Raising Tech

Amber Bardon: Welcome to Raising Tech Podcast. I’m your host, Amber Barden, and today our guest is Gregory Petrossian. Gregory is the director of sales for SkyPoint and SkyPoint is an AI platform for senior living operators to help them chat with their data. So Gregory, tell me, what does that mean? What does it mean to chat with our data?

Gregory Petrossian: First, I’d like to thank you for having me on this podcast. Appreciate you and Parasol for having me.

What does it mean to chat with your data? Now that AI is everywhere in the news and on your phone and social media. What generative AI has done is provide a means of being able to have a conversation. With a chat agent, right? And previously that chat agent used to be very deterministic, like example, you’re going to a customer service website, or, you’re on a customer service call and you’re like, pressing 1 to go to this tree or.

I have to give it my name, and it’s going through a tree of thought. What it means to chat with your data is using a large language model like ChatGPT that understands the context of your business and your business data and your data systems, whether that’s policies and procedures that have been tucked away in SharePoint or a network drive, or you have your data systems in Senior Living like Point Click Care or Yardie.

UKG, Sage, and the list goes on having an easy way to ask what is going on in the day to day operations and query these systems. That’s what I mean by chat with your data and having a natural conversation with that agent.

Amber Bardon: AI is definitely becoming a big buzzword in the industry. I’m starting to get asked about this a lot from our clients and people wanting to know, what does this mean?

What’s the impact? What do I need to do? And just as a side note at Parasol, we’re working on a white paper about this that will be coming out for everybody. Can we just talk a little bit about. What does AI mean? If you don’t mind giving us just a general overview and then how does SkyPoint view AI and how do you bring AI to the industry through SkyPoint?

Gregory Petrossian: Great question. I think if we want to look historically, the definition of AI has changed earlier. What was AI? It was traditional machine learning models that were able to predict or help score or provide some sort of risk assessment on data. And you had to go through arduous data science and machine learning and training, and this was the days of big data.

So then a I went making predictions on. Here’s the data on what I have today and can AI help predict what’s going to happen tomorrow. So what we call  predictive analytics, when people are talking about AI today, it typically sounds like they’re talking about chatGPT or generative AI.

What is generative AI? We saw the growth and the popularity of large language models. These large language models are the engine to having these very natural conversations. It is the means of how we work with chatGPT. ChatGPT has large language models that enable it to have a natural conversation with us.

And then they’ve taken a corpus of knowledge or think of it like a library. They took the whole Internet. Fed that library of knowledge to this large language model that can have an eloquent conversation. And now, all of a sudden, I can ask questions about this library of knowledge of what’s been going on in the world about history legal.

Whether it’s legal work or different domains of knowledge. I can now have a conversation and it can help me do things. That large language model isn’t just about predicting the future now. It’s about help me do work in my certain work stream. Help me write this email. Help me write this procedure.

And so that’s the big leap we’ve made is now we’re not just trying to predict the future. We are actually having AI help in our day to day tasks. So that’s what generative AI is really helping us do. It’s not just being able to analyze what’s happening. It’s chatting with your data and doing something with your data.

And I think that’s always the missing piece for people is well, okay, what can it actually do? I think that’s also what’s scaring people, right? It’s we’re saying, Oh, is it going to take my job? How am I going to be able to pivot in this day of generative AI? And the term I really love to use and what Microsoft is making more popular is this idea of a copilot.

Copilot is there to enhance what you are doing as a human and how you can do it better, faster, more efficient. And so I think this era of copilots, this era of generative AI, something is going to help, whether it’s senior living operators or beyond, either work with their data and their systems, and then in addition to that, get their work done faster.

Amber Bardon: Yeah, I think you’re exactly right that people know it’s out there, but they don’t really understand what is the impact and how may it possibly change the industry. And I think, what we’re hearing a lot of is how can it help with workforce challenges, which is the big issue right now in the space is staffing challenges and being able to have alternatives to staffing inability to find people for staffing.

I don’t think that’s the focus of what SkyPoint does, but let’s talk a little bit more about what SkyPoint actually is. And how did you come to get into senior living?

Gregory Petrossian: SkyPoint as a platform is a means of providing, whether it’s senior living operators or beyond, the data and AI infrastructure, getting to the point of having a place where you can land.

And bring your data, unify your data and make it consumable for a large language model. So it knows what to do. And you can have that conversation on your business specific data. Again, whether it’s PDFs, audio files. System data that’s in tables and rows and columns. How do you make that consumable? You need a backend infrastructure to do that.

And I think in senior living, we’re seeing a leapfrog moment for operators because a lot of the operators I’m talking to lived in spreadsheets. They’ve never invested in building a data warehouse or a data lake house. Those terms typically go over their head. And so how do we allow that? How do we accelerate them to being able to have that infrastructure with clicks of a button?

How do we provide a fractional data and AI team to help them accomplish and tackle certain business use cases that are going to move the needle for them, rather than assuming every operator has the same problems and fitting them into a cookie cutter box. The way we approach it is really working in a design thinking process with the operators and saying, okay, where are the places you’re spending a lot of manual time and doing a lot of manual tasks.

Based on that, what data and what data systems can we bring in, how can we model and mold it, and then now provide a copilot experience or a reporting experience for a user that doesn’t then have to extract data into a spreadsheet or copy and paste data into a screen. How do we get them to actually making decisions and taking actions without having to worry about that back end process?

Amber Bardon: Can you just walk me through if I’m a nurse what does this mean to me? What am I doing differently than what I do today?

Gregory Petrossian: I think some of the use cases that I’ve seen in senior living or long term care is a nurse is having to wade through tons of different documents as they’re looking to admit a patient, let’s say or understand, what’s going on with this patient.

What have they done for the past week or what’s their care plan? What’s their meal plan? And then have to actually put those things together for the resident or the patient. And what the copilot can do can be the means of putting together that care meal plan for them much more quickly, putting together a rough draft.

It can look across the different systems, the chart notes, and typically you’re getting PDFs, whether it’s from the emergency care, like the emergency unit that they had to go see 2 weeks ago, or, hey, they’re getting care from outside our 4 walls, what happened without the nurse having to go look through all those different charts and summarize it for themselves. So how are we bringing this into their own workflow? Another thing we’re seeing is scheduling. if you’re scheduling the labor for who is working with what resident for the week. It’s also another thing a copilot can help with.

Amber Bardon: So just going back to your previous example on the admissions or just sorting through the data of what’s going on with the resident. I’m just imagining that what SkyPoint would do and correct me if I’m wrong, is they would have the ability to go to this AI tool and say to it, “Give me a history on Mrs Smith and give me the history of what led to admission” and then it would pull the data from all these different sources and essentially give you that little paragraph of summary of data.

