Raising Tech

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. 

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. 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 back to Raising Tech Podcast. I’m your host, Amber Bardon. On today’s episode, we have Senior Sign. Senior Sign is designed to make move ins straightforward for staff, residents, and their families. Senior Sign is far more than e-sign software. Think compliance tracking, remote and mobile signing, electronic faxing, and all of your documents house in one location in the cloud.

 Their goal is to bring you peace of mind by keeping the moving process simple and error free and onto and representing Senior Sign today. I’m so excited. We have Neil Krauss, founder and chief product officer.

Amber: Welcome to the show, Neil.

Neil: Thanks, Amber. Yeah, it’s awesome to be on.

Amber: As I shared before we started recording, I’ve heard a lot about Senior Sign. We have people using it. I’ve heard so many positive things. So I cannot wait to dig in today and learn more about Senior Sign and have you share it with our audience.

So let’s start with that question. What is Senior Sign and tell us the story behind its creation.

Neil: Yeah that [00:01:00] is a good question. So the story behind the creation, maybe I’ll start there. And I think that’ll probably answer the first question, which is what is Senior Sign. So in 2017 I walked into a senior living community had an idea for a project that I was working on.

Thought maybe there was a channel to market and sell through senior living communities. Through the process of a conversation with the director of sales and marketing here locally in Utah. She asked me to put their move in packet online. She’s can you just put all of this paperwork online for us so people can fill it out?

My initial response was I’m sure somebody’s already doing that. Why don’t I do a little research and I’ll tell you who to sign up with was my response to her. That kicked off about a 10 month process, which turned into back and forth with the community, creating a prototype understanding their process better.

And through the course of that, I realized, it’s not just as simple as something that like a docusign can handle, a handful of signatures. One document, it ended up being, 20 pages, residents and [00:02:00] family are signing 19 to 20 times. They’re collecting attachments, they’re trying to collect physician forms.

So there were all of these problems with their process in trying to digitize, what was up until that point just on paper. I saw a lot of folders that were two sided. One side was for the family to fill out. The other side was for the physician to fill out. So they needed to go meet with their doctor.

 Through the course of that process, we created a tool that handles the move in process started out specifically for senior living. That’s really what Senior Sign is. That’s where we got our start. Was right there in the community an idea from a director of sales and marketing.

So I can’t take credit for the idea. But we’ve grown quite a bit since then. Worked with a handful of communities since then. And then now we’re working with 700, more than 700 communities. So across the senior living industry.

Amber: Yeah, I think you, you can take credit because I’ve been in senior living for 17 years and anyone who’s ever interacted with the senior living community knows about this problem of admission paperwork.

It’s a problem in so many aspects [00:03:00] from faxes, from printing, from paperwork, from tracking, I’ve gone to sites where they have literally showed me folders and stacks of paper and they’re like, this is what we’re doing manually. And you did come in and you created a solution to solve that. So I think you should take a little credit.

Neil: Okay. I’ll take a little credit then.

Amber: So walk me through a little bit. How does this kind of work start to finish? So when someone has seen your sign fully implemented how does, how do they get the paperwork out? How’s it signed? How does it talk to other systems like the medical records system? Can you talk me through that a little bit more?

Neil: Yeah, that’s a great question. Up front, what I continually heard was. Other tools in the industry that maybe have come around to try and handle this process are a little bit cumbersome in that all of the setup is put on to the community and somebody in the company. Talk to a lot of people in the industry that were maybe paying for a software that handles admissions or move in that they really weren’t able to utilize yet [00:04:00] because somebody in the company had to become an expert on, Building all the templates, things like that.

We really start and started with a customer success process, which We collect all of the documents that they’re currently using, hopefully in digital form. Sometimes we get really bad scans of documents, etc. But usually it’s PDFs, and then we build smart templates on top of that. They’re using the same documents over and over again.

These sales and marketing managers know their packets inside and out. Sample templates could be like documents, the physician forms attachment requests all of that kind of works its way into a packet template.

So that’s really where we start is with all of the setup, but as far as, the frontline workers that are working with families and the residents they would either import from another system to your point a health record or a CRM we do work with a handful of different softwares across the industry, we’re open to integration.

So either importing some of that information or just starting out by adding a new resident into [00:05:00] their Senior Sign portal. And then from there, we have three options to help complete that paperwork. The first being from home so they can send it out. This wasn’t nearly as common until COVID hit and then we saw a lot of people sending packets for completion from home rather than in person in the community.

Amber: Can I ask you, when you say they’re doing it from home, is it like a portal that they’re accessing?

Neil: Yep. Yeah, exactly. They create a login, a lot of HIPAA compliant information, PHI payment information, things like that get collected in that. So we do password protected at this point for the residents.

 They can send that packet for completion from home. Oftentimes there’s a prepare phase, so The manager is going to prefill a room number, rates, care types, feeds, things like that. And then when the resident does sit down, oftentimes it’s actually an adult child, a family member, a power of attorney.

Sitting down to fill out that paperwork as they work their way through the packet, those templates that we’ve built begin to pre fill from document [00:06:00] to document. So I fill out the first one, we’ve collected a little bit more information that we can then push into the subsequent documents to hopefully help speed up that process. They work through, documentation, attachments we can fax physician forms, print physician forms,

email physician forms. It depends on the physician oftentimes. But that’s the at home process. There’s the in person process, which we see a lot of. We did see a lot of it pre COVID. We still see a lot of it skilled nursing actually does a lot of this as well like bedside, being able to do that and have a process there was pretty important as we were building the tool, so that’s the second means, and then they can still do it on paper if the resident so chooses, so you can pre fill and prepare that packet as a manager, and then just print it and send it with them for completion from home to, again, hopefully help speed up that process, and then attach everything back and have it all live in one place.

That, that’s what the process is like right now. You mentioned integration, et cetera. So something we’ve said all [00:07:00] along is we have to be platform agnostic is how I put it. Don’t really care what your CRM is or what your health record is. It’s we’re fine to play nice with any systems that you’re using.

And hopefully build a better workflow so that it’s a little bit more seamless, Dual entry of all of that data is a really hard process as a manager to have to Go back to my crm type everything in or write everything into a packet And then secondarily on the flip side to get everything from the packet and try and type it into the ehr whatever it is they’re using So yeah, we do integrate and we try to carry as much data through that process as possible so that the process seems seamless and then obviously finalized documents that are signed with compliance tracking, et cetera, built in audit trails, all of that gets can get exported to this, the health record, not the CRM.

Amber: So once it’s implemented. Then staff can access that information either in Senior Sign directly or in the health record. It sounds

Neil: yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [00:08:00] That’s the ultimate goal. We don’t like, we, we don’t have any I don’t know what the word would be, but it’s it’s not a tool that you’re constantly going back to previous packets, except maybe in the.

The off chance the state walks through the door and needs to pull a few packets to review or things like that. So

Amber: who who with the community is the typical user of this software and I want to go back to a question as you’re answering that on implementation are you said you’re getting PDFs or, versions of the documents.

Are you building everything in the system or is the staff doing that? Can you just talk about that a little bit more? What’s the involvement from the community?

Neil: Yeah. Yeah. That’s great. Our typical daily user from the community is that director of sales marketing an admission coordinator, maybe on the skilled side at a CCRC or a live playing community.

It just depends on where they’re coming in, if they’re coming into the health center side, or independent living, etc. It can vary just depending on which company we’re working with, but I [00:09:00] would say the majority of the time it’s a director of sales and marketing. That’s doing that kind of walking through the whole move in process up until move in day.

And then to your other question. So we have a whole implementation team that’s the second half of our customer success team. So customer success helps with, answering questions and all of that. But our implementation team collects all of their documentation, attachment requests, position forms, anything to help build that packet.

And then we have a whole, I call it a fleet we have actually a whole bunch of, stay at home moms that want to work part time, et cetera, that, that build document templates for us. And once those are built, the way our technology works is, some other processes can be more robust with other companies, but the way we’ve tried to do is, do it is to simplify by, we get an updated PDF, hey, there’s a, here’s a new version of that same template that you’ve already built.

Okay. We can just swap out the background image and all of the fields and the data collection portion of that still lays [00:10:00] right on top of that PDF it’s a really quick swap makes it an easier, quick update, so we get updates all the time and we handle that just as part of their ongoing subscription fees.

Amber: Okay. That, yeah, that helps give me a really good idea on what implementation looks like. So one thing I’m wondering as you’re speaking is we all know AI is buzzword, it’s gonna come on every single conversation you have with people about technology these days, AI automation, bots, process efficiency.

 I’m just thinking, taking like the hospital records, things like that, being able to just automate some of this data. If you can tell us anything new and exciting that’s coming around that.

Neil: Yeah, anything that’s around that is very high level at this point.

We’ve got a pretty simple process. Anything that we’ve toyed around with, or are starting to explore has to do probably with interpreting legalese. Going through a document, maybe explaining it if A resident a more senior individual is reading through that.

And it’s like [00:11:00] those packets can be cumbersome. So it’s like what am I really signing and agreeing to here or highlighting any key portions of a legal agreement? That’s really where we’re starting to look to help some of that or. Even in that process of having a little bit of a companion in some instances, some people don’t have that power of attorney adult child to help them go through that process, so they lean on someone in the community to do that.

But how could we do that with AI or a signing wizard? If you remember back in the days of Microsoft Office with the magic paper clip kind of thing. So something to walk them through the process and help you should bring that

Amber: back, bring that right here for clip. I love that was your answer, because I was thinking more in terms of like data automation, but you’re talking about actually being able to add value to the process by explanations to residents, which is really cool.

Neil: Yeah, I’ve seen some amazing things happening with AI, especially on the [00:12:00] CRM side, patient intake on the skilled side, really figuring some of that out. But, the primary issues or problems that we continue to face just in that little move in process that kind of lives between CRM and EHR, we’re in between those those problems are, can we find, a specific legal agreement?

Did they agree to, arbitration? How do we pull some of that? So there is for sure a data component where we could, have them, have a tool of sorts that they can go through and call that information. But I don’t know that AI would be needed for some of that, some of it can just be tracking.

Amber: Another question that occurred to me, as you were speaking is another sort of common very manual process I see that I haven’t seen a good solution to is like, what happens post admission?

Admission, so right now. Everybody’s sending emails. So there’s like an email goes to maintenance. It goes to housekeeping. It goes to dining. It goes to is there anything built into Senior Sign that automates the post admission and starts the workflow of what has to happen next?

Neil: What we’re looking to do is go deeper [00:13:00] into the move in process which expands necessarily into some of those offline tasks. Let’s call it. So what we have today and Senior Sign our tool basically has digitized that paper folder I mentioned earlier, which is what they used to send family home with.

Where we’re looking to go is, what are all of those offline tasks, unit turnover, for example, getting keys, made a nameplate for the door, a welcome packet. What is moving day like planning some of those things t minus 10 days to move in. How are we handling X, Y and Z kind of thing. So that’s really where we’re looking to go with the tool.

More automation, more task tracking again around that process. So that’s where we’re headed. A lot of those features aren’t sitting in Senior Sign today and available to our customers. We’re not resting on our laurels saying, “oh we’ve got e-signature, so let’s move on.”

We’ve got a lot in the works.

Amber: Yeah, and I’ll just say from having visited many communities that is definitely a challenge that doesn’t have a good solution. So it’s still very manual that move an email, move out email, stuff like that. [00:14:00] And if you can solve that, I think that would be fantastic.

Neil: Yeah, even move in day I think there’s so much that happens move in day to make that. As stress free as possible, a great experience for, these residents that are giving up one home for a new home and. That’s emotional, etc. So anything that can help make that go more smoothly is a huge advantage for a community.

Amber: Yeah. That’s what we do on Raising Tech. We come up with new ideas. Yeah, there

Neil: you go.

Amber: Sounds like you guys were working on it already though. So I know you mentioned at the beginning when you were talking about your founding story is that you had looked at other systems like DocuSign, you tried to find an existing system.

So now that Senior Sign is built and rolled out to so many communities, can you talk a little bit about the difference between Senior Sign and something like a DocuSign?

Neil: Yeah. I had a bit of a tech background prior to coming into the senior living space. This is the first industry where I’ve seen people really seek out and look for technology solutions for their communities that are very senior living [00:15:00] based, directed at senior living, designed for senior living, built for senior living.

A great example is the CRM space. This was, I came in, I had never heard of Sherpa, I had never heard of Welcome Home, never heard of, At the time, you had Enquire and some others so had never heard of these CRMs. You hear of HubSpot, Salesforce, SugarCRM.

Like I could name a thousand CRMs out there. So really what we’ve tried to do is, we hear time and time again that DocuSign just doesn’t work for senior living. It’s not a knock against DocuSign. It’s just the process is more robust than an e signature. E-sign is the easy part.

 The e-sign act is only 14 pages. There’s not a whole lot of parameters in there that you have to adhere to. So really going deep in that movement process is what makes us maybe a little bit different from a DocuSign. A couple of other points, our pricing is really geared towards senior living, so we price per community, whereas Some of the bigger players.

