sure. Some things I consider balls the silent epidemic that is going through just all populations.

And some of the biggest indicators are fall is, 1 of the biggest 1 is obviously have you had a fall in the past year? That’s a clear risk for fall. The 2nd 1 is a fear of falling. So that’s another very high. Indicator that someone’s going to fall soon.

What I find about fear around something, it’s often about [00:22:00] not understanding a thing, so people just don’t really understand why they’re imbalanced. So what they tend to do is they just. Unfortunately, start to actually slow down and start to sit more and become more immobile, which actually starts to increase the risk of potentially having a fall.

What I think is really powerful about our tool is that It’s an empowering tool because we identify exactly where and in your profile you have a deficit, it helps you to understand this beast. Essentially, you know exactly where it is. And it’s not a fear inducing thing. It’s an empowering thing.

And so now you’re armed with, okay, this is exactly where I need to address my impairments. And this is how I can get better. And people start to realize okay, this is not a sentence for definitely going to fall. This is now a way out. And how I’ve become more mobile and more independent again.

So that’s something I just really want to, out there for people to understand about the tool and and, where I see it.

Amber Bardon: I love that you said that, and I love that you’re framing it as an empowerment tool, because [00:23:00] combined with your accessibility and portability, it really, Brings the ability to assess for falls to a much broader audience.

It sounds like.

Geoff Wright: If I can add to that, I think, and Ramiro knows this all of our case success stories. 1 of them is exactly that where we tested a bunch of seniors and men in a series of the 4 that we actually quantify. We. Said they all came in with very high fall risk. We put them through about six weeks of physical therapy or Tai Chi, and at the end of it, they all had improved and gotten their fall risk significantly down.

And many of them said they were just so pleased when it was for them. It was a competition in their mind to say I can change those numbers and they all did. They all just went from lots of reds to lots of greens, which is a positive movement. And it was really nice to see how excited and involved they invested.

They were into taking power over this. This, [00:24:00] usually you get a bad medical wreck, a medical report from your doctor and you think Oh no, my cholesterol is high. And then you realize that you can do things to lower this, or you can do things to improve your balance.

Amber Bardon: That’s such a positive note to end on.

So thank you for sharing that story. And thank you so much to both of you for joining us today. If listeners want to learn more about UprightVR, how can they find you?

Ramiro Maldonado: Yeah, so we have a website up right? Vr dot com. There’s a request for info at the end at the bottom there. If you want to reach out to me directly, my email address is my 1st last at upright.

Vr dot com. So that’s Ramiro dot Maldonado at upright. Vr dot com. I try to respond as quickly as possible. Again, our website. The info email there at the bottom of that website, as well as my own email, feel free to reach out. Happy to talk about this stuff. Excited to talk about this stuff.

Amber Bardon: Yeah. Fabulous. We’ll post that in the show notes as well. And thank you so much both for joining me today.

Geoff Wright: Yeah, thank you for inviting us. Very good time.

Amber Bardon: You can find us online at [00:25:00] RaisingTechPodcast. com where you can see all of our episodes and contact us to provide feedback or submit an episode idea. We are on social media everywhere at Raising Tech Podcast. If you enjoy Raising Tech, please leave us a review and share with a friend. Music is an original production by Tim Resig, one of our very own Parasol Alliance employees.

As always, thank you for listening.

Welcome to Raising Tech Podcast Resident Exclusives. My name is Amanda. and once a month we have a featured episode completely dedicated to resident technology including education, common issues, tips and tricks and more.

These podcast episodes are to educate, inform, and update residents on today’s technology world.

Today’s episode is going to educate you on how to recognize and avoid malicious emails. You can listen to today’s episode on all podcast platforms, but we strongly encourage you to watch the video demonstration on YouTube. Today’s demonstration is just one example of the many technology classes we offer through our Tech@Home program.

Without further ado, we have James Peck, our Tech@Home manager. I hope you enjoy.

Hello everybody. My name is James Peck and welcome to our Tech@Home scams and phishing emails presentation. I’d like to introduce you to some common scams that I see on the day to day and teach you how you can recognize them and avoid them in the future. [00:01:00] So the first thing that you need to understand is the number one rule.