And then the same thing would be, if they want to look back, maybe all our clients do care meetings, every morning or shift change meetings, they could say give me a summary of everything that’s gone on in the past 24 hours without having to go pull the clinical notes and look at the chart and pull the assessment.

Gregory Petrossian: That’s exactly what I’m describing. And I think in addition to that, think about the communication that needs to happen with the family and how can you more easily put that plan or what’s been happening and then communicate to the family more easily.

” Hey, help me write an email to the resident’s family”, or “Hey, a resident’s family asking about a policy or procedure, or what’s gone on. Can the copilot just write that quick response for me?” And so let’s increase that touch that we can have and that communication across all aspects of the care.

Amber Bardon: That’s pretty amazing. We’re all used to doing that on our phone right now. My kids ask me a question, I go to Google and ask Google the question and it comes up a generative AI and gives me the answer. So how does this work? Is it voice activated? Is it an app that sits on their phone or computer?

How does that piece work? And then my second part of that question is, how do you build this on the backend for a client? What does a client need to have in place to be able to take advantage of this technology?

Gregory Petrossian: Great question. So the way that end consumer interacts with the experience can be the choice of the operator, whether it’s working with chatGPT or what’s now Microsoft is releasing called M365 Copilot.

We can also build what’s called a custom copilot with Microsoft’s low code technology called Copilot Studio. And then finally, we have built our own product called our private copilot, where we can actually white label and deploy a web application with a custom URL for the operator, like copilotoperator.com, and it looks like one of their own applications in their environment.

You have different options for that experience, and there’s different licensing models that everybody has, so we just help bring the right experience and model to the operator.

Amber Bardon: So to go to the 2nd, part of the question, tell me what this looks like from an infrastructure perspective. Let’s say a client has PCC and Sage Intacct and OnShift and Paycom and Sherpa and eChoice Menu.

How is this all working together? Do you have to have agreements with each vendor individually? Just walk me through with this. Like, how do you build this?

Gregory Petrossian: Yeah, so what we provide and what our platform truly is all the back end infrastructure where data can be brought in and unified and if a customer has these relationships with all their vendors, they need to ask them for data access, and some vendors are easier, and some vendors are more difficult to get that data access, and sometimes you have to pay them money for that data access, and every vendor provides data in a little different way.

 And sometimes they have different options for getting to that data. And that’s where we help as the advocate of the customer. We say, we walk through and talk with all their vendors and ask these questions. Typically, our customers or operators don’t have the technical depth to even know what to ask for.

So we help them in that regard. And we’re building integrations with Many of the data systems that they’re familiar with currently and have worked with . As soon as you get that access, whether it’s through an API, some SFTP or you’re getting just CSV files in some way. We work to automate that data ingestion, bringing that data into that unified back end and what we have is a pre built architecture that plugs into that copilot experience all the different ones I was mentioning as well as we’re building and massaging that data that could be used for a copilot, or it could be used for reporting the way I like to explain it is you want to build your data warehouse or your data lake house these data structures in a way that can be used in different modalities.

whether it’s for generative AI or whether it’s for reporting. Build it once and use it across the different ways, whether you’re trying to explore data with reports or whether you need a specific answer, like you were saying with your Google search, or you need help with a specific workflow. So we bring all that and put it in a box and with clicks of a button as a customer purchases it.

We deployed that infrastructure specifically into their four walls. That’s what makes us different is we are an enabler for data, and we help accelerate the path to doing that because a lot of my background and experience has been building these things from scratch. There’s a lot of work you have to do to be able

to even get to the point of being able to bring data in the door and when we had all these different customers on one off builds, it was hard for us to manage and maintain that. So a lot of the value we provide is consistency in how it’s built and that infrastructure. So we can more cheaply provide support

and maintenance and break fix. We have a fractional team that can support the end to end data process that gets that data to the large language model or to the report. And that’s what we’re making cheaper and easier for operators to be able to compete with the larger operators that have the money to build these things from scratch or have data teams, we want to be the easy button for them to be able to get going on these type of efforts.

Amber Bardon: How many senior living communities are you currently working with

Gregory Petrossian: Communities? Don’t know the number, but right now we’ve got four or five operators we have been working with for the past year and a half, and we’ve got another five to ten operators that are on our pipeline. So I would say it’s still early days for us and I think it’s still very early days for generative AI, and we’re really working with the operators that are pioneering and leaning in. And I think that’s the difference is, sometimes I’m talking to operators, they’re like, Hey, give us to the T, the use cases and the things that this works really well for.

This has only been out for, 12 to 18 months. And so we’re working with you on tackling the use cases you are seeing and the pain points you have. And so those operators that are wanting to be more on the bleeding edge are the customers we’re seeing.

Amber Bardon: Do you ever see. Potential in the future use case for the residents themselves to have access to this

type of tool.

Gregory Petrossian: Absolutely. And I think, and typically what I’m telling operators is you want to solve this first internally on your internal data and with your internal teams before you start deploying and putting it out there in the public. An example I like to pick on is, I was seeing these memes of things like some Chevrolet dealership that had taken their customer service chat bot on their public website and was callingsome open AI API and people were using that chat bot as just like a free chat, GPT pro subscription and asking it things well beyond, “Hey what is the price of this model or what is the price of this car” or “hey, when can I buy it?” They’re telling you to do its homework, right? Because they didn’t put the right guardrails and the right context for it to be specific to what it needed for that dealership.

And so that’s what we’re doing first is there’s a lot of training and reconciliation and fine tuning we have to do to make sure that the AI copilot is reliably responding and what we have done with our product is effectively turn off hallucinations. And so you’ll get more. “Hey, I don’t have that answer” then you would with chat.

That’s going to make up an answer. And we go through a testing phase, very… I would say an iterative sprints or iterative cycles where we want to take a small piece of their data and use case, solve that first and then start building on that rather than boiling the whole ocean all at once.

And so it is an iterative process to get to the endpoint, and you’re never really done with your data. And I think that’s one thing that customers have to really grok whether you’re doing data warehousing analytics, business intelligence, AI, you’re always building something and iterating on it, and it’s never really done because your business is always pivoting and changing.

Your data systems are always changing. And so how can you take off? How can you bite off enough? Chunks that you can actually chew and get through and see value on the other end because if you never see business value on the other end is what really kills these projects. So we’re very meticulous and what we’re going to take on with our customers and operators because we need to see true business wins.