I don’t want to keep knocking on DocuSign. I don’t want that to be, there’s Adobe Sign, there’s HelloSign there’s a [00:16:00] handful of other e signature softwares out there but they’re really priced per packet, per signature, per user, per whatever it is and so it doesn’t really cater and it gets quite expensive when you start adding in, I need a regional to have access and six people from corporate and my director of sales and marketing across

19 buildings, and we’re sending out 80 pages of documents four times a month, you know It’s it just adds up really quickly. So that would maybe be the first point. Secondarily, Five community, a 10 community, senior living company is a big deal to us. You know, we want to make sure that they’re using the software.

We’re tracking. Are people logging in? Are they using it? If not, we reach out with our customer success team. Whereas you’re going to be a really small fish to an Adobe sign, a DocuSign. And then lastly, we’re really looking to integrate with all of the systems that they’re probably already using today that are also senior living specific, the Point Click Cares, there’s MatrixCare. There’s all the different health [00:17:00] records. You’ve got Align now Etc. WelcomeHome. All of those integrations are important to us just because it does smooth out that workflow for the end users that are using those other systems.

Amber: Yeah, that led me to think of another question.

I know you’re managing the admissions process. Can you also do other contract management?

Neil: We do a little bit. The one we get asked about all the time is human resource documents.

Amber: Okay.

Neil: So we haven’t played in that space.

We, we’ve tried a couple of times with a few different communities. There’s a couple that are using it for that. It’s not really designed for that process. If we did something and we would do it in a big way to really handle that, but we do see all sorts of documents and contracts, et cetera, internal company ones as well as external.

Amber: Yeah, I’m starting to see this request pop up a lot more recently. I just had someone text me a friend at a community and ask me, who do your clients use for contract management? And I was like. I don’t really have anybody doing that yet, but it is popping up. I’ve heard of [00:18:00] contract works, but, I don’t know if there’s anything seen living specifically like we’re talking about.

Neil: Yeah and maybe I’m sure I could ask a lot more questions around what they’re trying to use it for something we’re also working on, long term roadmap in terms of the product is a little bit smarter contract builder for the community. Taking into account, a lot of the fringe questions, etc, But being able to, for example, type in resident, Amber’s moving into 201, room 201 and pulling in all of the information around that to build that card contract a little more smartly.

So rather than having them have to prepare and fill that out, we know 201 is a two bedroom unit that rents for 4, 500 a month base. It’s in Building A at our CCRC, and it’s on the second floor, and just pulling in rates, fees, care types, et cetera, so automatically knowing that’s an assisted living, and that’s under, Neil’s management, and so assigning Neil as the community [00:19:00] contact, some things like that maybe a little bit more of the contract building again, longer term, we’re not there just yet, but something we’re working towards.

Amber: Now I’ve learned a lot today. I I’m really glad I got to hear more about Senior Sign. Like I said, I’ve heard really positive things . Is there anything we haven’t talked about? You want to make sure our listeners know?

Neil: We’re very senior living focused. We’re just now starting to venture and get pulled in naturally into skilled nursing a little bit more But very senior living friendly. We love the industry We feel very fortunate that we get to work with such great individuals.

Amber: I didn’t comment on this earlier, but everything you were mentioning about the senior living specific and the vendors and the specific needs.

100 percent true. And we definitely look for partners who are focused on that and understand that. I’ve talked to people who are trying to come into the industry and we’ll just integrate with anybody. It’s it doesn’t really work that way in senior living. Like you, you think it does, but you have to really know the right people and right, understand the players and how they all want to talk to each other.

Neil: Right. Yeah, exactly. I always joke. [00:20:00] So when I partnered with our CEO, when I brought him in as my business partner joked, we went to our first conference and I said, just buckle up, this is A really big high school reunion. Everybody knows everybody. The industry is very small in terms of, who knows who and everybody’s worked for everybody else and they’ve jumped companies.

But that’s actually what I really love about it is going to conferences, seeing customers, seeing other vendors that, that we integrate with and other partners. I’m looking forward maybe to running into you all at a conference and this has been great. Thank you very much for having it. I love

seeing more of this happening around senior living, which I think is probably an underserved industry when it comes to podcasts and information and technology, etc. So thanks for what you’re doing.

Amber: Yeah, I’m glad to be here. So where can our listeners find out more about Senior Sign?

Neil: Senior Sign. com is probably the best place if you want to actually see the software.

You can sign up for a demo and one of our sales guys are happy to jump on at any time. I don’t think anybody needs to seek me [00:21:00] out individually, which is great.

Amber: Unless they want to hear more about your founding story.

Neil: There you go.

Amber: Thank you so much for coming on today, Neil.

Neil: Yeah. Appreciate it. Thanks Amber for having me.

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. 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 Bardon: Welcome to Raising Tech Podcast. I’m your host, Amber Bardon. Today, we have a special episode. We are so excited to announce the launch of a new mini series, Raising Tech Resident Exclusives. Once a month, we will feature an episode dedicated to resident technology, including education, common issues, tips and tricks, and more.

These episodes will be to educate, inform, and update residents on today’s technology world. On featured episodes for resident exclusives, we will feature specific content for residents, such as cybersecurity, what streaming services to use, AI for residents and more. For those of you who are not familiar with our Tech@Home program, we are the only senior living technology company that educates residents on how to safely and properly navigate technology. At Parasol Alliance, we offer onsite support for residents with our customized Tech@Home resident technology support services and this personalized program helps residents engage and connect with the world around them through the use of technology. [00:01:00] Our resident technology program has so much to offer we have a dedicated technician for the community.

They work on things such as move in setup, technology device setup they offer drop in sessions for residents to walk in, one on one support, as well as technology classes. And I know from me being on site at multiple communities and speaking to residents, this is a service that I hear them asking for.

Not only is it a day to day support, basically a help desk for residents and a way to solve their technology problems, but I increasingly hear more and more residents ask for education. They want to know what’s out there that they’re not aware of. They’re excited to get more engaged with technology.

And a lot of times they’re just not exactly sure where to start and how to stay safe. And so we do a lot of this education and classes through our program for our clients that have that. And we really wanted to offer this to a broader audience. So that’s why we’re going to be doing these mini series, which is a little bit of content, a little taste of what we offer through our Tech@Home program through our resident exclusive episodes. [00:02:00] So for our first resident exclusive mini series, we’re really just going to talk about the program, what it is. We’re going to get a little bit into what it looks like and joining me today to talk about this topic. I have James Peck, who is our resident technology manager.

Welcome to the show, James. 

James: Thank you, Amber. 

Amber Bardon: So James, you’ve been with us for a few years and you were resident technology assistant for most of that time. So you’ve recently been promoted up to the manager position, which we’re all so excited about. So first I want to hear a little bit more about you. How long have you been in the role?

What led you to want to do this position to work with residents and maybe tell us what your favorite part is.

James: So I’ve been with the Tech@Home program for about two years now. I saw an opportunity to help an audience of people that’s most in need of accessing technology, training, information, and resources. It’s been a pleasure working with the residents and seeing them grow over time. One of my favorite things that I get to see is the satisfaction that residents get after their issues are resolved or their questions are answered. 

Amber Bardon: That’s great. [00:03:00] James, can you share with me a little bit?

What does it look like day to day? So if you’re at a community, what types of questions are residents coming to you with? What kind of information are they looking for? What’s the most common support issues? Tell me more about your day to day in that role. 

 

James: Some common questions that I get requests from residents pertain to email.

Usually it’s things like inbox cleaning. They’ll get lots of spam, so maybe we’ll set up some spam filters for them, unsubscribe them from mail lists and even create folders for their family communication. And then additionally, just making sure that their email is accessible and secure. So maybe we’ll set up a bookmark so they can get to their email.

Autofill login information, and then enable and help them understand what two factor authentication is, how they can use it and how it keeps their account safe. Email keeps residents connected with their community and family. That’s a really important one. Another thing is printers. So usually it’d be troubleshooting a lot of printers, unable to print things is most common.

So I’ll help them fix printer errors. Usually it’s reconnecting devices. [00:04:00] Printers are a big deal to residents, they print off recipes, letters, event flyers, and more. And printers drive a lot of community engagement from what I can see, and also improves their quality of life.

 Additionally, just replacing printer ink. Telling them what kinds of ink to buy, where to buy it in person versus online. And then if they’re able to show them how to replace the cartridges themselves, otherwise I can help them with that. And lastly, a really common one is scam education and prevention.

So most commonly is responding to scareware. Usually, so it’s obstructive pop ups, give you beeping or alarm sounds. So what I do is reassure the residents, there’s no harm done with these pop ups and if they’re comfortable with it, I’ll give them instructions on how to close those pop ups in the future.

Additionally, while I’m there, maybe I’ll run a short scan, install an ad blocker for them to keep these things from happening in the future. And then just thank them. Once again for reaching out to Tech@Home and this gives residents a peace of mind while they’re using their devices and it brings a lot less fear of being hacked or getting [00:05:00] malware on their devices.

Amber Bardon: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Residents are in their home in these communities and these are all day to day technology items that we’re all dealing with in our own homes. And I think it’s so great that we could have a resource who can help them be at the ready, walk them through a lot of these common issues and really enable their use of technology day to day.

I want to talk a little bit more about the cyber security aspect, because I know that’s something I hear a lot about from our clients is like the number 1 concern with just the high incidence of scams and cyber security incidents and things like that, targeting this population. Can you share a little bit more about the specific concerns that you’ve heard from residents?

And I know you mentioned a couple of specific things we can do, but can you just touch on maybe some just high level tips and tricks? 

James: Absolutely. So one thing to mention is we do offer a class on scam prevention and awareness where we cover these sorts of tips, but some specific things that I get into are being cautious of phone [00:06:00] numbers that get flashed on the screen, telling you that you need to call them for various reasons.

Closing those pop ups or avoiding those phone numbers is by far the easiest way to avoid getting scammed. Another thing too, is just being aware of who is sending you emails. I also help residents identify where the emails are coming from and then how to verify who they’re receiving emails from is actually who they think it is. 

Amber Bardon: we are going to be doing another in depth episode about cybersecurity in the future. So watch for that. James, from your perspective, from having done this role for a while, how does Tech@Home improve the day to day for residents.

James: The thing that we all have to keep in mind is that Residents do all the same things that we all do in our own lives, whether that be shopping, banking, scheduling appointments, watching TV.

So Tech@Home can help residents stay productive with these things and it definitely increases their satisfaction with technology in general. Additionally, a more specific example is helping our low vision residents with training and interfacing with their devices that can be through screen [00:07:00] magnifiers or shortcuts.

And this also allows them to continue using their devices in the same capability that they used to. 

Amber Bardon: James, I know that the technology culture amongst residents really varies site to site at all of our different locations so at some locations, there’s a resident steering committee for technology or resident education committee. I know some have coffee hours.

Some have drop in sessions. Can you tell me a little bit about your experience? How do residents typically engage with you? Do they like to start tickets? They like to call? Do they like to walk up? Do you do drop ins? Tell me about how that works 

James: Usually residents will do a combination of all those things.

So most commonly residents will reach out to the front desk, and they will assist them with the ticket creation process. Otherwise, I host twice monthly Tech@Home classes, and I encourage all residents to bring in their devices that they’re having problems with or if they have questions about.

Additionally, I offer some drop in hours in my office, and if I catch any residents in the hallway who ask me some questions, I can help them [00:08:00] there on the spot.

Amber Bardon: Let’s talk a little bit more about the classes and the education. What are some of the topics that we do presentations and classes on? 

 

James: Our class topics vary. Many of them are inspired by news or current events. Like right now, AI is a hot topic. So we have a class on that. In other classes, we cover popular software that residents may be using, like Microsoft Word just generally navigating their email or web browsers and using Google.

And additionally, we do live demonstrations. Usually it’s computer navigation, how to get through certain menus, and all that is shared live for residents to view in class, and they can also follow along on their own devices.

 

Amber Bardon: James, tell me a little bit about how do you educate residents when there can be a really wide variety and not only technology knowledge, but also age ranges.

James: When I’m helping a resident with training devices, I typically assess how the resident is describing their situation and their problem to me. And I like to meet them at their skill level. And there’s a big variety. Some residents [00:09:00] like things as simple as possible and are very hands off in the process.

And others like to know exactly what I’m doing and how I’m doing it. So they can replicate it in the future. I like to keep my classes at a very general audience level, and keep things very simple, and then sprinkle in some more technical aspects, and I can gauge how the class is going just based on facial expressions and the questions that residents ask and the feedback that they give after classes.

Amber Bardon: I know that can definitely be a challenge just in speaking to some of our other resident technology technicians that there can be such a wide range of technology adoption just based on age or willingness or enthusiasm and a lot of different factors.

So I know we have a lot of great ways to tailor that content to different levels of where the residents are at. So James, I am really wanting to hear from you a story about a resident that you have worked with or helped out with. Is there something memorable that you can share with us?

James: Absolutely.

 Very recently, I was helping a resident who was compiling information on her family [00:10:00] history about her homestead in Montana. So she had gone through the process of reaching out to local archives, pulling a lot of information and records that the state had.

And what I was doing was helping her compile this into a digital format and then sending it to a publisher. And it’s been a very long process, but my role has been acting as a translator for the resident and the publisher. Thank you. Because the publisher understands and will speak way more technically than the resident is comfortable with.