If something looks suspicious on your computer, it most likely is. You need to know how scammers operate. Being informed is the best defense for this because scammers are everywhere. You might be familiar with this from unsolicited phone calls, emails, and text messages. Scammers will hide behind fake names, fake stories, fake companies, and often they operate out of foreign jurisdictions that protect them from facing justice.

So some general advice is be cautious. Don’t talk to people that you don’t know. This is especially true on social media. Don’t share information with strangers. And today, anything that you post or share online can be used against you by scammers, especially if what you post is public to everybody. In the past, you may have been taught to look for red flags.

Check for spelling errors, mismatching fonts, check for robocalls or people who don’t sound real, [00:02:00] or just look for lies or false statements. These are a baseline understanding of scams, but today we’re going to go over some more advanced computer scams and how to tell what things look suspicious going back to the number one rule. Some common scams that I run into sometimes we’ll see IRS scams. So you may receive emails from government agencies especially the IRS. If you get emails from them or if you see something bearing an IRS logo, don’t follow the instructions in the email necessarily. What you’ll want to do is, you’ll want to go navigate to the website of the agency that’s sending you the email, and you can log in there.

Typically if it’s something urgent, the IRS or any government agency will send you mail so always keep that in mind. And just avoid clicking on shady links or following instructions that don’t seem quite right in the email. Another common scam are emails claiming to be from Microsoft. So Microsoft or Windows or Office 365 or anything [00:03:00] else will not send you unsolicited emails about your computer.

Never call Microsoft if you’re ever given a phone number or anything like that ask yourself a couple of questions. So when you look at this email on the right here, does the email threaten you? Does it coerce you into doing something immediately? These are all red flags that you should look for when you’re evaluating if an email or a message on your computer is legitimate or not.

As you can see on the right here in this example email, it’s telling us very plainly that if you don’t verify your mailbox, we will force to block your account. Aside from the grammatical errors this is using a sense of urgency. So if you ever feel this in an email or a message don’t feel pressured immediately to take action because most likely it is a scam and they’re trying to get something from you.

Another very common scam that I see are invoice scams. So these will usually come in as text messages or as emails and they’ll bear a logo of a company and the company will be claiming to charge you hundreds of dollars for some service [00:04:00] that you’ve never signed up for or recognize. None of these are legitimate.

Never call any phone numbers that you see in these emails or reply to the email itself. Most commonly, I see fake emails from PayPal, Amazon, Geek Squad or like McAfee or other antivirus companies. None of these actually originate from these companies and they are just used as a way to get your attention and get you to click on a link or to call a phone number.

If you are actually concerned about anything that’s happening with your bank account or your cards, always go to your bank’s website and check for unauthorized transactions there. Sometimes these emails will claim that you have 24 hours to do certain things. Again, this goes back to looking for the red flags of creating a sense of urgency or coercion.

If you feel any of these feelings while you’re going through these messages, it’s most likely a scam.

Next are virus scams. They’ll use messaging like your PC is infected, there’s a virus in your mailbox, [00:05:00] security alert, etc. Usually they’ll have antivirus names and logos plastered on them, like McAfee, Norton, Avast or some others. When you receive these emails, like the one on the right, never click on the links inside them, because you don’t know where that’s going to take you.

So In this example on the right here, there’s an email with some interesting grammatical choices that tells you that ” our spider detected five deadly Trojans in your mailbox today.” This is not technically correct, and it’s something that they’re, again, in the next line saying if it’s left unchecked, they’ll completely shut down your email.

This is far beyond something that is possible of happening. You can ignore this. They’re just trying to get you to click on that link down below, which takes you to, in orange, that HTTP scan. avast. com. So this would be an example of a malicious link or a bad link. So what happens if you click on [00:06:00] that? The most common thing that happens is it will open up a website which will display a message and attempt to lock up your computer. One example of this message on screen here, it’s the typical Microsoft Windows scam where they say that they’ve detected a virus and that you need to call a support technician.