Amber Bardon: I think you’re absolutely right that this is definitely very new and, it’s really exciting to think about this being the future. Essentially that we’re taking the technology that we’re all just getting now on our phones and applying this to the industry at whole and it’s been such a huge gap.

A data analytics, data analysis has been such a huge gap in the industry for years and years. And there, there hasn’t really been a great solution. And I almost feel like this is leapfrogging some of the other things like just BI tools, power BI and things like that.

 This has been such an interesting conversation. I’ve definitely learned a lot. I might have some follow up questions for you off this podcast, but I do want to ask you if something I ask everybody on the podcast before we wrap up. This is all very new and it is the future, but what do you see beyond this even?

So after this becomes more commonplace and we start to see more and more operators adopting this, what do you think is next?

Gregory Petrossian: What I think is the future of AI and AI copilots is we’re going to see organizations having these AI copilots to be specialized within their business. You’re going to have a copilot that really knows your H. R. data and your H. R. processes. It knows your sales and marketing department really well, and it’s helping them. And so you’ll see business domains having these specialized copilots helping in their day to day, their analysis, their forecasting and that’ll become way more commonplace as reporting business intelligence has been already.

What we’re going to see as well as the next stage in what copilots can do is automated agents actually doing these tasks, having a level of autonomy of, ” can you work with this resident’s family on any of their questions” and it can go and scan. Oh, I see this email that came in and I’m going to respond based on the resident’s information, the context I have, and it’s going to be able to do that more automatically.

And so I think, again, that’s what’s really scaring people is that it can do more and more task oriented things on its own. But I think we’re pretty far away from that. And it’s the tasks. That’s really the grunt work that we don’t really want to do or should be doing. And we really want to lean more on the human touch and the human relationship in senior living, actually caring for the resident. Rather than the administrative back end back office test that we are grown to do.

Amber Bardon: Gregory, is there anything we didn’t talk about that you think our listeners should know? I think all of this is going to be really new to them. And I think a lot of people will be excited about this, but I just want to give you a chance to say anything else that you want to mention before we wrap up.

Gregory Petrossian: I think it’s an exciting time for operators to lean in to their data. I think it’s an exciting time just for health care in general, where we can finally realize what we’ve been saying for so long of being able to provide better care for cheaper price and to really be, value based in how we operate.

So, excited to see what the next 5 to 10 years holds for senior living at large.

Amber Bardon: Me too. It’s an exciting time for sure. We’re seeing a big shift in the industry and a lot of new technology and I think it’s a great time for senior living tech.

Gregory Petrossian: Yeah. And thank you again for hosting me. So appreciate it.

Amber Bardon: Yeah, so glad you were able to join us. And where can our listeners learn more?

Gregory Petrossian: Please visit our website, skypoint.ai. We’ve got blog posts. You can typically find my blog posts or my teams. We have a YouTube where we have tons of content as well, where we teach about AI, other Microsoft technologies, we love being thought leaders and mentors in this space.

We do a lot of free trainings as well. You mentioned power. B. I. we do a lot of free power. B. I. and what’s called fabric training and Copilot training. So check it out and hope to see you at one of our trainings or webinars.

Amber Bardon: Thank you so much for sharing that. And thanks for coming on the podcast today.And listeners, if you would like to give us feedback on this episode or find more of our episodes or give us any ideas or topics for future episodes, you can find us at raisingtechpodcast.com and you can find us on all the social media at Raising Tech Podcast. Thank you for listening.

Amber Bardon: Welcome to Raising Tech Podcast. I’m your host, Amber Bardon. Our guest today is Dylan Conley. Dylan is the Chief Technology Officer for LifeLoop. LifeLoop is a technology platform for senior living providers that provides engagement and operations functionality for the day to day.

Welcome to the show, Dylan.

Dylan Conley: Thank you. Thanks for having me, Amber.

Amber Bardon: Dylan, would you start us off by telling our listeners about who you are, what’s your background, what brought you to LifeLoop?

Dylan Conley: Absolutely. I’ve been in technology for decades, but really just entered senior living. So my background is more enterprise SaaS applications, spent years and years with large technology companies building software solutions.

So this was a big move for me just a few years ago. What really drew me to LifeLoop was the mission. The mission and the outcomes to be able to innovate and provide technology to an industry that affects the lives of so many people has been really just the greatest privilege of my career.

Amber Bardon: I’m always curious to ask people who are new to this industry, because I’ve been working in this industry for almost 17 years. So how do you find it? What do you see are some of the differences from your previous past experiences?

Dylan Conley: It’s interesting. I think that organizations that we work with, no 2 are alike.

The needs of the seniors, the needs of the staff, they’re always different. And so 1 might come to a technology company or setting and expect we’re going to build a solution that is so robust and simple that it meets everybody’s needs, and that is absolutely not true in this industry. Customization, flexibility, ensuring that every individual, regardless of the level of care, has their needs met is a fun challenge.

Amber Bardon: So let’s talk a little bit more about LifeLoop. Tell me about the history of LifeLoop. How long has it been around? What’s the founding story? Anything you can share there?

Dylan Conley: Believe it or not, our story started 25 years ago, our founders were the first to break computers into senior living and they found very quickly that it had a huge impact.

It was immediately clear. There was an opportunity and this was needed in senior living. So they founded IN2L aimed at helping seniors engage with specialized content covering all the dimensions of wellness. Over the past 25 years. We’ve continued to curate, collect, refine that content set so that our engagement solution has more than 6,000 different content items covering the needs of seniors in every care setting and handling scenarios that you would run into in just about any context.

About a decade ago, LifeLoop was formed or founded with the goal of helping families stay connected with their loved ones, helping families stay connected with staff. So it was really a communication centric platform, but through the years it’s evolved into a full operational platform with solutions for every department and senior living. Everything from activity and calendar management and maintenance, transportation and photo sharing. We’ve really built a solution that covers the needs of everybody. The 2 companies came together, LifeLoop and IN2L, a little over a year ago, and we were able to very quickly integrate both the products and the teams thanks to our shared DNA which is the mission.

Amber Bardon: Actually, I was going to ask you about that because I know that everybody is aware of the merger between IN2L or It’s Never Too Late and LifeLoop. And I’ve had clients asking me “What does this mean? What are the changes? What does this mean for us as a potential client or an actual client?”

So can you just talk a little bit about how that partnership works and any changes or integrations down the road?

Dylan Conley: Yeah so we’ve already integrated the products to the degree that you can get everything that each company provided but now you can get them together. It means that our robust content library that was through IN2L only available in pre packaged hardware solutions is now available through the App Store Play Store in the LifeLoop app. It also means that we can bring the content, bring the engagement to different areas of the daily senior living workflow in new and innovative, creative ways that wouldn’t be possible without the two solutions all part of the same platform.