Just helping with very basic things like installing Microsoft Word, typing everything up, getting scanned images and documents Into a digital format so we can send it off. 

Amber Bardon: I love that story. And I think that shows the value of Tech@Home as more than just that support of how does my printer work?

Because you’re doing so much more to enable residents to use technology, to preserve these memories, preserve these stories. And I think that’s just so amazing. James, thank you so much for [00:11:00] joining me today. It was really great to have you on the show, and I really look forward to hearing more content from you in the future. 

James: Yes. And thanks 

for having me, Amber. It’s been a pleasure. 

Amber Bardon: And stay tuned for more resident exclusive content coming.

Thank you for listening.

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. 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: [00:00:00] Welcome to Raising Tech Podcast. I’m your host, Amber Bardon. And today we have HeartLegacy on for the second time. Christie Freeze is the Partnership Growth Manager. Welcome to the show, Christie.

Christie: Thanks so much for having me excited to be here.

Amber: So Christie, I know we’ve done a podcast in the past with HeartLegacy. And on that episode, we dived a lot into what is HeartLegacy? How did you come to be those types of things?

So we’re not going to spend a lot of time on that today, but just so our listeners know, if they didn’t listen to the previous episode, can you just give us a really brief intro on both HeartLegacy, SalesMail, and yourself?

Christie: Yeah, for sure. So HeartLegacy was actually founded back in 2018 as a legacy preservation, video editing solution.

And so in 2019 is when I was personally introduced to SalesMail, which is more of a sales centric tool. So think HeartLegacy, more like edited video marketing videos and SalesMail, more personalized one to one video. And I was actually introduced when I [00:01:00] was a sales director. So my whole career has been in senior living sales and marketing.

And then fast forward, I joined the team here at the top of the year in January. And I’m now the partnership growth manager, which really what that means is really supporting our external partners, which is what we call our customers and our clients. And then also working really closely with our sales team, marketing team, and client success team really to focus on our pilot program.

So we offer, a trial or a pilot, and I’m really stewarding those pilots into success. And then doing a lot of trade shows, conferences, that kind of thing.

Amber: So Christie, one of the things I wanted to talk to you about today is how HeartLegacy and sales and all has evolved since COVID. So obviously we all know as part of COVID, we saw more and more digital interactions. We saw more and more things happening virtually. So in this new world that we’re in both during COVID and post COVID, how can senior living communities maintain that human connection in their communications?

Christie: Yeah. Love this question. So I also really think that [00:02:00] during COVID times, We really started to lean on like zoom and teams, which is obviously how we’re connecting, but I think that we started to really lean on those forms of communication. And so for SalesMail to be able to allow really one to one, more of the asynchronous communication versus having to all be on the same zoom call or same team’s call.

I think that really shifted. It really shifted it for me during that time where I could send a message in a really meaningful way and it would land in the inbox or text message or whatever. And that family or prospect or referral partner could watch it when they wanted and they could respond when they wanted.

And it was still a really meaningful communication method because I was, I talk like this and my tone and my inflection, but it wasn’t something that I needed them to agree to a time to be on the call with me. So I think that really opened up the world of possibilities and allows people, like I said, send it via text or send it via LinkedIn message and still have that personal touch if you’re not able to [00:03:00] be in person or be on the call at the same time.

Amber: So can you give me some real life examples of how this would work in a community?

Christie: For sure. So I’ll share with you first my personal best practices where I found it the most impactful.

So the first stage, if you are, Getting like in a place for mom or caring. com lead, any type of third party lead coming in. This is an opportunity, which I think we’re going to talk a little bit about automation a little later on, but this is an opportunity to make an evergreen video, which is just a video you can make and use over and over again.

That just basically says Hey, I wouldn’t say, Hey, Amber, in that video, I would say, Hi, I’m Christie with so and so community. We’d love an opportunity to show you around, answer any questions you might have and send that when the new lead comes in. And then once the lead responds to you and you’re like, hi, I’m Amber.

I’m a real person. I would then really start personalizing that followup. So it doesn’t need to be at every stage of the process by any capacity. But I think inbound lead, I also think post tour, once somebody has come into tour. If you’re not doing it [00:04:00] on the inbound lead, I think pre tour is a really impactful place to be able to like, say, Hey, I’m wearing this butterfly, top, and I’m going to be outside of the front entrance. This is where you part just letting them know. I think that in senior living in general, there’s still a stigma sometimes attached to walking into a senior living community and not knowing what to expect. And so if you can tell them what to expect or show them what to expect, that’s really going to start removing the mystery of what this whole process even looks like.

And then, like I said, post tour recapping the things that you heard, the things that were important and then using it throughout the rest of your process.

Amber: Yeah, that makes sense. I think one of our clients is actually doing this as well on the employee side.

So when someone is coming on site for a job interview, they’re sending them a video welcome to our community. This is where you park. This is where you can find the front desk. Cause as we all know, some of these communities can be a little confusing and complicated to figure out where you’re supposed to go.

Christie: They for sure can. Actually, that’s one of the stats that I have [00:05:00] to share is that one of our partners has seen an 85 percent increase in responses from employee candidates using it on the recruiting side, which again, right? Like I, I’ve only used it in the sales capacity, but really being able to see How the team interacts, how people are going to treat you through getting those types of videos.

 It’s almost like dating, right? Like where both parties need to be involved. It’s not just all of these people want to come work for us, or these people want to come live with us. Let’s have some back and forth dynamic and make that a really enjoyable experience.

Amber: Yeah, absolutely.

It’s most of our day to day interactions that we’re just on our phone and we’re just looking things up. It’s all through those videos now, like text based messaging, email communication just seems a little antiquated at this point. So you mentioned earlier automation and. AI is a huge buzzword.

We just published a white paper about it. And so let’s talk a little bit about how automation can be used in the sales environment in senior living. How can it be personalized? Not just feel [00:06:00] like a mass email. Let’s talk a little bit about that.

Christie: Yeah. So I think it’s still a really delicate balance. I think that, I know I personally am always going to be on the human connection, like a true human being is always going to be the gold standard, but I think that evergreen videos are going to be able to bridge the gap with them.

I want to personally be the one that makes that initial evergreen video, or perhaps it’s after a webinar or after some type of an event, an email that goes out in mass. With one email that or one video that was made for many people versus one to one. I still think that there are going to be hiccups when you try to do one to one videos at mass.

I think that’s just something that you need a really easy tool. Like I think that SalesMail makes it really easy to sit and crank out 15, 20 videos in a really meaningful way. Because it’s so easy to do. It takes me like 45 seconds, right? I just sit there and crank them [00:07:00] out. But I think that you can also leverage those evergreen videos in an automation type campaign.

I know I’ve used in the past like outreach or sales loft or things like that when I was in more of a SDR type role. And those are fantastic if the video is really general. Because if not, we’re going to have, Amanda’s video going to Amber and Christie’s video going to Sally, and it’s going to just potentially be a mess.

So I do think that’s on the horizon, but I really would love to see it stay a little bit personalized in that automation type sequence.

Amber: You can never fully automate or it just becomes too, just because a lot of noise, right? Everyone’s, you’re getting hit all in automated communication.

We talked a little bit about how are we getting the videos out and personalizing those and automating those and things like that. But people who are listening to this may be thinking about like, how do I even make a video in the first place?

Christie: Yeah, for sure. So that’s my favorite thing about SalesMail is that it’s you need nothing but your phone. And if people [00:08:00] can get on a zoom call, which we’ve all had to do through COVID times and beyond, you can use this app. It’s just an app on your phone. And the reason that I get this question a lot.

So this might help unpack it a little bit. I get the question a lot. Like, why wouldn’t I just make a video on my phone? And the answer is you could. You can now upload that video to SalesMail. But the reason that we record and want to send out of SalesMail is that it’s going to come through branded and it’s going to come through as an animated gif over a hyperlink image in the email body.

So the full video file is not coming in the email. So if you were to send a video raw from your phone, it’s probably going to get flagged in spam. It’s probably going to look suspicious because it’s a heavy file. And so by using our tool and this platform, it’s coming right into the inbox or text message or LinkedIn already branded.

And for senior living communities that brand awareness and that trust that they’re able to build by seeing, a spectrum retirement logo or, something like that. That’s oh, yeah, [00:09:00] that’s who I’m talking to. Now that face matches that. And then that logo hyperlinks back to their website.

And then there’s the contact information down below. So we have over 6, 000, 7, 000 users now. And those people are trained when they’re onboarded to say, click the link above to maybe check out our website, click the link below for a call to action, or here’s my contact information. And so it’s just that very smooth process that makes it super quick and easy, but also really impactful when it’s delivered in that way.

 Another kind of pro tip that I encourage people to think about, if you’re not watching yourself or re watching your video, I think you can move forward.

If you re watch and you re watch and re watch, you’re going to pick things apart. That’s just like, how we operate. But I think if you create these and think of these as a video voicemail, the cadence that you would leave a voicemail in, that helps you to just kind of like, rinse and repeat, start cranking them out.

And I do always tell people when I’m training them, that the [00:10:00] recipient on the other end cares so much less about what you look like, what you’re wearing, they’re so still captivated that a person took 30, 45 seconds to make them this personalized message, if you were to ask them what your hair looks like or what you were wearing, they couldn’t tell you.

Like that part’s not actually important to them. I’m not saying go stand outside of a dumpster, but even if you did, it’d probably still be okay.

Amber: Yeah. I think I’ve heard that the person who looks at your own social media and your own recordings as yourself,

Christie: 100%, especially through that lens, right?

If anyone’s coming to your platform, they’re coming to gain value and to learn what you have to share, not to pick apart what you’re wearing.

Amber: So I think we’re talking primarily about the staff side of that, but can you share any stories about the resident side and how residents get involved in some of these videos and content creation?

Christie: Yeah, so I know for me when I was using it, which I have seen a [00:11:00] lot of examples of these 2 with other users, but introducing typically there’s like a resident ambassador or somebody that’s been at the community for a long time.

And having the ability to again, I would do this in more of an evergreen format. I would have them introduce themselves and just like how long they’ve been here and what they love about the community and be able to have that as one of my like value add touch points. But it’s also really impactful when that family walks in to tour and sees Betty and they’re like, Oh my gosh, it feels like they’ve already met her or at least know some things about her.

You can do that with so many other areas of the community. I’ve really encouraged teams to do this with their executive directors. If the executive director is not able to meet a family or a prospect upon touring, this is a really awesome time to have a quick video from them that you can fire off.

And then just being able to capture activities as they’re happening. If it’s something that, if they’re really passionate about. Pickleball, record pickleball being played in the [00:12:00] community and say, Hey, we can’t wait to have you here on Tuesday to play pickleball with us at 4 p. m. or whatever that looks like.

So I think there’s a lot of ways, like I said, because it’s so easy to just point, shoot, send it, save it. You have this queue or this library full of really meaningful content that you can share when it makes sense. I think that’s the other misconception is that people think they need to record the video and send the video.

And that’s just not my personal best practice. I would rather sit down and make all of the videos for tours I’ve had this week, referral partners. I’ve connected with this week and then send it out when I may be more in front of my computer and able to just type out these quick little emails that I’m embedding a video into.

Amber: Yeah, it’s almost like using your phone personally to share videos and photos when you think of something in the moment, you can just go in your library and just send it out as it makes sense. Yeah. Are there some statistics that you can share about success stories from teams [00:13:00] using SalesMail successfully?

Christie: Yeah, there’s a couple, but I picked one of my favorites because I think it speaks to sales teams, but I think it speaks to operators too, just in general, right? Like we’re all trying to get new leads to convert to tours and we’re all trying to get those tours to convert to move ins.

And Julie Potowitz is a name that many will recognize and it’s probably familiar with. And this is during her time at Vitality Living, not while she’s been at Grow Your Occupancy. But when she was at Vitality Living, she did a really good job of capturing the statistics pre SalesMail and post SalesMail, and I think that was really impactful.

So one of the stats that she’s provided to us is that she saw a 22% increase of inquiry to tour. So converting those inquiries into tours, an increase of 22%, and then an increase of 37% of two, or to move in by adding SalesMail. Like I said, not at every stage of the process, but at some of the most meaningful times.[00:14:00]

And I think that is just huge. When we’re trying to get people to convert from an internet lead via phone call, text, email carrier pigeon, that part’s dramatic. I know, but it feels like we’re trying all of these really I don’t know, outdated ways and expecting them to just walk in and tour, we send them a personalized video.

Our chances truly are going to increase. That’s just, that makes complete sense to me. And so then it’s just refining that process. But those are two stats that I really love to share. I think those are really impactful.

Amber: Yeah. And I think it’s just, it looks a lot more fresh and current, I think to see those videos in a communication versus just the traditional text based messaging that we’ve had in the past.

Christie: For sure.

Amber: I think, we’re moving through post COVID technology changes, but what do you see is going to happen in the future? What’s next? So we’ve made this transition to more digital communication, more videos, but what’s going to be after that?

Christie: Yeah, I feel like as far as the AI [00:15:00] front goes, I think that’s going to continue to evolve and grow and I’ve personally dabbled with it like a fair amount and I’m no expert by any capacity, but I think that has the potential to really just shift this journey as a whole. I think that still having personalized video.