This is typically what happens when you click on these links and emails, and then it will really get you stuck. This kind of falls under a category of pop up scams. These will mostly appear if you accidentally click on a link in an email, or click on an advertisement on a website. These have no legitimacy and they’ll use buzzwords to create a sense of urgency to call a phone number.

After you call that phone number, which you should never do, they claim to have technicians on the phone who will help you fix your issue. What these technicians actually are professional scammers who sit in call centers and their help is trying to get your banking information and to get money out of you in order to fix a [00:07:00] non existent problem that they created.

Going back to this pop up, if you’re having difficulties closing this pop up usually the X buttons won’t work or the X buttons and the corners will disappear. You can always go to a trusted peer to remove this pop up from your computer. It’s completely benign. They don’t actually have any malware or virus put on your computer

after that pops up. It’s just simply a little website trick that makes it very difficult to close the window. If the pop up is obnoxious, if it’s making beeping sounds, or if it’s reading off a robot script you can just hold down the power button on your computer, and you can turn it off, and just take a break until you can get assistance with it.

And another note just for your own information, this is what an example of a real virus detected message looks like. On the right here are two different pop ups. These are from Windows, so on the top is a Windows 10 message, and on the bottom is a Windows 11 message. These are very small windows that will show up on the bottom right [00:08:00] corner of your screen.

These are not emails, and they’re not intrusive at all. Windows has a built in antivirus called Windows Defender or Windows Security. And what it does is if it detects a real threat, as they call it, which would be virus or a malware sample or anything like that on your computer it will take action and it will stop the threat.

It does this in the background, it does it without your permission, and it does it for free, which is great. And it will usually use language like ThreatFound, ThreatBlocked. And if you ignore this message, that’s completely fine because Windows Defender has taken care of the threat for you. And pop up scams these are a lot more common than these real virus detected messages.

You will probably run into a hundred or a thousand pop up scams before you actually end up with a real virus on your computer.

So this takes us into the second half of this presentation, which is identifying phishing emails also called scam [00:09:00] emails. How do you identify these? What we’re going to go over is how to check the domain of the email. We’re going to go over what that means and how to do it. Every organization has a domain name.

And usually a domain name is the same thing as a website URL. For example, Microsoft, the company, owns Microsoft.com. If you visit Microsoft.com in a web browser, this will take you to their website. Amazon, likewise, owns Amazon.com. Harvard, for example, has harvard.edu. So your domain is typically a name dot something.

Usually it’s dot com. That’s the most common, but it can change depending on the company organization or institution. And likewise, emails have domains too. And you can use these domains in the email to judge the authenticity of the email that you receive.

First, you’re going to open up an email and in here you can check the sender’s address. The sender’s address can usually be found at the top of the email. It will show maybe the name of the person [00:10:00] who sent the email and usually you’ll see a string of something at something. com and if this doesn’t show up you can click on the name of the person who sent you the email and it should reveal their email address.

So ask yourself, when you see this sender’s email address. Does the domain match who the sender claims to be? So let’s look at an example of what I’m talking about. So here would be an email address from john.smith@parasolalliance.com. So that first part to the left of the @ symbol is the name of the sender.

So John.Smith. And to the right of the at symbol is the domain, ParasolAlliance.com. So in this, john.smith@parasolalliance.com, this is your entire sender’s address and it’s just someone else’s email address who sent you the email. So you can look at this and go parasolalliance.com is the associated domain to the Parasol Alliance company.

So this came from Parasol Alliance and [00:11:00] probably from someone named John Smith. And you can use this information for every email that you receive. And you can check the sender’s address and try and make sense of it. So another example the fraud department at Chase Bank. So their email address is fraud at chase.com. So again, on the left of the @ symbol is fraud. So referring to the fraud department and then the domain is chase.com. So when you see an email from this. You can just ask yourself, is chase.com the official domain of Chase Bank? In this case it is. So you can be assured that this email came from Chase Bank.

So let’s look at some examples of things that are not from Chase Bank. So for example in the top here, you can see fraud chase, some numbers .com, at gmail.com. First of all, gmail.com is not the official Chase Bank domain, so you can write off that email immediately as being suspicious [00:12:00] or a phishing email.