Nobody has lost anything. Nobody’s going to lose anything. This has allowed us to bring just a tremendous amount of value to our customers in addition to what we were already providing.

Amber Bardon: Thanks for sharing that. Can you talk a little bit more about what does LifeLoop do specifically? Can you tell me about what are some of the key differences between LifeLoop and some of the other platforms on the marketplace today?

Dylan Conley: Sure. So specifically LifeLoop provides daily senior living workflow platform that assists in all of the day to day activities. Our content, our engagement system is really our biggest differentiator in that we have been perfecting this over the last 25 years. And we still to this day have a large team dedicated to curating

and highlighting content so that every month there’s fresh new activities for residents to take part in. Never a dull moment. Never an experience of “Okay, I’ve done it all. What more can I do with this platform?” It never happens because there’s always something new. On the operation side, staff operations, our platform handles messaging communication, whether it be between families and staff, families and residents inter staff communication.

Mass emails, notifications to the community and into families. Our messaging platform is really the core of the platform. And then the heartbeat is the calendars and activity management. We have built a robust activity management framework into the product so that you can facilitate and automate the day to day.

Everybody’s on the same page. Every resident and family knows at a glance what’s  planned activity, attendance tracking registration. And everything you could imagine that would go with activity management. In addition to this, we have transportation capabilities, maintenance capabilities, so that a resident can request help in their apartment. Photo sharing, digital displays, and so we tie it all together with the ability to showcase important information in strategic places within the community, whether it be what’s on the menu near the dining hall, what’s the agenda today in a recreation room?

All of that information available from within our platform. You can display in digital displays throughout your community. Now that’s just some of our key features. We do a dozen or more different things with our platform.

Amber Bardon: I want to just reiterate what you said because that is an important distinction between LifeLoop and some of the other products out there is that not only are you a resident engagement platform, but you also do the staffing side, which is really unique. I don’t think any of your competitors also have the ability for staff to use the tool and use the system.

Dylan Conley: It is the content, the engagement that is our key differentiator and not just that you can do the 2 with 1 platform, which does bring a tremendous amount of value to just 1 less system that you need to worry about learning and maintaining, but it allows to integrate and weave the content and the senior engagement into the day to day and in creative ways that others just wouldn’t be able to do.

Amber Bardon: So walk me through that a little bit. Let’s say I am a staff member at a community that has LifeLoop implemented and all the different modules and aspects you talked about. What does that look like for my day to day workflow?

Dylan Conley: One example is we have the ability to bring our music content into the displays. And so what’s typically a static digital display that’s presenting information in a slideshow format. Now you have accompanying music, and so you can fill the room. You can essentially provide overhead music from our content offering, which is specifically curated to the needs and the tastes of folks in senior  living directly within your display.

Amber Bardon: So let’s talk a little bit about the industry specifically. So what are you seeing from LifeLoop’s perspective?

What are some of the key challenges that the industry is facing as well, specific to communities? And how is LifeLoop helping to solve those challenges?

Dylan Conley: I think there are a few big challenges that we hear from our customers over and over. Just ubiquitous problems in the industry and hearing that feedback has driven the direction of our product.

We take a customer led approach to product design and and strategy, but to answer your question directly, the 1st problem I would call out is staff turnover. I don’t know that I’ve met a single operator that isn’t focused on improving staff retention. It’s a tremendous problem in the industry today . So our products are built to save staff time and to empower them to do their best work. These are some of the most talented, hardworking professionals I’ve ever met, really a demanding job. And so to  save them time is a meaningful thing. We’ve long held the belief that the key to improving staff retention is reducing burnout. Studies have shown in the vast majority of cases, burnout is cited as a key reason for leaving a community.

These staff members just don’t have enough time to provide the residents with the experience that they wish to provide. And it’s unfortunate. It’s that they can’t meet their own quality standards, which leads to burnout. Some of our most innovative customers approached us saying we’re observing something.

We think that we’re seeing longer staff retention, the longer duration of employment on average. We’ve seen that since rolling out your system. Can you validate that? Do you see in your data that’s true? So we dug in. We looked at the data. We found that on average. Length of employment or length of activity within LifeLoop is 31 percent longer than the average length of employment in senior living.

So this is a pretty big difference, but the data is very clear. That when staff members have access to LifeLoop, they stay employed at least 31 percent longer. And when you consider the costs of onboarding new staff and potentially using temp workers, it’s really a significant cost savings.

Amber Bardon: That’s really fascinating. How did you guys get that data? Did you do surveys? Did you ask the HR teams to provide that information?

Dylan Conley: In product data, we looked at when did the staff user first become active?

When did they start using the system, all the way through to when did they stop, when did they become inactive. On average for each staff user of our application was 31 percent longer than industry average.

Amber Bardon: Congratulations. That’s an accomplishment.

Dylan Conley: Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. We’re very excited about that.

Amber Bardon: Let’s talk a little bit about the technology market in senior living. I always say that I think senior living technology is the most exciting technology field because it’s such a  huge area that’s really been ignored for a really long period of time.

So there’s so much innovation happening. So many new vendors coming into the space. What’s your assessment of that?

Dylan Conley: Yeah, so there’s really 1 thing that I’ve been hearing a lot over the last 18 months or so. it is that there are a lot of technology providers in this space. There are more than 300 providers that I’m aware of, that the team has analyzed, we’ve looked at capabilities.

Just understanding the technology landscape and the vast majority of those 300 providers have just one capability in their product or said another way, their point players. I see the technology landscape and senior living has fragmented, made up of hundreds of point players. And as a result, a lot of our customers come to us frustrated.

They try investing in technology, but now they’re stuck with numerous systems that don’t talk to each other. This exacerbates an already overwhelmed staff who now has to maintain all these different systems, each with their own  idiosyncrasies, each with their own learning curves. And making the staff retention and burnout problem worse and so essentially undoing the positive intended effect.

A very small minority of providers in the space have 5 or more capabilities where your typical senior living community wants to automate or digitize dozens of different workflows. A very small minority who do more than a dozen capabilities like LifeLoop. I think in summary, my thought is that I don’t see having a landscape

so fragmented is scalable in the long term. I see point players only really thriving. With investments and integration or with M&A with mergers with other point players or expansion of the tool set.

Amber Bardon: Yeah, I completely agree with you. I think definitely the vendors that can figure out how to integrate are the ones that have the best long term solution, because we really moved to a place where  best in breed is what everyone’s looking for.