And video in general is not going anywhere. I think that’s going to continue to increase and be on the forefront. And so I think that, it reminds me of like back when email first came out or phones first came out. And when we got phones. We were like, we’ll never text on those, or we’ll never have a social media platform on those.

That’s all we do on them now. And so I think it’s. It’s not when is that going to happen? It’s it’s happening. How do we leverage it? How do we lean into it? And so I think that it’s going to take the humans behind the AI to really lean into this type of, resources, essentially what it is and this tool and use that to enhance this entire journey for people.

And I think that the [00:16:00] buyer, like the consumer on the other end, Is way more well versed in technology than they ever were before. And so I think that, back in the day I started in 2012. So I’m allowed to say that back in the day, I think that it was just like, Oh, they don’t know anything.

Meaning the family, they know nothing. So it’s up to us to educate them. And now they do. And now they have the ability to educate themselves. And so now we really get to come in as sales folks and be a true trusted advisor and more of a guide. Is this the right fit for you? Doesn’t sound like it. You should consider here, or here.

Because we’ve done really good research. So I think it’s just going to continue to evolve and grow really at a rapid rate. And so we just need to be on board for that.

Amber: Yeah, that’s a really good point. In the past, people didn’t know anything. So you had to educate them, like you said, and now it’s almost like the inverse where people have too much information.

And you have to try to be more selective, which with what information actually want them to know and pay attention [00:17:00] to.

Christie: We need to shift of hey, did you maybe just go to Google and type in senior living? Nah, that might not be what it exactly looks like right now.

And that might not be what the community that the person’s representing offers or looks like right now. But I think it’s great. I think that gives us, like I said, an opportunity to be more of a guide versus trying to educate and then guide.

Amber: Christie, is there anything that we haven’t talked about that you want to make sure listeners know from this podcast?

Christie: So I think really just humanizing whatever it is you’re doing. And I think that, for salespeople specifically, this is just for sales folks and marketing folks. I think that getting over the hump of being nervous on camera, Or being fearful of what you sound like or look like, I think that needs to come sooner than later.

I’m personally super down and offering my time and resources to help people overcome that because. It’s so impactful when you can do that through the sales process. And the quicker that folks [00:18:00] can hop on board with that, the better it’s going to be for the family, for the prospect, whoever. And it always blows my mind that people are really fearful because a family is going to walk in and see who you are.

Like they’re going to see your face. They’re going to see what you look like and what you sound like. And so it almost feels like a competitive edge to send them a video first. And let them start to get to know you. So when they walk in, it’s not like a brand new first meeting. Just starts to remove that barrier a little bit.

So I would just say, be brave, just be brave, dive in, give it a try. So I think that the success and the results that will come will be really worth it.

Amber: Yeah, I’ve heard an analogy before when you’re meeting people remotely that it’s almost like you’re moving through the process and dimensions. So maybe you’ve seen like a picture of them and that’s one dimension and a really good video call and that’s like this next dimension and then you meet in person and so they become more and more familiar to you as you introduce these different dimensions [00:19:00] of technology.

Christie: I

love that. I can

visually see that happening. So that’s a really awesome analogy.

Amber: Christie, where can our listeners learn more about HeartLegacy, SalesMail, and where can they find you?

Christie: Yeah, for sure. So LinkedIn is our jam right now. You can look up SalesMail or HeartLegacy over on LinkedIn.

You can find me on LinkedIn. And then our website offers a ton of really great blog posts, help articles, things like that. So if you’re just getting started into SalesMail and you want to check that out great resource. Demo Day has recently been launched. And that’s just a great opportunity to learn more. 15 minute demo, 15 minute Q& A. We’ll be hosting those every month, so be on the lookout for the next one. You can get signed up, register for the Zoom, and we’ll see you then.

Amber: Fabulous. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Christie: You’re welcome. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

Amber: 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 [00:20:00] 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.

Amber: Welcome to Raising Tech Podcast. Today, we have Aaron Mayer, who’s the Director of Sales for Bear Robotics. Welcome to the show.

Aaron: Hey, Amber. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Amber: Yeah, I’m really glad you’re here. So we have done a Bear Robotics podcast. It’s been a minute. So I connected with you, Aaron, at a recent conference, and we talked about how we have to get you back in the podcast.

Robotics is blowing up. There’s so many new things coming out with staffing crisis and workforce. I know that the workforce is a big topic at multiple conferences I’ve been to. So I’m really excited to talk to you today and dig a little bit deeper into Bear robotics. and specifically talk about introducing robots.

Aaron: Yeah, awesome. like I said, thanks for having me on. I think the biggest thing that we’re seeing in the senior living industry right now is that a lot of operators haven’t snapped out of the COVID slumber. They’re still doing heavy room service, buffet style service. They have adapted their dining rooms and most of them are [00:01:00] just empty.

And dining is such a critical point in all of these communities, especially independent and assisted living. There’s not many times that the residents get to socialize with one another. They look forward to these meals every single day. And the biggest part here also is we’re having these staffing and labor shortages.

It’s hard to retain good people. It’s hard to drive the operation and keep it going. At the same time, costs are going up and the expectation is rising for these customers, these seniors that are moving into these very luxurious establishments. They’ve traveled the world, they’ve dined in very nice restaurants, and they come in after they’re footed with a big bill and they expect To be wined and dined and they should so we need to find a way to deliver on these expectations.

And I’m excited to get into it today.

Amber: So Aaron, tell me a little bit more about you first. So to set the [00:02:00] stage for the conversation we’re going to have today.

Tell me about your background. Where did you come from? How did you end up at Bear Robotics? What’s your journey?

Aaron: I’m a classically trained chef. I was born and raised in the kitchen. I did it all. I started as a dishwasher. You hear that story all the time, but it’s very much true for my situation.

Went to culinary school. I got the formal degree. I actually majored in nutrition worked in hospitals and I found myself nuzzled in senior living dining operations. I’ve worked with some big contract food service companies managed a bunch of high level like dining operations accounts.

And three years ago, we actually ended up deploying these robots in one of my communities that I managed. And it was right in the middle of COVID and it saved my operation. That’s the truth. I was able to restructure my staffing patterns and my labor force. To accommodate these automation tools and the residents were all about it.

We were able to level up our dining [00:03:00] experience. So a lot of times today when I’m talking to new customers and dining directors or executive directors or COOs, CEOs, presidents of these large organizations, I like to challenge them to think outside of the box to level up their dining atmospheres as well. A lot of people think that these seniors might not like these robots or the perception might be off.

But it couldn’t be more wrong. They love seeing people in a dining room and they love engaging with their favorite servers three times a day. They love seeing them. They love chatting with them. And when we can keep those servers on the floor to be more attentive and provide table maintenance , floor presence equals perception of service that’s elevated.

That’s what we’re doing here.

Amber: I want to go back to what you said. You said that Bear Robotics saved your operations. That’s a bold statement. Tell me more about that. Give me some specific examples of how that worked at your community.

Aaron: Yeah, so I’ll get very [00:04:00] specific. We had about six servers for a 50 table dining room.

And this was actually back in the middle of 2020. When we were in the thick of it, we were actually were just coming out of the the first wave where we thought we could reopen dining rooms with social distancing. And the president of my company was nagging me to try. I was the Guinea pig for all new tech operations.

And he was saying, Hey, try these robots. And I’m like, absolutely not. I have limited staff, I’m being pulled in a million directions. Finally, I agreed to do it. And we implemented two of these robots at my establishment. What I did was we lost three servers, three servers came down with COVID.

And we were operating at 50 percent staffing pattern. We actually luckily just implemented a point of sale system where we had handheld tablets on the floor. So what we did was we restructured how we went about our dining service. [00:05:00] I kept two people on the floor just to take the salad, soups, beverages orders.

They were just on the floor ringing in these tickets and that’s all they did. And I told them, do not go back into the kitchen, just stay on the floor. We were able to service two times the amount of tables per person when we leveraged those two technologies together. So we were ringing in tickets from the dining room and we were having a robot run the food and beverages and soups and salads out.

So with those two working in harmony, we were able to operate as we were full staffed with three servers and two robots.

Amber: I love that story. And I love that this came up because there’s two points I wanted to speak to based on what you said. So first of all, you said earlier, you were really resistant to the idea of robotics and I go on site to a lot of sites.

I was just at a community last month. And I was talking to the dining staff and same conversation. What’d you guys think about robotics? And I was really shocked. There was so much [00:06:00] resistance still. There’s people that are in positions that are younger, you think would be more open to this.

The woman I was speaking with was like, absolutely not. I will never have robots here. I don’t want to take away from the personal touch. So I want you to speak to that, but also on the same token is what you said earlier, that a lot of people also have a perception that the residents are against it.

But I also have heard. Complete opposite. So the communities that have implemented robotics that residents really like it, they get excited, they like to brag about it. So can you speak a little bit to those two points?

Aaron: Yeah, absolutely. And I’m glad you brought it up. First from an operator’s perspective, you hear robotics and automation and you’re like, I don’t have time.

I don’t have time to do this. This is a huge lift, big implementation.

Amber: Can you explain that more though? What, what takes the additional time? Like, why are people thinking it’s more time?

Aaron: I think because we’ve been trained to inherently like senior living moves slower to adopt new things.

We see that all over the place. When we were at that CCL event, you were talking about wifi [00:07:00] infrastructure and how daunting it is just to put that into play. And we’ve been trained to think that way whenever we’re implementing a new call system, POS system EMR, like anything like that, it’s just a big project.

And now I can’t speak from any other organizations, but we make it really simple. Our product is installed and ready in two hours, and then we’re just sitting there observing and training. So it’s not a multi week phased rollout where there’s plugs and tapes and all this construction. It’s quite simple.

Everything’s in house in our product. So it’s really easy to implement our robots just to even test out for a short amount of time. to address the bigger part of your question, I love when I’m faced with a customer or someone, even a resident saying I like our servers.

I don’t want to get rid of them or we want to increase human interaction, not reduce it. Because it gives me like perfect platform to shoot right back and say, are you [00:08:00] crazy? What? It’s quite the opposite. When I talk about server presence on the floor, I really mean it.

And I tell a story all the time and everyone can relate to it. Like how many times are you out dining with family, friends? And you’re looking around on the floor for your server. Maybe you want another glass of wine. Maybe you’re ready for the check and you can’t find the server. You’re looking over your shoulder.

You’re trying to make body language, eye contact, whatever it is. And you can’t find them. And in your mind, what happens at that time? You start to perceive the service going down because I’ll tell you what that server is doing. I’ve been in the kitchen. I’ve been a server before. They’re juggling a million plates.

They’re checking on their other tables. They’re in the kitchen, waiting for their food to be ready. They’re making sure that this person’s checked out. They’re doing all these things, but our robots keep them on the floor. We don’t deal with many people that want to eliminate humans on a dining room.

They just want to provide a tool to help them. And that’s what we do best.

Amber: Yeah, I think when a lot of people who aren’t [00:09:00] that familiar with what a solution like Bear Robotics can actually do, and when they hear robots, they’re thinking that’s taking away from the customer side, and you’re really talking about more back end operations.

So can you walk us through, what does a community look like that has Bear Robotics fully implemented what are the roles that the servers are doing, that the robots are doing. Can you just talk through that? What’s the experience like for a resident?

Aaron: Yeah, and I’ll do a full circle journey.

A recent client of ours we did this virtual white paper with and we tried capturing the full cycle of What we do and how we do it. And it all starts with kind of just a phone call and a consultation. How do you see these robots helping your community?

What are some of your pain points in your dining operation now ?These guys particularly the dreadful four to eight shifts, if anyone’s listening that manages dining or nursing operations, and it’s a hard shift part time you have the college or high school kids working [00:10:00] it and it’s really tough to keep staff.

They were struggling with that. And the biggest show of the night is dinner. The residents really look forward to having dinner. And like we talked about earlier they have a really high expectation of their service of dinner. They want their food coming out quick. They want it hot.

And they want to be able to chat with their friends and have a good meal experience. What we did was we actually came out we did a little walk through we qualified the site, made sure that there’s no barriers for success, like stairs or big bumpy flooring, which we never really see in senior living in general.

And we actually attended the resident council and food committee, where most people have monthly or bi weekly, And we presented the idea of robots to them first, before we implemented anything, before we went live we let them ask questions, we let them touch and feel the robot, see how it moved around the dining area and the space, and we quelled all concerns up front there actually wasn’t in [00:11:00] this particular instance, there wasn’t one person that was curious about us eliminating staff, which we weren’t.

We were just supplementing and adding in a, an extra set of hands.

Amber: Can I ask you a question before you go on to the next part? But I was wondering the back of my head while you were talking, it sounds like it wasn’t the case in this community, but have you ever been brought in where maybe the CEO is we got to get robots and I’m super excited.

And everyone else hates the idea and how do you overcome that?

Aaron: All the time we deal with C suite or owner operators, people who are not operators, people that are very removed from the actual operation.

And they say, I love the idea of it. This will work perfectly. They sign up for an agreement, they get a handful of robots. And then the worst thing that happens is we come out to deploy these robots. And the dining team doesn’t know the residents don’t know and then all of a sudden they see this big [00:12:00] white thing that’s moving around their dining room.