Another example, fraud@realchasebank.com. In this case, the name on the email is correct, which is fraud. But the domain is not correct. It’s not realchasebank. com. It is chase .com. And a third example, FraudDep@ and then a bunch of letters. net. Again, that domain name is not chase. com. So you know that all of these email addresses did not come from Chase Bank and you can ignore them.

So let’s look at some examples of emails here. This is a very easy example of a scam email. It’s obnoxious and in your face. They use emojis and the subject line on the top there and lots of capital letters and exclamation points to get your attention. Just on the premise, you’re never going to receive free money in your email.

Likewise, this is a good example to take a look at who sent the email to you. So under the subject line in the second blue rectangle is the fake email address, [00:13:00] which is who sent you the email. So they give you a long nonsensical email address that sent you the email. And if you see something like that, just delete it immediately.

It’s all spam and they’re just trying to get you to click on a suspicious link. So let’s look at some examples that are less obvious. Here’s an email pretending to be Chase Bank. We’re going to pick on them frequently throughout this presentation. And just based on the body of the email itself, it looks legitimate. They bear the Chase logo, the English and the grammar used in it is correct, and they list some transactions there in the middle of the screen.

So they show several hundred dollars that was approved and declined. And then in the subject line, they show activity of your debit card on a specific date. Now this email may look legitimate, but there’s one easy thing that you can get to, which is checking the domain. So as you can see on the top here, this comes from the sender named Chase Fraud Alert.

But [00:14:00] the domain is admin@vagaro.com. Like we said, does the person who this email is claiming to be match the sender address? In this case, not at all. We don’t know who vagaro.com is, it doesn’t matter. If they’re claiming to be Chase, we know that it’s a scam and we can immediately ignore this email and delete it.

So another scam that is very common is USPS or shipment delays coming through emails and text messages. So here’s an example of an email pretending to be the U.S. Postal Service and they’re explaining how your package wasn’t delivered on a specific date. Now in this email, you can see it’s just a pipeline to get you to click on a link, which will take you to a bad website.

 You do not want to do this. We’ll get into why later, but up here, just going back to checking the domain of the sender. You can see it comes from somebody on the top there called U.S. Postal Shipping. And then we see a very suspicious. Sender [00:15:00] address there, just lots of random letters and numbers @ a bunch of random letters.

Nothing that came from anything that says @usps.gov or the official USPS site. Again, you can completely ignore this.

So why don’t we click on links and unknown emails? Links or buttons and emails can take you anywhere. So for example, we have www.google.com. You can see that it’s underlined there, and that means that it’s a link. And if you click on that, it will take you to a website. Now, just because the link text says google.

com doesn’t mean that it’s actually going to take you there. In fact, it can take you to any website that it wants. So there’s another example below it where it just says, Please Click Here and it’s underlined. If you click on that, it will take you to a website. Most commonly, these links will take you to what are called fake login pages, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let’s take a look at what this looks like in an [00:16:00] email. So here is an example of an email that went out that they give you a reason to click on something. And if you click on it, it will take you to a website. So you can actually figure out where these links are going to take you by hovering your mouse over them.

Do not click on the link, but if you hover your cursor over that kindly click here or any button in the bottom right of your computer screen. There will be a small bit of text that shows up, which will tell you the website that you’re going to travel to if you click on that link. So in this example, if you hover your cursor over kindly click here, it says that it’s going to take you to udelsecure.jimdo.com. So this is just an example domain for this email, but that’s how you would do it. So if you do click on one of these links, one common thing that will happen is it will try and show you what’s called a fake login page.

So fake login pages are a way for scammers to steal your. [00:17:00] Passwords and your usernames to accounts without you even realizing it. So in this example, you will be landing on a page that’s called Office 365 login. It will look like a legitimate login page if you aren’t paying too close of attention, but there are some signs that this is not legitimate and you should not enter your information into this website.

So first is checking the domain of the website. So at the top of your web browser there it says that this is bdshelton. com. So this is not office. com. This is not microsoft. com. So because this doesn’t match what the login page is posing to be, you immediately know that this is a fake website and it’s very dangerous for you to put your information in here because scammers will control the site.