We’re moved away from the old days of one system doing everything. And, we definitely hear that a lot from our clients that having 10 different passwords to things and systems not talking to each other is such a huge challenge. So I’m really agree with you on all

of those comments.

Dylan Conley: Yes, that’s right. And it’s more and more of our customers are asking for integrations and that’s why a big focus for us over this past year has been building APIs to support open synchronization with any system as well as SSO. So then instead of having to maintain passwords and usernames across all of your different systems, you have one set of credentials and it flows through.

And we’ve been getting really good response from those capabilities.

Amber Bardon: We have run into some challenges with the SSL with the Microsoft MFA credentials, but that’s probably a different topic. But let’s talk a little bit about the future. So what do you see are some trends that are going to be happening in the industry?

And I’m specifically curious. How do you think AI is going to fit into that? That’s a question that I get a lot. So I’m interested to hear your take.

Dylan Conley: Yeah, so AI is here to stay and generative AI in particular, I think will have a major impact in the next year or 2. It’s happening now. The interest is there now, and it’s happening quickly.

I think there are a lot of really time consuming tasks that. are going to be automated as technology providers master the APIs provided by vendors like open AI, the makers of chat GPT, just as one example, where these sophisticated systems can create what one of us could with nearly the same quality, but in a fraction of the time.

 What’s even more exciting about this is they can be trained to meet very specific criteria. Whether it be corporate objectives or industry level best practices. And so highly tunable, accurate automation systems, I think, is going to do a  lot to reduce the dependence on the few highly tenured staff who are most in demand in the community who have been there longest and understand what’s the daily operations and the residents better than anybody’s will take burden off of them, which will in turn improve retention of the folks that are most crucial to the success of the operation.

Amber Bardon: Is there anything that LifeLoop is working on that you can tell us about that’s going to be coming out in the future.

Dylan Conley: Yes, and now I’ll just say that we are working on some big things that make use of artificial intelligence, generative AI in particular, to meaningfully reduce time in a very measurable way.

I can’t say much beyond that. Unfortunately, but I will talk about something that is coming very soon here, just in the next month. And we already have this in some of our more innovative customers hands as they pilot it. We’re preparing to launch a product that we call LifeLoop Insights. With this product we are empowering and arming  operators with all the operational data so they can understand at a glance how their communities are performing operationally and how their residents are engaging.

So we provide KPIs that serve as leading indicators. So operators know where risk is emerging within their system, where to invest their time and attention. We also provide actionable insight. So it’s clear what steps to take with each community to improve performance. Front and center, plain English.

Here are the recommendations of steps that you can take to make your communities more efficient and help your residents engage better and more holistically. And we’ve seen that when done right, there are very real, very measurable wellness outcomes, wellness improvements. We use data, not just from within the system but across the industry and broad.

So we have thousands and thousands of communities that use our products today. And so we see the data we’ve analyzed what does best in class look like in the industry and where are there opportunities for improvement? And with LifeLoop Insights, you have the ability to compare your community’s performance, not just to other communities within your system, but across the industry and broad.

Amber Bardon: Sounds really exciting. looking forward to learning more about that in the future. Dylan, thank you so much for joining me today. Is there anything that we have not covered, or any words of wisdom or advice that you would like to share with our listeners?

Dylan Conley: I really appreciate your time.

Thank you. Great questions. I think the only other thing I’d say is this is an exciting time. We’re seeing evolution and technology unfold in front of us. It’s not too different from the birth of the Internet, the birth of the cloud. You might call this the birth of generative AI, but I prefer to say we’re entering the age of intelligence.

And just like all other evolutionary events in technology, the systems and operational practices that took us here from where we were yesterday, they’re not going to take us into the future. So my advice, words of encouragement is to embrace this change. It’s the innovators that will differentiate their products by being the first to harness this new technology.

Amber Bardon: I love that. The age of intelligence. You should coin that.

Dylan Conley: Thank you. Maybe I’ll, maybe we’ll go for a trademark.

Amber Bardon: Dylan, where can our listeners find out more about LifeLoop if they’d like to

learn more?

Dylan Conley: Yes. We are LifeLoop.com. If you go to LifeLoop.com right on the homepage, you can fill in your contact information.

Our phone number is there as well. We’d love to hear from you and we’d love to see if we can help bring value to your communities.

Amber Bardon: Thank you so much for joining me today, Dylan. It’s been great having you.

Dylan Conley: Thank you, Amber.

Amber Bardon: Listeners, if you’d like to find more Raising Tech podcasts, or you’d like to share any feedback with us, or you have an idea for a future episode, you can find us online at RaisingTechPodcast.com and on social media at all of the same handles. As always, thank you for listening.

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Amber Bardon: Welcome to Raising Tech podcast. I’m your host, Amber Barden and today my guest is Joel Cormier, who is the Director of Product Development at Viconic Health.

Viconic health is the maker of Viconic Fall Defense technology. Welcome to the show, Joel.

Joel Cormier: Thanks for having me, Amber. I appreciate being on and hello to your listeners.

Amber Bardon: So Joel, this is my first time learning about Viconic Health. So why don’t you give me a little bit of background and introduction about the company?

And then let’s talk specifically about the fall defense program.

Joel Cormier: Sure. Fall defense is a patented impact protection technology. It’s a new intervention in senior living using proven technology that was originally developed in automotive and military and sports for passive impact protection systems.

And the simplest way to really describe it is it’s fall protection under your feet. As we know in long term care, we’re well aware that falls happen despite everyone’s best efforts to prevent them and detect them fall defense is really a new intervention that we’ve developed for all senior living environments and specifically what it is it’s the flooring underlay is the best way to describe it. So it lies between a flexible floor covering and a rigid sub floor. reduces the risk of injury when someone falls on it. So it’s not like an airbag, which would be an active system. It’s a passive system, like a pad that reduces the risk and severity of fall related injuries.

The other cool thing about it, it’s a hundred percent made in the United States and engineered and produced right here in Metro Detroit.

Amber Bardon: So I know there’s a lot of different types of fall technology out there. This is definitely a growing field. A lot of those technologies are categorized as preventative or monitoring or after the fact. So how would you categorize this type of technology? Does it help prevent falls in any way? Or is it really after the fall occurs that the benefit comes in?

Joel Cormier: Actually, it’s neither. It’s really a system that is there because falls do happen, so it doesn’t prevent the fall, it doesn’t detect the fall, but what it does is reduces the risk of impact injury when you do fall.

Amber Bardon: Can you just explain that to me a little bit more.

Joel Cormier: Levels of impact protection are required in certain areas like automotive and military. They’re actually mandated, for instance, by the Federal Highway Traffic Administration for reducing risk of critical injuries and crashes.