And they’re like, what the heck is that? Whose job is it replacing? So to your point, it’s really important to touch all layers of the operation and we’re very careful not to deploy robots until everyone’s prepared to receive them.

Amber: I love your idea about letting people just interact with them. And it’s just a unstructured way so they can ask their questions and see what it’s like. And I think a lot of times, just with robots is people have this like idea in their head of what it’s like, and that’s where the fear comes from.

But when you actually see them, It’s totally different. Okay. So keep walking me through it. So you’ve come on site you’ve started your implementation. What is the rest of the implementation go live look like? What do you need to do prepare? What kind of training is there?

What has to change on the operational side? And then maybe you can talk about what does this look like once it’s actually in place?

Aaron: Yeah. So from this example, we held the resident council. We allowed them to ask questions. We solicited feedback. And then we prepared them [00:13:00] for their first night of service.

We said, look, you’re going to have a new friend in the dining room today. It’s going to be helping out those hardworking servers that bust their butts every night to get you your food quick and hot. And there was a lot of excitement around it. We try to engage other departments as well. I love working with activities departments and and just anyone who’s deals with resident engagement.

A lot of times we do an activity where over a month span as we prep for the robot to come, we have the residents participate in a naming event or a gender reveal. However you want to do. We’ve seen it all. Quick disclaimer. 99 percent of our senior living communities. named their robot Rosie because they basically resonate with the Jetsons because that was their time.

And

When I say it takes two hours to install that’s really all it takes.

Our engineer comes out, we do a map which is basically all internal. We mow this robot around, capture the walls they have 3D cameras on the robot and LIDAR, which basically [00:14:00] bounces a signal and it’s just depth perception. They’re not like video or picture cameras.

They’re just depth cameras. And then we get this map and then our engineers design it to work towards a workflow that we use. So as we go, we’re working with the dining team, the front of house managers, the dining directors whoever’s hands on in that operation. And again, to your earlier question.

This is why we need everyone involved from the start to know that we’re coming in. Many times when we deploy these robots, this sounds like a big process, but I’m just spelling it out. Many times we actually know what we’re doing before we get in. So we can just be in the background doing this whole process.

And then we just we prep for a huddle or a standup right before service and we train everyone live there. So fast forward to actual service, our first run we do an in depth training with all the staff. We make sure everyone knows what buttons go, where the purpose of the robot. The purpose of staying on the floor and [00:15:00] engaging with the residents and not crowding in the kitchen.

Anyone who’s listening that is in dining operations. They know it’s a big issue where people congregate in. And we don’t like that. They’re always saying, Hey chef, where’s table two, or I’m waiting on four. We want them getting the heck out and staying on the floor to entertain the guests and make sure they have everything they need.

So we do a lot of that. We try to make sure things are going smooth and then we take the training wheels off. We walk away we monitor the data and reports. We share them with the operations team and the people on site. We can see how many deliveries we make per shift per day. What does our operating time look like?

How much weight do we carry? How much distance did we travel? A ton of KPIs that we can measure that can just be translated into return on investment.

Amber: I didn’t know about the KPI and reporting side. That’s interesting. It’s something I hadn’t thought about to have that information. Does that also help you determine ROI [00:16:00] and like labor hours, save, things like that?

Yeah.

Aaron: And it’s quite complex because we don’t get too involved. We’ve done a couple of case studies where people have been an open book to their labor pattern and their staffing and wages and all that good stuff. But a lot of times we don’t ask the questions cause it’s personal to the operation, but you can surmise ROI capacity.

Our robots cost 19 bucks a day. So depending on what Metro city you’re closest to, if you’re in, if you’re on the West coast or even like DC area, New York city area, you’re already paying 15 an hour. And one thing I talk about a lot is calculate the robot and operating time. If you have John, the food runner that works from four to eight, you’re paying him from four to eight.

You’re paying four hours of labor. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t mean he’s running food four hours straight. He’s taking bathroom breaks. I’m sure he’s sitting on his phone for a few minutes checking Twitter and going through Instagram and it just happens. So we calculate [00:17:00] that in robot operating time.

Even if we do five deliveries in one hour, that’s an operating hour that you would have been paying a human. And again, this might sound like I’m suggesting we’re replacing staff. But our proposal is use John the food runner to become a server or have him run other things that the robot can’t, or just be in a dining room and be more pliable with your workflow.

That’s what we want to encourage people to do.

Amber: Okay. Yeah. That makes sense. Can we talk about some robot myths and maybe bust some of those myths and I’ll tell you some of the ones I’ve heard, and then you can maybe add some you’ve heard, and we can talk through them to dispel them a little bit.

And some of them we did discuss already. Of course, the fear that people’s jobs will be replaced the loss of customer service. But I’ve also heard some operational concerns just around floor layout, building layout, where the kitchen is, where the dining room is how applicable is this in places like the assisted living and skilled nursing dining room?

So those are some of the ones I know, maybe we can talk about [00:18:00] those and then also add any that you’re aware of.

Aaron: Sure. So some of the big ones are our dining rooms too tight. We don’t have the space. And that’s that myth is busted. Big old busted stamp. We only need around two feet to move around to get through pathways.

There’s no dining rooms that are too tight in senior living. Even if even if you have one, I I say prove it because we have wheelchairs, rollators, walkers, we’ve got all these assistive devices, but if a human can get through it, so can our robot. The one thing for us, we deal with a lot of restaurants, of course and when we have people standing up, like a college bar or a big bustling, like sports bar, something like that’s a challenge for us because you have, you don’t have people sitting.

But in senior living, you have people sitting during meal period. Of course, people are getting up coming and going, but for the most part, people are sitting and when that is the case, we can get to and from anywhere we really need to go. The other thing is floors and [00:19:00] pathways. Our newest robot survey plus, which is directly behind me.

And you guys can find it on our website. It’s our most marketed robot. Basically our second generation, we can go over really bumpy floors, big thresholds that are almost a half inch wide. We can go up and down ramps. The only thing we can’t do is stairs. Of course, I like to joke. We can go downstairs, but we can’t go up, back up.

And the good thing is we don’t see a lot of these uneven flooring or ramp kind of situations in senior living because they’d be a tripping hazard anyway. So the climate and environment is really conducive for heading these robots. The last thing that we hear a lot of people do is talk about is door access.

My door is really close to the dining room. I can’t leave it open or fire code says that we can’t do this with the door. That one’s busted as well because we have a product that opens and closes doors now that communicates with the robot. And likely people have these in their communities already.

There’s numerous brands. [00:20:00] We have a product that we use that works directly with the robot, but also works when a server tries to kick or push a door. So it’s manual and automatic. And that’s actually something we just implemented with a couple of robots that are the latest deployment that did the white paper study.

 It’s been a game changer for us. We definitely. That’s a big thing for senior living. What happens in a kitchen should stay in the kitchen, except for the plate.

Aaron: We don’t want the noise the clanking, all that stuff in, in, out in the dining room. Some people have the space and they have open kitchens. A lot of new designs are open style, which is great. Definitely more conducive because this door opener we have is an added product and it’s a separate integration.

But when you get it all to work together it’s really harmonious.

Amber: One more myth I want to bring up, and I’ve heard this more with the cleaning robots and maybe like the lawn mowing robots and things like that, but is there any worry of a collision? Are people scared of that?

Aaron: They’re always scared of it. And it’s funny cause when you’re at these [00:21:00] deployments, residents like sticking their feet out or putting their hand in front of the robot. And I always laugh and I go over and talk to them and I’m like, I told you it’s not going to hit you. The only thing that could happen is a resident could bump it like if they’re not seeing it or something.

But that’s never a very violent interaction. The robot is bottom heavy, so it’s not going to tip over. It’ll just wobble. We have really good detection. Our engineers are really good at creating pathways where we don’t hit anything. If something were to jump out really quickly and startle the robot.

It would stop on a dime. We’re really good at doing that. So it’s something that we’re confident in.

Amber: Aaron, one last question I have for you. You have so much experience, working for a community before being in the culinary industry and all the different clients you get to interact with through your position.

Now, do you have any general tips and tricks you can just share to elevate dining operations?

Aaron: Yeah, I would say the biggest thing is [00:22:00] be more adaptable and think outside the box and welcome new types of tech. Welcome the new P. O. S. System that your servers can take orders with tablets out on the floor.

Welcome. Automated tools that could bring food to the table. Eventually we’ll be able to bring food for room service up, up multi levels. Go vertical you in order to consistently deliver on the expectation of elevated dining experiences. You need to implement these tools. Because the labor market’s not going to get any better and you’re good people.

They won’t stay forever. So you need to leverage automotive tools. And when you can have a whole suite of automotive tools that aren’t that expensive to work together, to really get the most out of your staff. It’s a great thing. It really is. And you could deliver that expectation and you could have a really awesome dining program.

One that your residents and customers talk [00:23:00] about and people come just for that.

Amber: Yeah, I think that’s a great. No to end on. And really you can take that and apply that to really any area of senior living that more automation, more process efficiency is something we need in so many areas. And, robots are a pretty cool way to do that.

Aaron: They are

Amber: well, Aaron, where can our listeners find out more about bear robotics?

Aaron: So you can go to bear robotics. com. We are all over the place. We market a lot. on Google, our home website. We also are at some major conventions. We’ll be at leading age this year. We’ll be at the big ones.

So you will see our robot roaming around the floors and you could find us there.

Amber: Thank you so much for joining me today.

Aaron: Thanks for having me, Amber.

Amber: 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. If you enjoy Raising Tech, please leave us a review and share with a friend. Music is an original production by [00:24:00] Tim Resig, one of our very own Parasol Alliance employees.

As always, thank you for listening.

Welcome to raising tech podcast. I’m your host, Amber Barton. Today, we have something very special for you. We recently hosted a live episode of raising tech podcast in which we had multiple panelists that spoke on AI. It was a really great conversation, a great discussion. The full video is available on our YouTube channel, which we will link in the show notes.

In the meantime, here is an audio version of the events and we hope you enjoy.

Welcome everybody. Today we have a very special live recording of our podcast raising tech.

 We recently published an AI white paper. So we had multiple clients coming to us asking us what’s going on with AI? What have you heard?

Their board members are coming to them and asking them and AI is just a buzzword right now. We’re hearing it everywhere. So what we wanted to do was speak to key industry leaders across a lot of different sectors, a lot of different platforms and get all of their insights. And information and exciting developments that are coming [00:01:00] out.

So please check out our AI white paper. It is on our website. It is a free resource. And then today we’re doing our live podcast, which where we brought some of the people from our white paper onto today’s episode. And we’re going to hear from them directly. So we have some prepared questions that we’re going to walk through, and then we’re going to open up to audience questions.

So please feel free to put any questions you might have in the chat. I’m Amber Bardon. I’m the founder and CEO of Parasol Alliance. Parasol Alliance is a full service technology company. We do day to day IT support onsite services, resident technology, as well as strategic planning and project management.

And I’m going to turn it over to our panelists and have them give a brief introduction as well. So we’re going to start with Jonathan. Do you mind doing a brief introduction for our audience? Sure. Thank you, Amber. So I’m the CEO of V Care Companion. As a co founder with Sanjay, who’s also on this call Sanjay brought the robotics capabilities with to, to myself.

I’m the founder of a company called [00:02:00] Family Care Space. We’ve built a variety of applications built on real time and the merging of those workflows within a robotic environment to help address the really critical labor issues in healthcare. That’s what we’ve done and then in that process. We developed applications that, again, are at the point of care.

So we have an autonomous, we call CC, our care companion. And CC provides access to the data lake, all the various information that could be in an EHR, et cetera. In addition, we have a gen AI application that deals with. Ambient dictation, the idea that a nurse can talk. To CC about a status update with a resident.

That tech, that voice gets turned into text when you use artificial. Intelligence understanding large language model to be able to create the text into the specific form, send that out to the, you are [00:03:00] probably talking about 3 hours of savings just in that alone. We’re adapting in the field for the folks that are facing the challenges of.

I can do quite a bit with a lot less than they did before. And an administrative workload, it’s just really burdensome to say, at least. The care is all about helping those that care for those that care and the setting can also be to be in a community and can also be in a home care setting. There are a variety of other elements that come into the care.

We get added. We are adding biometric devices, things like this. Again, everything that can help that care worker that home care provider at the point of care with our friend. Cc is what we’re all about. Thanks for that introduction. Sanjeev, how about you go next? Thanks, Samberg, for having me on your podcast.

HelloGuard Robotics was really started based on my passion for robotics and AI. You can think of us as your 1 stop trusted partner for all things, robotics and AI based [00:04:00] workforce automation solutions, such as what Jonathan just spoke about. V Care is another company that I co founded with Jonathan.

And we fully integrate into your current system. So we make it real easy for robotics and AI workflow solutions to integrate into your current, whether it’s your EHR or your operational systems. And our mission is really we wake up every day. And all we want to do is automate the everyday mundane work so that you can elevate the more important work, such as taking care of your residents in your community.