They will take your email and your password that you type into that box and they will turn around as soon as you send that information to them, sign in as you, and they will steal your account. This happens all the time to individuals and [00:18:00] organizations. So it’s very important that you understand that this is a common scamming method.

And this is how you would look for it.

So another example of a scam email is this one. So this comes from an email called corporate@rightspaceme.com. Regardless of the sender address in this email, it actually has some personal information in it. Now, just because an email includes some of your personal information doesn’t give it legitimacy.

So in this email, it’s been redacted, but it would show the person’s full name and an old address that they’ve used. And it has a big flashy button that they’re trying to get you to click on, and it would take you to a suspicious link or a bad link. In this any kind of email like this that uses your personal information, it to try and get you to do something, disregard them, delete them, mark them as spam and avoid them at all costs. Some key takeaways here. Slow it down. So your scams are often designed to create a sense [00:19:00] of urgency. So take the time to ask questions and think things through spot check. So do your research to double check the details that you’re getting does what they’re telling you make sense in the email. Again, going back to some of those scams, some things seem nonsensical and some things that they tell you might not be standard protocol, so you always want to be aware of that.

 If there’s people asking you to do things, just stop. Don’t send things immediately. So no reputable person or agency will demand payment or your personal information on the spot. This again goes back to the Sense of urgency and red flags. This information was taken from a Google spokesperson to Fox news.

And that is the end of our presentation today. So thank you everybody for attending and we hope to see you on the next one. Thanks.

You can find us online at RaisingTechPodcast. com where you can see all of our episodes and contact us to provide feedback or submit an episode idea. We are on social media everywhere at Raising Tech Podcast. [00:20:00] If you enjoy Raising Tech, please leave us a review and share with a friend. Music is an original production by Tim Resig, one of our very own Parasol Alliance employees.

As always, thank you for listening.

Amber: Welcome to raising tech podcast. I’m your host, Amber Bardon. Today our guest is Ken Reinstein, who is the Vice President of Business Development for CaringOnDemand. CaringOnDemand empowers individuals or their loved ones to request caregivers with ease and convenience with no limits on what you need and regardless of where you are, all at the push of the button.

Welcome to the show, Ken. 

Ken Reinstein: Thank you, Amber. I appreciate the opportunity to be here. 

Amber: Let’s dive right into CaringOnDemand. Tell me, what is it? How did you get started? How long have you been around?

Give us the story and give us the background on the company. 

Ken Reinstein: Sure. So I’m a relative newbie with the company. I’ve been about two, three months. It was great to meet you at Leading Age Arizona a few months back. Really appreciated the presentation you gave there. CaringOnDemand is a mobile application.

It’s available to clients and to families. There’s applications both for recipients of care and their families, as well as for [00:01:00] caregivers. And it’s a, it’s really a simple thing. You download the app, you set up a HIPAA compliant platform. And then what that allows our team and recipients of care to do is if they need care, they can literally push a button and say, I need to see someone on Tuesday at 10 a.

m. That information is shared with our caregivers around in the area where that person needs service. And then we fulfill that need. And it’s like, it’s really simple. The beauty of the interface is it allows. Let’s say mom or dad to use it as well as an adult child or we have a backend dashboard that’s built for organizations such as senior living communities or other healthcare organizations where they can monitor who’s coming in and out of their building.

They know what’s going on depending on their level of interest in what details they want. They can see care plans and things like that. And that goes for both the individuals as well as communities. And the beauty of it is, there’s a live human being that helps people on board.

We have a client liaison, so you’re not [00:02:00] just stuck dealing with kind of fumbling with the technology, if perhaps that is a challenge. There’s an opportunity to speak with our live client liaison. Who’s a person right here who lives in the East Coast, and they’ll help build a plan to meet your needs and your budget, depending on how much time you need.