Any hard point in a vehicle , has some padding or protection in the event you impact it. It really is like a helmet pad or an absorber that’s in between you and whatever the hard surfaces that presents that risk of injury.

Amber Bardon: What are the requirements? Does it raise the floor level? How does it work with a wheelchair or a walker or something like that?

Joel Cormier: The interesting thing is that there are no requirements for floors in long term care or senior living environment. Whereas there are federal standards in automotive, sports and military that require that those surfaces be padded or compliant to reduce the risk of injury. ‘Were developed technology that’s on over 65 percent of cars and trucks and 75 percent of ground combat vehicles, along with sports helmet liner systems.

Really the way it works is that it lies in wait and is there 24/7 to reduce the risk of injury when you do fall. With our experience in automotive and military and sports impact protection, we were keenly aware that rigid surfaces represent a risk of impact related injuries wherever we live, wherever we play, wherever we age. In 2015 we became a finalist under the Head Health Challenges 2, which was actually sponsored by the NFL, GE, and Under Armour, was actually on the 2016 Super Bowl because we were working to build a lab and develop a superior turf underlayment system.

To reduce the risk of concussion and injuries in sports. So that’s really how we started developing our underlay system. But we really identified an unmet need in senior living because the concrete and rigid sub floors are so rigid and long term care and even in aging in place and residential environments with just the floor covering that they pose a substantial injury risk.

And so during that development work. Carpet and synthetic turf manufacturers that we started interfacing with are the same ones that produce floor coverings. And I want to really be clear in this, that the floor coverings are not the problem relative to reducing the risk of fall related injuries.

They’re actually an essential part of the solution because floor coverings. To get back to your original question they’re just doing what they are engineered to do. They provide essential traction, cleanability among other, vital functions and the flooring manufacturers, they really do an incredible job of developing functional quality and aesthetically pleasing goods to cover these rigid sub floors.

Through our collaborations, I’ve developed many friends in the flooring industry and their support was really essential for us understanding how floors work. And, floors also need to support mobility. Some efforts in the past were made by others in an attempt to develop underlayment systems to reduce the risk of injury, but they were either so squishy that they actually created mobility issues.

Or they were so hard and inefficient that they really didn’t substantially reduce the risk of injury, if that makes sense. Rigid rubber products they may have a little comfort, but they don’t really substantially reduce the risk of injury. Whereas soft foams may be able to absorb injury reduce injury risk, but they create mobility issues and they’re squishy.

So we really applied our expertise from our work in other industries, automotive, military, sports to develop a low profile system that supports the mobility and healthy aging. So you really don’t know it’s there it’s firm and stable yet when you fall on it, it’s capable of deforming and reducing the risk of injury.

And and we patented it and now we’re bringing it to market.

Amber Bardon: Is your ideal scenario to install this flooring in the entire community, or is it generally specific to just the resident room, or how does that work?

Joel Cormier: Our initial installs have been initial individual resident rooms to date but we have had more and more interest moving into 2024 and entire communities or memory care wings or AL wings or skilled nursing facilities.

Those are the 3 levels of long term care that seem to have the most interest. Certainly there’s a preventative benefit and independent living as well too. And those type of long term care settings, AL, memory care, skilled nursing so that’s where we primarily have seen it in our initial installs have been an individual rooms, but falls can happen every anywhere.

And based on the research falls primarily occur in the bedroom or in the bathroom or somewhere in between. But, trip hazards and other things can create a fall just about anywhere within a facility, or building or home. So it just makes sense to be conscious of where your falls are occurring and, protect those areas specifically and other areas if you’re able

Amber Bardon: Are you focusing on senior living communities or are you also able to install this in someone’s home if they live independently? And if you have installed in some senior living communities, how has it gone so far? Can you give us any case study results?

Joel Cormier: Yeah, that’s great.

Our first applications have all been long term care facilities, AL, memory care, skilled nursing, and really, since we’ve brought it and made it available to the market the warm welcome we’ve received from providers, caregivers, gerontologists, researchers, designers, architects, and installers has really been amazing.

We have a 26 page white paper available on our website with the details and the science between how Viconic works, how it supports mobility, ambulation, walking, wheelchairs, motorized wheelchairs, yet it’s capable of deforming to reduce the risk of the fall related injury on our website.

So I encourage anyone if they want to geek out there’s 26 pages of science there. And it also includes the data from our beta sites, and some of our pilot partners on the actual fall data from the rooms with and without the iconic system so iconic was installed and select rooms. They put their highest fall risk patients in those rooms and then we compare it to the rest of the facility that may or may not have, high risk patients and thus far the providers have been very pleased with the the outcome.

Amber Bardon: Joel, is there anything that you are working on that will be released in the future that you are able to share with our listeners?

 Joel Cormier: falls happen at home as well. And so we’ve begun our effort to launch Viconic At Home.

The vast majority of seniors currently are aging in place and prefer to age in place as long as possible before making a decision or having to move into a long term care facility. For seniors aging in place, incorporating Viconic into a remodel or even a new build just may make more sense for them.

And 1 of the things that our product can do in addition to reducing the risk of injury is reduce things like trip hazards, that can cause a fall like rugs. Because our product does provide some comfort underfoot and it does have an R value, so it does provide, some thermal insulation.

And so some of those things that you might have, a sink side mat or a bedside rug that could promote a fall can be eliminated when you put the Viconic in there. So we’ve just really started to develop a network of preferred certified aging in place. Professionals that are focused on assessing homes and their conditions and ways that they can be modified and improve so people can age and live their best life at home.

And also along with that, working to develop a network of preferred remodelers and installers and, potentially new builds as well too. We also love the greenhouse model, the small home model. Where you have multiple residents occupying a residential home and an assisted living or memory care type application.

Amber Bardon: So I know you mentioned earlier that there are not any requirements to installing this, but I imagine there’s some type of cost to bring up the floor and put this underneath. So what would a community need to know that they would need to change or do from an infrastructure or investment perspective for an install?

Joel Cormier: One of the things that we engineered the product for was ease of installation. So it is a floating system, so it can go over just about any rigid surface that needs to be protected with very little surface preparation. Basically, these panels are modular, they stick together you cut them with a box cutter or a zip tool to the periphery of the room, and then you conventionally install a flexible floor covering over the top of it.

 Because the product is a little bit under a half of an inch in height, we had to engineer a transition for it, which we also supply, so [00:12:00] it’s a sloped surface that integrates with Viconic, so you can get up onto it from a surface that does not have Viconic. So that was one of the developments that we have.