And by shifting the burden of repetitive tasks from humans to robots HelloGuard believes that you’re solving the most important challenges that person centered communities face today. Which is really a shortage of qualified personnel, exorbitant staffing costs, overburdened and burnt out employees, all the things you hear about with.

With that and a lack of new ways to really upscale existing staff so that you can reduce attrition. But before I jump into some of our AI [00:05:00] solutions, I just want to give you my view of the AI world, because everyone views AI slightly differently. I think the simplest analogy out there for AI is that, AI is simply a utility.

I liken it to refrigeration, that’s the simplest thing I can think of, when refrigeration first came out the ones who really benefit benefited from refrigeration is companies like Coke and Pepsi and similar to browsers, what browsers did to the internet really AI began its sort of evolution by leveraging, a ton of data to predict probability of an outcome.

So think of, a chess game where, AI is gathering a lot of data on possible outcomes and trying to find the highest probability of winning a game. Obviously, since then, AI has advanced with supercomputing. Now becoming reality and machine learning getting more advanced. There’s this concept of super intelligent AI or generative AI which is where we focus most of our efforts on [00:06:00] and we’re able to provide, those types of tools now and everything that we do specifically in in 2 buckets the 1st bucket Where we provide AI solutions is what I call is a hardware bucket.

We carry world class robots that boost productivity, whether it’s in cleaning, whether it’s an indoor outdoor delivery, whether it’s in patrolling the outdoors for security, or whether it’s simply in. Interactivity and entertainment those are the areas where we provide robotic solutions and what’s unique about our robotic solutions is that we integrate with all of your operational systems, like elevators, we can open doors, we provide 24 by 7 proactive monitoring.

So think of us almost as your outsourced robotic service provider. The other side of our hardware business is that we spend a lot of time. Leveraging the AI chips and 3D LiDAR technologies that exist within our hardware. For example, our cleaning robots can remember if they missed a [00:07:00] spot, they’d go back to that spot and clean it.

They also know how to map their surroundings. They’re able to know when they have to refill the water and go back to the docking station when they’re running out of charge. And things of that nature. That’s the hardware side of our business. The 2nd bucket of is on the innovative services and solutions to solve for staffing workflow challenges.

And be care companion is just 1 such key example of this where we’re using generative algorithms. At the point of care to help clinical staff make better decisions. And we care in this instance becomes what I call as the face of the data lake to solve everyday challenges that a nurse faces with administrative tasks.

And we think that the solution is really going to revolutionize care delivery and senior living very quickly at scale for all communities. So that’s where we fall in terms of AI. All right, thank you so much. Jessica, you’re next. [00:08:00] Hi, everyone, my name is Jessica Bradley. I am the director of business development and strategic partnerships for semantics.

I live in the Lehigh Valley. So I’m right on the, I know you guys are all talking about where you’re from. So I figured I’d mention where I’m from. I live right in between New York City and Philadelphia. I’ve worked in health care my entire career, and I worked in medical devices. The majority of the time, but I transitioned over to semantics where we do.

Remote patient monitoring services through the use of a risk based wearable. I transitioned over to Somatics two years ago and have since been introduced to Parasol Alliance. We’re excited to be on the webinar. We’ll dive in when we get into the webinar about what makes our wearable and remote monitoring different, but it’s nice to meet you all.

Thank you so much, Amber, for having us. Thanks, Jessica. Ryan, your turn for an introduction. Awesome. Thanks for having me. I’m Ryan Galli. I’m the CEO of Icon. We are a software company that [00:09:00] focuses on engagement and communication for staff, residents, and their family members. From the perspective of, holistically, what we’re trying to do is really make and give you the tools to deliver a phenomenal experience, the kind of experience that creates advocates for your communities.

To make it so that if you’re getting word of mouth positive social presence that’s going to attract and retain more staff and residents. What we’ve been doing on the side is what we’re calling smart aging, which is our proprietary platform. That is really focused on 2 things. 1 is synthesizing down all the complexity and noise in your community to personalize.

Experience for individual residents in the community and the 2nd piece is getting predictive and trying to understand how we can improve the overall programming and what impact of those changes might have on overall satisfaction and same concept on the [00:10:00] employee side is we’re much more focused there on turnover.

Thank you and last Steve. Thank you, Amber, and sorry for being a little late. I clicked the wrong link. I very much appreciate being a part of this. And I’m Steve Micah. I am the head of deployment strategy at SkyPoint and we very much look at AI as a data product. 1st, we see a lot of common themes and senior care and senior housing prominently.

The lack of data unification, the true inability to get a holistic view of all the data at your fingertips, there’s a lot of siloed data sources and inability to get that unified view. So we really start with our kind of journey to generative AI with data first, cleaning up your data and really bringing together that single source of truth that you can then layer traditional analytics tools on top of, as well as generative AI, really looking to generative AI as a human in the loop.

To support caregivers, to support leaders, to have quicker access to data, better understanding of internal data at their fingertips that employ them to [00:11:00] spend more face time with employees, spend more time with residents and really improve that caregiving and employee experience. All right. Thank you so much for introductions from everyone.

So if you showed up a little bit late, we’re going to do a couple of questions. We’re going to do some round robin. I have some prepared questions I’m going to read, but please feel free to pop your questions in the chat as we go along. And we’ll be answering audience questions at the end. So Steve, first question I have for you, and this is a question I hear a lot when we’re talking about AI.

So I’m really curious to get your input on this one, but. How can we better address the concerns and issues facing frontline senior living staff, utilizing AI? And maybe you can talk a little bit about people’s fears that maybe this might take away jobs or things like that. Yeah. And that’s definitely a common question that’s thrown around.

I go to a lot of AI user groups and just beyond the senior living industry, all up the common question is, fear of losing jobs. And I think there’s a couple of interesting factors at play in senior [00:12:00] living that make that less of a concern, you know, primarily that of employee retention already being an issue and also that average age of caregivers being on the higher end.

What we see on the ground is a lot of complications using the multiple different platforms expected to use at all the senior living facilities. What we really want to look to AI to better help those folks on the ground, deliver care by spending way less time with administrative and operational tasks.

Less time looking up information, less time as data entry specialists, much more time with face to face experiences. And I think that in the current state of what we’re providing and looking at is generative AI is truly to provide that human in the loop to support that quicker access to data. And I think that’s truly going to help both the resident experience and the employee experience.

We should not be living in a day where you have to access 4 different systems for your HR, your CRM. You should be able to go to 1 place and access all your data and leverage common language to ask those questions. And that’s the other side. We’re looking at it is as I mentioned, a lot of [00:13:00] the times I hear caregivers feeling like they’re almost data entry specialists in their day to day lives.

We need to have much more easy to use. Platforms that allow you to use natural language to both ask questions and, track meeting notes. And a lot of the AI tools out there, I know a lot of people have probably seen the news around ChatGPT 4. 0 and the kind of creepy voice that they decided to go with.

But in the long run, what we’re really doing here is the ability to, track with audio and leverage AI to ingest that and, easily get notes. Again, spend less time entering data in yourself and more time leveraging tools. For that increased face to face time, and I think that’s what everybody in the industry is really wanting to look to towards in terms of a better employee experience, a better resident experience.

And before I move on to the next question, I’m just going to ask you as a follow up to that, if you can just in a minute or less, can you just give a really specific example of like, how would this impact like a nurse or a CNA on a daily basis? Yeah, so specifically, a lot of the tools we’re using even looking up state regs or looking up policies, procedures, [00:14:00] looking up patient information in a secure platform.

Common issues you’ll have with publicly available generative AI tools is that lack of HIPAA compliance, lack of PHI. Safety and security when you’re leveraging a tool like sky point, you can have confidence that when you’re entering and receiving patient information, resident information that has done so securely.

And again, last time, clicking through reports, clicking through screens, just get answer that get that answer very quickly using common language to ask the question. Great. Thank you. All right, Jonathan. Next question is for you. And this is such a cool question that I think people will be interested in hearing the answer to, but what makes your robotic companions ideal for senior living settings.

Thank you. That is a really cool question. That’s at the heart of it. Why introduce something in a setting that could detract, right? Or take away because we already know there are a lot of stressors as is. So fundamental to this is I think a theme that I see running through here. Making the burden or easing the burden on the [00:15:00] care staff in performing their duties.

And I can’t think of a better place to start than at the point of care. 1 of the, I’ll give you a concrete example of how we see that unfold. We have a follow me feature. As a nurse is doing her rounds or has rounds, comes into a resident’s suite, begins an assessment, and speaks into CC.

The findings, or this is the verbal report that would end up having to be transcribed and eventually. After a lot of administrative activities put into the HR system and updates. In the environment, we’re talking about. Our CC will follow the nurse, go into the room, hear the dictation, hear the words spoken, the conversational activity transcribes that we use algorithms to create.

The necessary parsing and putting the data where it should be. And then pushing that off to an EHR that pushing off to an EHR, as I’m sure Steve can [00:16:00] attest, many can attest. Is not an easy task, and it’s, there are battlegrounds between the HRS and there’s walls set up for purposes, right?

They want you to, be totally involved in their environment as much as possible. And that does pose a challenge if you’re trying to create an openness, right? But there are ways to do that. There are companies like sky point and others. And it’s exciting that those walls are coming down, but what you’re getting with that care worker, the nurse now does not have to go back to her office, transcribe her notes, put it into.

And by the way, all of this is happening in a very dynamic. Environment where there’s lots of interruptions, things get rescaled in terms of what needs to be done when it’s very hectic and dynamic. Because she’s spoken out, or he’s spoken out the assessment, and we created the report that can be pushed to the EHR, can be adjusted if need be, but our track record is about 98 percent accurate in terms of the text, [00:17:00] getting in the right categories, like if it’s pharmaceutical or medication based, general awareness, wellness, et cetera.

And that process saves at least 3 hours. Of a nurse’s day, and so we’re talking a robotic companion that goes around with the nurse and that’s only one area. We have a an array of biometric sensors that are going to ambiently take data from the resident as part of the protocol for the care.

That can also be appended to this update. We have a 3D or rather a a facial recognition cameras and other validation can be utilized for consuming, for validating that the resident took the meds when they said they would. Things like that, so there’s a variety of different uses of this.

That will help the care setting the caregiver, and I think as well, increase the quality of understanding the care. Situation with that resident, that patient. And it can be in the home as well. Just monitoring a fall risk individual, the camera that we’re [00:18:00] utilizing has capabilities. So we can see if the gates changing, if there’s a posture that looks very unstable and then create an alert to let staff know where and when and who all of that information.

So having the point of care tool there with the nurse, the care, the various caregivers I think is really the powerful, compelling reason we’re seeing tremendous amount of response in the market. Attraction is increasing daily. I think it’s a good word to use now accurate word because this is a big problem.

We don’t have enough people, right? And we have a tremendous amount of burden put on the people we have. And so we’re trying to assist that. Yeah I really love what you and Steve both just commented on because I, as Steve said, there’s this burden of the administration side that technology has placed on everybody, especially on caregivers and it’s been building and building for years and I feel like the technology is now shifting that to the point where we’re [00:19:00] able to remove some of that burden and make some of these workflows and day to day processes, just more efficient using this technology.

So exciting to hear about that from both of you, Jessica, we’re going to shift the focus a little bit. So we’re going to talk about some metrics and some outcomes. So we’re using this technology. We’re putting it in. Let’s talk a little bit about what kind of metrics do you think we can get out of AI enhanced insights that would have the most impact for communities.

Yeah, no. So I’m sure everyone or the majority of people on this call are all here. You might be in leadership conversations where you’re saying we need to when you’re looking at your quarterly metrics, what’s our overall QM score? What are our, what’s our data around UTIs, our data around falls with injury or pressure injuries, and how can we get better in these areas?

What tools are out there, which is probably why the majority of you are on this call. And that’s truly at the heart of what we do by utilizing remote patient monitoring, everyone on [00:20:00] every single speaker you’re going to hear from today is going to touch on the staffing crisis that is in this country and how we can help people in their operations, but also how we can truly benefit your metrics.

I was really pleased after having worked with a lot of big gorilla pharmaceutical or medical device companies. I always, we always had data, right? And that was something that I expressed to somatics that we really need. I need actionable data to show and validate that remote patient monitoring that travels around with the person that it’s impactful.

We do have that data. We’re excited about that. We did a clinical study with the University of Pennsylvania in the Wharton School of Business. As well as we did it in a, it was called Catholic senior housing in Pennsylvania. So we looked at a hundred patients in various levels of care.

So sub acute, independent living. We had them wear bands and we looked at their metrics. Six months prior to initiating the use [00:21:00] of a just passive wearable band that’s enhanced with AI and insights around all this data that we’re gathering from people. And then what we did was we looked at their metrics six months after.

And the numbers, and I can share them, should anyone want to see the paper, I’d be happy to share it with you. But the numbers are impactful. We were able to reduce UTIs by 52%. We were able to reduce falls with injury by 42, 40 2%, with falls with injury, 17% drop in 30 day readmissions.

These are all things that you’re most likely very interested in and our metrics that you’re analyzing every day. And I think that one of the key things though, that I talk about is that putting a wearable on someone’s wrist. Isn’t going to get you those results. What truly gets you those results are two things.