The real kicker and beauty and differentiator for what we do is there’s no minimums with setting up care. When someone typically thinks of a home care service or a home health service, there’s multiple hour minimums, two, four, six hours a day, et cetera. Although it’s a little bit impractical to have a five minute visit, someone could literally sign up and use our services for five minutes once a day, all the way up to a 24 seven care plan if needed.

Amber: That’s really interesting. We’ve spoken to other vendors in the space who are doing something similar, but it’s only for providers. It’s only for communities. So I really love how this platform is so flexible and can be used in so many different situations. Can you talk a little bit about what would usage of CaringOnDemand look like at a senior living [00:03:00] provider versus like you said, mom and dad out in the community by consumers directly.

Ken Reinstein: Yeah, there’s some really interesting opportunities there to partner with communities. So first of all, as I mentioned, we do have a dashboard that we would set up and there’s no charge to set this up for a community. There’s a dashboard that allows the executive director or resident services director to see that caregiver Ken Reinstein.

I’m not a caregiver but to see the Ken Reinstein is coming into the community to meet with Sally Jones at 10am. The way our technology works is. Our caregivers check in when they arrive at Sally Jones home, and then they check out. So there’s the ability to track that. There’s the ability to track if perhaps the requested meeting wasn’t fulfilled for some reason, and then we can follow up or if it’s canceled.

If the client recipient of care needs to cancel, that’s all notified in the app. The dashboard allows a lot of metrics in there, and I don’t have all the nitty gritty details to share, but there’s a lot of metrics that are really. Again, can be as detailed or as [00:04:00] simplified as requested by the community.

It’s flexible. We can set up modules to meet the needs of each individual community. The really neat value add to this is we can work with the community and we can help them market. We can be used as a sales and marketing tool that we have this service and

process at their communities. We’ve worked out where we’ve been a bridge program for communities. Perhaps there’s an interested party, a depositor who’s not quite ready to move in yet, or perhaps in a great situation, if there’s a waiting list, we could be a bridge program where we could work with X, Y, Z community and still be a Point of care or point of service for them in conjunction with the community while they’re perhaps still considering that move in or on that waiting list.

Amber: Yeah, that sounds really easy to use. Is it a nationwide platform at this time? 

Ken Reinstein: It is available. We can work anywhere that a certified home care agency or home health agency exists. Our primary operations [00:05:00] right now, we have about 400 recipients of care on our platform right now. We’ve got about 15 or so communities across the east coast and in Arizona where I’m at.

But there is literally no boundaries to where we can go again. We just need to work with, and we do work with some national healthcare vendors, home care vendors right now. So we could set up and get started very quickly Anywhere that anyone would be interested to work with us. 

Amber: Can you talk a little bit about the caregiver side?

How do you find your caregivers? How do you qualify them? How does all of that work? 

Ken Reinstein: Absolutely. So we work with license agencies that are regulated by whatever state they may be in. And of course, it’s all over the board on regulations in Arizona. There’s really not much regulation, but Perhaps in New York or New Jersey, Florida, etc.

There’s a lot more regulation, but we work with licensed agencies and those agencies of course conduct background checks on their caregivers and we ensure that they adhere to any of the state requirements that are needed. So what we do is we ourselves do not [00:06:00] hire caregivers, we partner with those national agencies or those local agencies that have those caregivers in place and

of course, with the requirements that they are background checked and certified so they’re not just hiring someone right off the street who had nothing better to do but to need a job. So we really ensure that there’s that quality there in that safety and security and peace of mind that we can provide through that partnership.

Amber: Can you tell me a little bit about the story behind the founding of CaringOnDemand? How did you come to be? What’s the background of the founding members? What was the problem you were looking to solve? 

Ken Reinstein: Absolutely. So our our founder, Stephen East has been in the home care and aging space for about 20 years.

And he kept hearing stories from seniors that were really, they wanted care. But the cost was really becoming prohibitive. Obviously, there’s cost pressures going on more and more in our world these days. But one of the reasons behind the escalating costs was the inefficiencies and also that silo mentality that agencies could only provide [00:07:00] care in set increments that are.

Again, multiple hour minimums . That disruption opportunity that differentiate that we offer is that we create a network of providers. So our clients have access to a broad network without having to call a bunch of agencies.