With that increase in height, you have to consider door jams and other things within the space. But it’s all things that are considered in, any remodel or new build. Most providers have been looking at it in the scope of when their current flooring needs to be replaced or they have a room turn.

That’s when they’re considering installing Viconic, and it can be installed very quickly and efficiently within that time period. Certainly we’re looking at more new builds and more construction in long term care. But, that’s going to be a little bit farther down the road for us, given the current environment, which has been a difficult environment to launch a new product and to say the least.

Amber Bardon: Yeah, that’s what I was thinking as you were speaking that this would really be ideal in a renovation or new construction scenario. So you can get it. I imagine that the install is much easier to do and more cost [00:13:00] effective in that scenario.

Joel Cormier: Yeah, it’s actually the easiest in a new build when you don’t have to tear up an existing floor covering you’ve got nice clean surfaces to work with, and you can finish it and you don’t have the reinvestment of a new floor covering but thus far the feedback from the installations have been very positive, people really don’t know it’s there which is one of the great things about it is It’s just invisibly supporting healthy aging and in person center care.

Amber Bardon: I know that your company has a grant program. Can you tell our listeners a little bit more about that?

Joel Cormier: Yeah, so our ownership is very passionate about what we’re doing to benefit the lives of seniors, both in the United States and globally. We really expected to be farther along than we are, but we’re in this for the long haul.

And this has been a challenging environment for us in the midst of a global pandemic and staffing shortages and cost increases and cost of goods and services. But we’re prepared to, continue to invest and 1 of the ways that we’re helping make this product available is through the grant program that we’ve developed. And after two years of positive feedback from our pilot sites, we rolled out this program so providers could experience Viconic within their walls, starting mid last year. And under the grant program, we provide Viconic Fall Defense at no charge for two to three rooms.

And we work with the facility to support the installation. We work with the provider’s team, their preferred flexible floor coverings, and installers, and whoever their floor covering providers are. We train them up on the install and support the initial installation on site. And part of the collaboration with the providers is that following installation, we share

and compare the fall data from the Viconic and non Viconic rooms and evaluate outcomes. And by the end of this month, we’ll have awarded at least seven providers a grant. And be sharing that information and data with them and working to improve outcomes. Going into 2024, we’re likely to continue the grant program.

It is on a tab on our website. So if you’re interested, you can apply at www.viconichealth.com. We ask for some information and it’s easy to apply.

Amber Bardon: So can you walk me through what does the product look like? Do you have different design colors, different choices, other different looks, patterns, things like that?

Joel Cormier: That’s a good question. It’s an underlay, so you never see it. But it’s about 11 millimeters, which is 7/16ths of an inch in thickness. And it has an energy absorbing Cone layer and those cones buckle and collapse and are the energy absorbing layer that lies below a rigid load leveling layer, which is the layer that the floor covering the flexible floor covering attaches to that’s the [00:16:00] surface that a pressure sensitive.

Flooring adhesive is applied to that is used to attach the floor covering the iconic and it’s really that simple. The facilities can use the flexible floor coverings that they’re currently comfortable with and simply put by Viconic, beneath those floor coverings. And it provides, a level of protection that the floor covering itself is just not capable of doing.

So those panels, it comes in individual panels. There’s a overlap of one seam to another that attaches to one another with a pressure sensitive adhesive. There’s a release liner you peel away, and the panels are about five feet by about two and a half feet, so it does go down very fast on the installation side.

Then once the Viconic is down it’s very, it’s a conventional floor covering install over the top of it. Your average flooring installer, if they can install the floor covering and have  installed an underlayment in the past, should be able to install Viconic. So it’s fairly simple from an installation and execution standpoint.

But it’s really one system. We can tune the stiffness of our energy absorber up and down. We feel we have it optimized right now for most senior applications to reduce the risk of injury, across the entire aging population.

Amber Bardon: Is there any opportunity to put any additional technology into the flooring that could help detect a fall so that you would be able to have, both functions at once with this fall program.

Joel Cormier: We think so. We look forward to collaborating more with current suppliers of fall technology. Our product is a bit translucent. We do anticipate being able to maybe do some way finding from beneath the floor around the perimeter as well to help guide, people with cognitive impairments That might help them find the bathroom at night, or if they have vision impairments those are things that we’ve anticipated and we’ll be working on and, we’re here, we’ve collaborated thus far with, leading gerontologists, researchers, flooring manufacturers, and we want to work more with providers directly understand what their needs are and provide systems that that make the most sense for the residents and for their caregivers as well, too.

Amber Bardon: Joel, I’ve really learned a lot on this episode and speaking to you. Is there any words of advice or wisdom or anything that you haven’t shared yet that you would like our listeners to know about?

Joel Cormier: Yeah, I just want to say, that there’s been so much great work that’s been done on fall prevention and detection, but unfortunately, falls happen.

And we’re really working to fill this unmet need in this space. And we really appreciate the support. We look forward to collaborating with providers and, from a personal standpoint, my mom fell and broke her pelvis and her inner humorous a couple of years ago. And fortunately she was able to come back, but a lot of people don’t, if you’re over 65 and you break a hip.

There’s a 25 percent chance you’re dead within a year of that from complications of that hip fracture and traumatic brain injury is almost as bad. Stay as healthy and as active as you can. Use your muscles. Your muscles are your best padding and protection against the fall. That’s often times why we don’t break when we’re younger and we’re frail and have more breaks when we’re older, in addition to things like osteoporosis.

In your environment, remove trip hazards that could cause a fall. And lastly, we just ask people to look at the data that we’ve published and the science behind it. A lot of people in healthcare aren’t really aware of what is being done in other industries and the standards that are out there that are protecting a lot of us in our day to day drives to and from picking up our kids or, just playing sports or

playing on a playground, for instance. Just look at the science and, if someone you care for is at risk of falling, we, we hope to have a Viconic available in markets and ask that people, consider it going forward. But stay healthy, be well. And try not to fall.

Amber Bardon: Yeah, this is definitely a huge area where we’re seeing a lot of technology come to play. So I’m excited to see all these new vendors coming into the space. Old vendors getting into the space because this definitely is a prevalent issue and can cause a lot of major problems for people.

So thank you so much for joining me today, Joel, and I really enjoyed getting to learn more about your product. Where can our listeners find you if they’d like to learn more?

Joel Cormier: To learn more, you can reach us at www. ViconicHealth. com at the link that’ll be shared in this podcast.

Amber Bardon: Thank you so much, Joel.

Joel Cormier: Thank you. Have a great day.