The AI that we apply to the data that we’re cap, that we’re passively capturing. So the nice thing about it is that you’re [00:22:00] not requiring nurses to take episodic readings. They don’t have the time for that, nor do where do they log it, right? All these questions. It’s doing it automatically. It’s syncing it in automatically.

But what the AI then that we’re applying is doing is looking at all these thousands of data points every day, and it’s identifying abnormalities and patterns. Predictively. That word is so important. It’s how can we prevent these things from occurring? So us giving, looking at hydration, looking at nighttime waking, walking episodes to give a predictive risk or alert around UTI risk.

That’s number one is giving that alert. That’s what the A. I does. But the second piece of that is ensuring that we were and we do this. It’s semantics, but or any other company. I can talk about that, too. But how we partner with who’s looking at the data and managing it right to help you operationalize.

Because if. If nobody communicates that to the resident or nothing happens to it, you’re [00:23:00] not going to see those effects and metrics. So it’s really important, I think, that you look at all of it holistically. Yes, you can see what AI does, but it’s also how do we put it into practice and that we we help with.

So we’re excited about what the AI and the insights can do by making it easy and making it truly impactful with some real clinical data. Thanks, Jessica. I love that you share that. As I think Sanjeev mentioned earlier, AI is such a buzzword. We’re hearing so much about it. We wrote a white paper about it, but to actually hear you speak to it and how it’s actually changing lives is just really impactful.

Okay, Ryan, I got a question for you next. So let’s talk a little bit about the resident experience. So how can AI be used to enhance and increase resident engagement? Yeah. So I think, for a while now, I’m assuming you’re using some sort of software platform for engagement. You’re collecting a ton of data.

And a lot of great stuff is in there. And I think a challenge that has everyone’s alluded to is that staff don’t have the time to be [00:24:00] data analysts. They don’t have the time to go through and look at the trends or identify opportunities to it. Improve the experience. And so that’s where a I can be very helpful.

In being essentially your data analyst. If you think about your population in a community at any one point in time. The, what’s relevant, what’s interesting really depends on the makeup, the complex makeup of people in there at that exact moment. And one exciting way we’re using AI is to look through all of the different, unique interests, likes, dislikes, what people have gone through in the past, really anything that’s social, nonclinical to identify really specifically, here are the five things you can add to your programming.

That’s the most relevant to the most people is probably get the best attendance and try to make those predicted insights. To say, you add this program, you might increase participation by X percent. And that’s really a thing where people have had that data for a while and probably couldn’t do that manually, but [00:25:00] this.

It’s really does it for you gives you really specific action items as to what to do using the generative component, which is great for summarization for taking complexity and synthesizing into kind of a written text that’s digestible by the average person. And then letting the staff use that and leverage it really easily in their day to day.

The second piece, too, is even inter residents. If you think about someone is moving in or even coming on a tour of a community. The most important thing is helping them make those connections as quickly as possible in in the community, there’s people talk about the back door.

They left the 1st, 30 days. Someone’s not settled. They might move out, help them make that connection, find someone in the community. Using AI to identify who might be compatible who share similar backgrounds and interests, and let’s introduce them to each other. Let’s start helping them make those connections as quickly as possible.

And so that’s really what gets me excited. The [00:26:00] ability to just take all the complexity and then leverage our experience in engagement. To really take and help you take your programming to the next level. Yeah, that’s really exciting to think about. I think a lot of times we’re thinking about AI from the staffing perspective, but to think about the residents actually being able to take advantage of this technology directly is pretty exciting.

And if anybody hasn’t seen the AI tools that are in icon, I got a demo of it recently. It’s pretty cool stuff. So definitely check that out. If you haven’t so far. All right, Sanjeev. I have a question for you. This is probably a question. A lot of people in the audience are wondering about. I know I’ve been asked this by our clients specifically.

So the question is, how do you overcome data privacy with your platform? That’s a great question, Amber. And oddly enough, that’s probably the 1st question I always get asked before we even get into any sort of AI solution or robotics. But, before I jump into addressing this concern, I do want to bring to light.

[00:27:00] Why I think this is such a grave concern, and it’s only going to get more and more brought to, the the spotlight so I systems can digest and analyze exponentially more data than your traditional legacy systems. So there’s an increased risk of personal data exposure.

And I think someone mentioned predictive analytics, for example, uses like pattern recognition and predictive modeling, and all of this requires data. And, the algorithms we’re building at HelloGuard and vCare really can infer things like personal behavior preferences, passively learning along the way, proactively making care plan recommendations as needed.

Clearly, with all this data that’s involved in all of this brings to light concerns about security and HIPAA. Specifically and I think I read the other day that the number 1 biggest concern with adoption when it comes to the C suite is the ability to handle data, privacy and security when it comes to and there’s a lot of [00:28:00] fear behind it.

Rightfully and with all the benefits of AI there’s some bad players. I think we’ve all seen the news where healthcare and senior living have been held ransom for, data that data breaches that obviously is not a good outcome that anyone wants.

So there, we’re seeing an increased investment in cybersecurity and HIPAA protection. It’s almost like we’re in an age where AI is fighting against itself. And we’re seeing that happen right in front of our eyes. And the more advanced AI gets, The higher the investment in cyber security and data protection, and we’re already seeing that rapid rise in cyber security companies combating this issue and it’s going to continue to evolve as we move forward.

But when it comes specifically to privacy and HIPAA, we are generally talking about something called P. H. I. or patient sensitive data. And we had hello guard and be care, As a company, we conform to strict security standards both on the edge where a lot [00:29:00] of our applications are running as well as in the hybrid cloud environment where most of the processing occurs.

So if we take a specific scenario at HelloGuard and vCare, we require all of our app partners running on the robot to conform to these HIPAA and SOC 2 standards. And the way we do this is we de identify or encrypt the data that’s captured at the point of care. And, before it’s sent to the HR systems in the cloud.

So if someone were to hack us, for instance, they would see gibberish. They really wouldn’t see any data. Hybrid clouds, such as AWS and Microsoft Azure are inherently protected. By cyber security and HIPAA protocols as well. And those are the clouds that we use.

So this is where most of the processing of the collected data occurs. So to summarize all of this, there’s really no data stored on our robots. Any data collected is encrypted before it’s processed and almost all of the processing and retrieval of data is done in a secure and protected cloud environment.

So that’s [00:30:00] how we overcome some of these concerns.

Sorry, I clicked on the wrong box trying to meet myself. Thanks for that. And I’m, I may have some follow up questions for you later on governance and policies and things like that. But I think that’s a question we’ll get to a little bit later. Steve, I’m going to circle back to you. What are you witnessing with operators that have actively deployed AI solutions at their communities?

Some specific use cases, impact potential if you can share a little bit more around that. Absolutely. Thanks, Amber. I’ll be honest, and a lot of operators that we’re working with, there’s a kind of ground layer, really building a foundation that happens early on. And that’s creating that unified data analytics platform, bringing all those different data sources together.

Jonathan previously mentioned the EHR gorillas that we often have to wrestle with that 1st layer is really bringing that data together. And then being able to leverage generative AI and traditional analytics tools to get that kind of holistic view of the data. That’s already at your [00:31:00] fingertips, but you’re currently siloed.

So many of our clients live in this world where they go to their HR, they go to their CRM, they go to their finance application and have to look in those kind of siloed contexts at their data. The 1st layer, there’s a lot of reconciliation need to be done. We’ve helped capture a lot of revenue just from that early stage kind of misunderstandings between different platforms and how even you track occupancy or move ins move outs within different facilities.

But in terms of generative a lot of the use cases we’re seeing truly are that human in a loop quicker access to data when it comes to, hey, check out what’s the insurance details of a certain resident. A lot of finance information, a lot of sales and marketing, just quicker access to those data points instead of looking at a report for everything.

And we’re also seeing a ton, especially with operators operating in multiple states of that regulatory review, being able to look up internal compliance measures, be able to compare those against state regulations and do so in a really quickly quick manner. Ensuring your internal compliance and running the gamut from accessing internal data to [00:32:00] access accessing corpuses of documentation, knowledge management, another popular tool that we started to deploy our resident facing, really help capturing.

What residents are doing in terms of activities help suggesting other activities to them, giving them an opportunity to interact with a lot of the policies and engagement opportunities available at different facilities. And I think 1 of the really cool features that both your employee facing tools and resident facing tools allow for you is to really gauge.

What questions are being asked and help shaping your services, your offerings, and the way that you interact with both employees and residents through that process. The kind of telemetry you get when you see the way employees want to consume data, seeing the questions and the requests being asked from individual residents really helps shape your services and has an added benefit of help fine tuning the models so that large language model can really understand the context of your industry and your facility a little bit better.

Thank you Sanjeev coming back to you. I [00:33:00] again, this is another question that I know I’ve had clients come to me with. I’ve had clients say, this technology is great and it’s exciting, but we still have mandates. We have certain regulations that we have to deal with. So how do you overcome that in certain states?

That’s a great question, Amber and, some of this is really focused around minimum staffing requirements for nursing homes that participate in Medicare and Medicaid. And like you rightfully said, it is straight driven. It’s not federal. And I think it was proposed in September that the final rule will actually require nursing homes to provide a minimum of 3 and a half hours of nursing care per resident day.

And that includes things like, half an hour of care from a registered nurse for resident day, and at least 2 and a half hours of care from a nurse aid for resident day and so on and so forth going to have things like 24 by 7 onsite are in services. Coming back to the question, how do we overcome this?

Ruling and how do we apply our robotic solutions to this. [00:34:00] So really these mandates don’t overcome the reality of what exists today in communities. And the reality is that you have overburden nurses and you have very costly staffing agencies out there. And I don’t think anyone is new to this concept of, agency rates and availability and turnaround times given the severe shortage of nurses.

I think I was reading the other day. Some nursing schools are trying to turn out that, nurses even faster, taking like a 2 year program and kind of condense it into 9 months. I don’t know what, what that does to the quality of the education that they’re getting, but, we just feel like our solution provides an alternative to what’s out there today, which isn’t great.

And it’s really hurting the operators. We’re simply offering that alternative not to replace nurses. But to be that force multiplier or that supplement to the nurses the biggest problem that hello guard is solved is the burnout and the ability to alleviate [00:35:00] that burden on the nurses through verifiable data that we’ve seen in the communities.

If you rewind back 20, 30 years a nurse had to remember 10 things, maybe 20 things in today’s day and age, post pandemic, they may have to remember 100 things or maybe 200 things, right? You almost need a checklist just to remember, what you need to do as a nurse.

And the staffing mandates don’t change these problems, these prevalent problems in any significant way. If anything, they actually accelerate it or make it worse. Hello, garden, be care, are there really to provide that relief to existing and new staff by automating those non direct care related tasks.

Things like deliveries of medication, rounding, dictation, med passing. There’s, I can keep going on and on, but, these tasks typically take up, 30 to 40 percent of a nurse’s day. So when you talk. Nurse, mandates of 3 and a half hours of a nursing care per resident day.

You’re talking like, half of their shift, [00:36:00] right? We’re basically automating half of their shift. So that relief, really allows the nurse to be more productive. Reduces attrition make some happier, obviously, happier employees mean happier residents, right? We all know that. And that’s what we’re doing, right?

We’re not replacing staff, but we’re actually helping them be happier, be more productive. Reduce some of the the burnout and really make them more productive. Thanks for that Sanjeev. I know we have a lot of audience questions coming in, so I’m going to ask one more prepared question and it’s going to be both for Ryan and Jessica from different perspectives.

And then we’re going to jump to the audience questions after that. These questions are similar. They’re basically around how can we approach conversations about using AI? So Ryan, I’m going to ask you from the resident perspective, and I think probably residents board members could probably be similar if they’re skeptical or they’re concerned about the use of AI technology in their community.

And then after Ryan answers, Jessica, I’m going to have you answer that from [00:37:00] speaking to more of the C level at the community. So Ryan, I’ll get started with you. Yeah, I think it really comes down to a lack of understanding. I think a I, for whatever reason, being in the news as much as has been has gotten somewhat of a bad or scary reputation.

We’re talking about a little bit earlier on the staff side. And it’s really just about education and informing the resident. Lot of residents are surprised. And when we talked to them to learn that they’re actually already using a I and a lot of different parts of their lives.

If they’re getting recommendations through Netflix, there’s basic, specialized a I focused on that using it already. And so it’s talking more about it from the perspective of the benefits of the technology and not necessarily even leaning into the shiny AI portion of it. It’s a lot more about, this is going to make your life much easier, or it’s going to make your experience much better.

That kind of [00:38:00] conversation and just having that conversation. I think it’s super impactful. And I think, unfortunately, due to just preconceived notions of certain stereotypes. A lot of times those conversations aren’t had because we just don’t think that for whatever reason, there’s going to be that kind of understanding.

And so have the conversation. It’s super important. And you will be surprised at the impact it will have in changing perceptions. And, I agree wholeheartedly. I think communicating to the residents that so they understand what it is, right? No matter what form of AI, whether it’s a wearable or any of these other platforms, it’s just that if they understand, I think their level of anxiety comes down.

But one of the biggest challenges that I saw immediately when I came to semantics was that, A lot of people don’t question, they want to use it. You guys are all on this call because you’re interested in using it. It’s how do I do it? How do we actually put this into practice when I have all of these other barriers that I’m dealing with on a day to day basis?