And we have that concierge level service and that flexibility to use our service at a, Again, five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, one time weekly, or all the way up to whatever length of time they may need. The beauty really is in the cost savings is the ability to tailor and to cater to the needs of the client, not to force the client to meet the needs of the agency.

Amber: What is the app itself look like? Is it generally used by the HR team at the community? Can you talk a little bit about how that process works? 

Ken Reinstein: It’s typically, like I said, used by someone in the resident care team, resident services team. They can see who’s coming in and out of the community when they’re going to whom they’re going to see. There’s a lot of details that are provided.

There’s [00:08:00] care plans that are individually developed for each user that depending on again the level of interest and desire. And of course, nothing is done in a vacuum. We wouldn’t share this information without the client being fully aware, but the community end user has the opportunity to see the care plans to see when that visit happened and if perhaps, the caregiver noticed that Sally had a fall since I was last here or I noticed that the house looks a little more disheveled, things are out of place.

I’ve noticed something’s going on. There was a deficiency or something. And so that information is shared with the Agencies, with the communities. We have communities that want very hands off. And then we have communities that really want us to be very fully involved and maintaining a full understanding of what we’re doing with each and every resident.

Amber: Can you talk a little bit more about the pros of why a senior living community would wanna use CaringOnDemand? 

Ken Reinstein: Absolutely. The average move in at a community is about 80 years old. Of course there’s, depending if you’re talking [00:09:00] about independent living or assisted, et cetera, typically someone’s gonna have perhaps a couple deficiencies or limitations with ADLs.

But for the most part, these individuals can be independent and can remain in an independent living status. Just by receiving supportive services that we offer that’s really what our vision is is that it’s care when you want it and for as long as you need that meets the needs of the individual.

So again it’s looking to help really extend the quality of life and the ability to have people who needs that little bit of extra care. For instance, we just received an inquiry yesterday about someone who wanted help for their father to take care of their cat and their cat litter there was some other things that they needed, but that was one of the first requests is do you guys help with pets and things like that.

So that was something that actually was giving peace of mind to a potential client’s daughter who was getting ready to go on a vacation and wasn’t going to be in town to really be there for her father. It’s a peace of mind, both for the [00:10:00] residents recipients of care and also family members and the communities itself that would be a partner to help

their residents stay healthy and vibrant longer. 

Amber: Ken, can you tell me a little bit about the ROI?

Can you talk about the cost for the platform and how that works? And do you take insurance? 

Ken Reinstein: We do not directly take insurance, but we provide paperwork to allow recipients of care to, to bill insurance such as Medicare, Medicaid, et cetera. It’s a very low cost.

We do not charge communities at this time. The cost for an individual recipient of care to have access to our app and our services is 5 a month.

And if we’re talking about a community level integration, there’s lots of flexibility there. There’s opportunities of course to maybe have a discount or perhaps several months of. Access and things. And we’ve also worked with communities that have just built that 5 charge into the monthly service fees for a community.

Amber: Is there anything about [00:11:00] CaringOnDemand that we haven’t talked about yet that you want to make sure our listeners know?

Ken Reinstein: We’re a new technology. It’s really the future. Everyone’s about technology, about convenience and about flexibility. I think using To help a community grow its resident satisfaction. A community with our services really with our platform integrated in what they do.

It just gives an additional value to moving into that community again, because it’s that peace of mind that we provide and we offer through the opportunity to work with certified home care agencies to take care of a resident or to take care of mom and dad to give them that extra extended peace of mind.

Through the platform that we offer. 

Amber: Great. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Ken. And where can our listeners find out more about CaringOnDemand? 

Ken Reinstein: Absolutely. We do have a basic website, caringondemand.com, if they want just to generally check it out. If they’d be interested if a community is interested or [00:12:00] it doesn’t have to be a community, it can be an individual, a family member, et cetera.

They can go to caringondemand.com/raisingtech and there’ll be a form there that they can fill out to have someone contact them. Everything is private. They’re not going to get spammed by signing in that form.

Amber: Great. Thank you 

so much for joining us today. 

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