My [00:39:00] role in, in terms of business growth for Somatics has been completely reliant upon the strategic partnerships that we have formed with management companies. Basically, we have companies all over the country that do remote patient monitoring management, chronic care management, to where you can bring a solution like a remote patient monitoring wearable, communicate the benefits such as hydration tracking, vitals tracking to your residents to provide them with a peace of mind.

It allows you to market the use of it, which is what, when people are choosing a community that they want to live in, sometimes that can be very attractive to people. It shows that you’re going above and beyond, but we come along and we can bring it at no cost to you because now we’ve partnered with groups.

That are billing Medicare for the service because this is completely reimbursable through Medicare and you don’t have any out of pocket costs. You’re benefiting from the metrics. You’re benefiting from the monitoring. So it’s really we’ve pivoted into [00:40:00] forming strategic partnerships to bring the solution to you.

To make it easy for you so your staff doesn’t have one more thing. They have to do one more thing. They have to learn one more thing. They have to manage and your residents can benefit. So that’s been a key part of our growth and the ability to get it out there in the market. So it’s been helpful for us.

Thanks. Okay, I’m going to I’m going to go through a couple audience questions, and then I do have a couple more to follow up with if we have enough time at the end. Jonathan, this is a question for you. I think you partially answered it earlier, but because you said the transcription accuracy is very high, but do you have a way to verify and validate that transcribed audio?

Yeah, the workflow is very simple. The text is captured at the robotic. Point and then that text gets transferred once the report is completed, the person presses, the process. What happens is we take that audio. [00:41:00] Transcribed in a text in through the cloud is where we process. Using going against a large language model, and it’s been tuned.

It’s not. Very important to I think this is a challenge. Transcribed Within the AI world, depending on the model that we’re working against, the processing time can be incredibly long and very unproductive. So we have a large language model focused on the content that you would have. We go very deep in the nursing care world with terminologies, medications, et cetera.

So we process against that. Model and come back to the robot presenting the report based on the data in the proper categories. And that the system learns it’s generative. So it’s learning. How do we respond? Because the. A nurse has the opportunity to make any corrections or edits. And our results have been in the 9597 and [00:42:00] after.

A period of use with an individual, the system’s learning. So you have a unique log in. We also with Tammy or with CC have a facial recognition camera as another means of validating the user. So the processing is against the model. The validation is against, um, the individual who’s taking the notes.

The nurse is looking at what came back and can adjust it. And the experience that we get when people see about 95, 97 percent of what they said is put in formatted in a, in the report that they’re going to need to create anyway. That’s the validation, right? The user. And the system learns the more often it does that.

Is that does that help? Explain. Yeah, I think it does for me. You guys can put in the chat. I know that we’ve been using the zoom transcription services and it is really accurate. It’s scary accurate actually. So it’s really interesting how this technology has continued to evolve to just become more and more [00:43:00] accurate than it used to be in the past.

I think it’s a question of tuning models to fit situations. It’s think about having a garage with. Everything like a tractor trailer, a fast race car. You don’t want to have one vehicle trying to do everything. That runs in tremendous issues with performance. So we’re very sensitive to that experience.

Thanks. This question doesn’t say specifically who it’s for but Jessica I think I’m going to direct it to you because this is something else I’m also curious about because I’ve had clients ask, how do you. Okay. Monitor your A. I. Outputs. And I think what the question means is who’s checking all this data and are you potentially liable if you’re not responding to me?

Yeah, so so just how I just mentioned sometimes it’s oh, my gosh, I don’t want to be liable. This data comes through and we don’t act on it. So for in those instances, there’s 2 ways. One, a lot of our like independent living communities, they just have a simple [00:44:00] waiver to say, Hey, we’re offering this to you through the community, but we’re not liable.

It’s just a simple consent form. We have plenty of examples of them for the communities that are like, listen, we really want to market this, but we just do not have the legs to be able to Have anything to do with it. That’s when I bring in my remote patient monitoring chronic care management partners.

They come in. They literally operationalize the whole thing. It’s so simple because all people are doing are wearing a band on their wrist. There’s no other infrastructure involved. There’s no cameras sensors that it’s the community itself literally has zero cost. Because it’s reimbursable through Medicare.

So the management company will build Medicare. They’re getting paid. They’ll build Medicare for managing it. But then they’re the ones who are establishing it managing it. And I think 1 more thing to note is that just because someone’s monitoring, someone’s remote patient monitoring or chronic care management doesn’t make them that person’s primary care provider or their specialist.

It doesn’t replace [00:45:00] that at all. It’s just simply monitoring people. That’s it. all. That no matter where they live at what area of care. So we do have some communities that are using it and an assisted sub acute type of level, or some people who want to and we have partnerships with groups that will also do that.

Depending upon the need, I assess that when I meet a group, just say, what are your capabilities? What are your needs? And what helps to fit the best? But that’s a way that doesn’t create any liability for the community. It offers the benefits. And it’s not that intimidating for residents to be able to bring it on.

Great. Thanks for that. Okay. So this next question is again, not specific to anyone, but I think Ryan, I’m going to give you the first chance to answer it. And if anybody else wants to join in, but any specifics on AI events or activities for communities. Is it events around AI for communities or is it AI using it [00:46:00] for events like what we’re doing with our platform?

Yeah, I think looking at, there’s a little bit more detail from Michelle. Just, are there events, activities like trivia, storytelling, things like that that AI could help support? Absolutely. So that’s exactly what we’re doing. And we’re actually going even a step further. So not only will we, use the AI to go through everyone in your population and say, here’s five activities.

You can implement, we’ll give you short plans as to what you, how to deliver that, and then even tell you any certain flags, like X person, be cautious because of this mobility issue they have, or here’s an adaptation that you might have to make to the activity because this person has poor vision impairment, and then I’ll give you suggestions as to what.

Adaptations can be made to accommodate that person. So it’s even going to that next year now. And so we’re working on really standardizing that and making sure obviously it works in every context, but absolutely. It’s a great use case [00:47:00] for great. Thanks. I’m Sanjeev. This question is for you. How do residents respond to robots being in the community?

I want to answer that, but I also want to answer the previous question. Amber, we’ve made it very easy for people to adopt in the community. And there’s simple ways to do it. So we’ve integrated chat with our robots, for instance. So you see a little smiley face and you can speak to it just like you would on your phone, right?

But it’s very simple and easy but in terms of And we’ve also done educational series For example, we partnered with MIT and their scratch program to allow people of any age to learn how to code using no code language How cool is that on a robot and make it do things, right? Obviously this could have, implications in K through 12, but it can also be used like in an activity session with an activities director.

But going back to your question about, how safe do people feel with our robots? The robots that we deploy in the communities are basically iPads on wheels. If you’re comfortable using an [00:48:00] iPad on wheels, then, and you’re comfortable with Alexa, then you’re going to be comfortable with our robots.

They’re not, that big, they’re 3 feet tall. They weigh 35 pounds. They’ve got 16 sensors on it. Very easy on the eye. People start dancing around it because it’s so cute. It looks like a little E. T. right? So that’s the easiest way to explain it. And it’s very non threatening very easy to interact with, and very easy to integrate it because it comes with an SDK kit, a software development kit.

It’s really easy to integrate it. Into any existing operation. Thanks. Yeah, and I’ve heard the same thing. I’ve heard that residents get really excited about the robots. They like to name them and even sometimes brag about having them at their community. Right. Steve, I’m going to ask you a question.

This is my own question. So hopefully you’re ready to answer it. But I think SkyPoint is such a cool solution. I tell our clients about it all the time. But I think some of the struggle and maybe people listening to this or who’ve read our white paper, they’re like. AI sounds really amazing, we’re still tracking [00:49:00] some of our data in spreadsheets, or we feel like we’re down here and AI is way up here.

So how do they get started? What’s that first step to start using AI in like a simple way? And how do they actually get to, to be able to fully utilize this technology? If maybe they feel that their technology culture is a little bit further behind. That’s a great question, Amber. And let’s be honest.

That’s something that we see often in the industry. There’s a lot of tech that accumulated from having all these different platforms and that lack of true kind of unifying force, and that’s why I think what SkyPoint is doing has been so impactful and driving so much value because we can really be at several layers of your data journey.

We can be that base layer. We have a several clients that we literally just ported off of that world where. They’re looking at PCC for their EHR data. They’re looking at Yardy for some other, operational data. They’re not able to get that true view. So we’re ingesting all those data sources together and getting you off of spreadsheets, getting you onto unified analytics, be it BI tool or leveraging AI to start asking some of those questions.

Cause the other [00:50:00] thing that we’re finding in with some of our partners that are a lot more advanced already have a lot of BI tools employed, might have a data warehouse that’s ingesting all their different data sources. Is that there are all these points solutions that can also be deployed and reduce the need for report for everything.

How much time do we spend paging through different Excel workbooks or drilling down to just get that one simple data point that we wanted to get 15, 30 seconds ago. So you can save development time from your BA team, building all these reports. You can also get that time to value, just accessing that single data point that you needed more quickly.

So yeah, to summarize, SkyPoint can really meet you at every phase of your journey. We can be your data architecture. We can also just be a part of your AI acceleration path. All right. Great. Thank you. Jonathan, I’m going to ask you a question and we’ll see how long this may be our final question.

And I’m sure this is again, something everybody is thinking about. So I’m going to talk to you about ROI. So how do you calculate ROI for your solution or any general advice you have [00:51:00] for calculating ROI for any of these types of solutions? I appreciate the question. And I actually sat on both sides of the table.

I owned a memory care community and I had to look at technology and what makes sense and along with many other things. So essentially ROI calculation is what do we do today? How much does it cost us to do that today? And then what can we do different and validate that we can do it and validate that we’re capturing what we expected, so that process to do that is collaborative.

And ideally, you want to have, and this is how we’re getting engaged with our opportunities where we lay that out 1st. There’s so many capabilities that we have. It’s almost trying to cost justify why you want to buy a phone, right? There’s so many ways that you can say, if that if I had a phone, I could do this out of the other thing.

So we put construct around prioritization of areas that we’re going to look at. So that process to determine ROI. It’s it’s. I’d say it’s not very glamorous, but it’s the [00:52:00] way it is, right? You look at, you walk in the shoes of the folks in the care side, and it’s also multidimensional, meaning it’s the care staff, it’s the administration, it’s the corporate side, so they all have views and aspects of what they’re looking at.

And that’s how we create the ROI model and determine the batting order, if you will, on how we would do rollout and feedback and monitoring. Yeah, and I think 1 thing we’ve heard over and over from all of you on the call today is how much time is being saved with a lot of this, these tools and also just how much more data you’re getting to just provide better care, better experiences for both staff and residents.

It is an opportunity to rethink processes to look at implementing. We’re talking not just technology. We’re talking about an introduction of something in a very dynamic and stressful situation or scenario. It’s so important. It kind of ties into the 2nd thing about balancing [00:53:00] how this gets introduced.

And so we have an adoption. We use there’s 3 faces. There’s the introduction of what it is and to sort out. Then the adoption phase, which is we determine what are the areas we want to tackle. So we begin the process of introducing CC into the environment. We have a great hands on boarding. Think about bringing on a new employee.

CC is like that, right? So there’s a onboarding process. And then we have the execution follow up. And, validation and as invariably will happen care staff. Somebody’s going to say, hey, what about doing this? For example, we can do the med pass piece. That’s. Very routine for residents, they may want to know more about that because there’s a certain aspect will really save some time for their day.

So we’re going to be responsive to that. It’s setting up that dialogue so that we can be attuned to the clients needs, but adoption. Acceptance and then ongoing, refinement adaption are adopting into [00:54:00] new areas or adding new areas of capability. But having those 3 elements in place are so important.

It’s not just about the return on investment, right? That’s a metric. Yes, definitely. But it’s about satisfaction of the staff. It’s about customer or client or resident, a patient satisfaction, right? Responsiveness. And ideally, we’d like folks to think that we are really helping everybody out. We have a wellness component.

So all of our interactions, we have a model that gauges the type of responses. And the idea is to create that sense that when I’ve left my time with Cece, I feel good about, or I have a clearer direction, or I understand areas that I need to get more information about, but it’s not about it’s overwhelming.

It’s about there’s a way forward, we’re in this together and the difference is Cece has a tremendous Source of information through the data, like through accessing the various things. You know that Steve talked about the answers are there. It’s just how to make it easy to come together at that point of care in that very [00:55:00] moment so that we give the best possible outcome for the care staff and for the residents.

Yeah, and just to add to that, I think even to take it up another level, this is about differentiation for your community. And as a provider, this is the direction that the world is going. And how quickly are you going to get there? Are you going to be an early adopter in the middle? Or are you going to be behind?

Because eventually residents, staff, family members, everyone’s going to be looking to move into communities that are doing this, these types of things with technology. So it’s exciting. I always say senior living technology is the most exciting technology field out there today. We were at the end of our time.

This has been really fun to do a live podcast. It was our first one. I want to thank all of our panelists. I want to thank our audience.

You guys had some really great questions. 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. If you enjoy [00:56:00] 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.