Amber Bardon: And listeners, if you’d like to find more episodes, or if you have feedback on this episode, or if you have an idea you’d like to hear about in a future episode, you can find us at RaisingTechPodcast.com and Raising Tech Podcasts on all social media platforms. As always, thank you for listening.

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Amber Bardon:
0:07

Welcome to Raising Tech podcast. I’m your host, Amber Barden, and today my guest is the founder and CEO of Cubigo. I’m going to let him introduce himself. He is from Belgium and his name is a little bit difficult for me to say. Welcome to the show.

Geert Houden:
0:22

Hi Amber. My name is Geert Houden, founder & CEO of Cubigo.

Amber Bardon:
0:26

So nice to meet you. I’ve known about Cubigo for a really long time and I’ve talked to a lot of people at your organization, but this is the first time that we’ve met, so really appreciate you taking time to come on the show today.

Geert Houden:
0:36

Yeah , thanks for having me. It’s great to meet it Virtual <inaudible> . So yeah, thanks for having me.

Amber Bardon:
0:40

Tell me about the history of Cubigo. How did you come to found the company? This is the first time that I knew that you were from Europe, so how did you come to the US and get into that market?

Geert Houden:
0:50

So I started the company in 2011, personal story with my grandmother, like a lot of founders in this space. We started out in Europe more from a home care angle and trying to keep people in their own environments for as long as possible with the help of technology. When we first visited the US in 2015, we saw a big opportunity in residential care and senior living in general. First when we came here in 2016 and we first lived for one year in a Brookdale community just to understand the market and the ins and outs of the needs of the people within senior living. All that information experience that we gathered, we used to build a new product, the current Cubigo version, which was launched in the US in 2018 and that is still being used and now in different countries as well. We brought it back to Europe.

Amber Bardon:
1:38

What is your market segmentation or do you have a lot of clients in the United States and in Europe? And I’m just curious, is the senior living industry very similar there or is it different?

Geert Houden:
1:47

It is different. First of all, Europe, the home care market is a bit more developed so people stay at home as long as possible and when they’re not able to do that anymore, they go into more skilled nursing. So the retirement living segment is not as present as it is in North America. We do have 70% of our business coming from North America, so that’s the US and Canada. The rest is coming from UK, Europe, and South Africa. So basically we still see both markets, very interesting development, but the North American market is the biggest for us this moment.

Amber Bardon:
2:17

When you say home care is more developed, does that mean that people are using Cubigo in their homes?

Geert Houden:
2:22

They do, but it’s always initiated by the operator. So it’s that beyond the wall principle where you leverage the services that an operator already has organized in a building or a campus and use that to bring to people outside in a 10 miles radius or something like that. Cubigo is built with that in mind and that is definitely also something we see going to happen in North America, but it’s a bit more about already in Europe.

Amber Bardon:
2:45

I definitely have a lot of our clients looking into that type of technology. It hasn’t really taken off so far, but I agree with you that I think that that’s coming and I think there’s going to be a big push for people to remain in their homes much longer just due to the costs of some of the communities.

Geert Houden:
3:00

The cost is definitely an important point. The other one is the expectation of the end user consumer and the baby boom generation looks a bit different at senior living and we know that some of these people just never want to live there and that could also be a solution for them to just stay at home.

Amber Bardon:
3:15

From your perspective, what do you see are the major challenges that are facing senior living in the next few years?

Geert Houden:
3:22

Well, I think one we already talked about that’s the expectation level of the baby boomers. We also see more and more people walking in with technology and they expect from the operator that they can interact with their tools with the organization. On the other side, there is the labor challenge. So there is a lot of pressure from that perspective, and we believe that the expectation level plus the labor challenge can be supported, at least solved for a part with technology. The biggest challenge we see on that front is that a lot of our clients and prospects, they have a lot of point solutions because every department purchased their own application, their own digital tool, and now when everybody is working in a digital way, we end up with 10, 15 different point solutions. And so there is not enough integration, not from a user experience where you have to use all these different applications, but also from a data perspective for all the data is now in 10 different silos. We believe that in the digital transformation of senior living, going from point solutions to integration is a very, very important step.

Amber Bardon:
4:22

So I know that the resident engagement market has gotten a little bit crowded in the last few years. There have been some companies that have been out there for a while , CareMerge, which is now Icon, TouchTown. I know Cubigo has been around for a few years. How do you see yourself as a differentiator against the other products in the marketplace?

Geert Houden:
4:39

We cannot just be bold resident engagement because we have extended the platform with other modules that tap into for us overall nonclinical environment instead of just being in a silo of resident engagement. So one of the big developments we have done the last couple of years is the hospitality suite point of sale payment layer that is available for all departments to capture ancillary revenues, not only in the dining room but also billable activities, maintenance, housekeeping, transportation, and bring that all together for invoicing , with EHR , the financial , systems in the backend. And we have added the visitor management module, we have added different services like transportation, housekeeping, maintenance, so it’s more than just resident engagement and we try to integrate everything on the nonclinical side and integrate with the clinical side of the EHR and go to more integration and integrated workflows than just being in another silo.

Amber Bardon:
5:30

I think a big part of that, and it’s related back to what you were saying with the data analytics is integrations with other systems in the marketplace. And I agree with you, I think there’s a huge lack in the industry right now of centralized data and KPIs and it’s something that really needs to get addressed. I feel like the entire industry is really far behind other industries with being able to just have key data at your fingertips. So how are you addressing integration and data analytics through your platform?

Geert Houden:
5:55

So first of all, there is the integration with third party applications. We mainly focus there on the EHR billing and the property management solutions like PCC, Yardi, so forth. We do also integrate with the workshops , maintenance facility management platforms. Basically we integrate all that data with our set or own data through data lake. So we have a very solid data infrastructure in the platform that at least bring all that data together and to start not only provide that business dashboards and correlation between these data points, but that is also a starting point of smarter algorithms like AI that can see patterns in these data that we as human beings are not able to see anymore. Before you tap into that, I know AI is kind of a hype or a trend. Before you can do smart things with AI, you have to integrate and bring your data together otherwise impossible. And that is why we first want to go for integrated workflows and then put that layer of AI and all that .

Amber Bardon:
6:47

Can you talk a little bit more about those integrated workflows? What does that mean for a community and their day-to-day?

Geert Houden:
6:52

Since we have visitor management, resident engagement, point of sale, all running on the same platform, they share basically everything. Once you have integrated your EHR for a resident directory and all the residents are synced, this resident directory is available in all these different modules. When you have a visitor, a family member coming in through our visitor management kiosk and they sign in automatically, they are available in the point of sale when they go for a lunch in the community and we can keep the preferences of that family member as well. Once you are a family member using visitor management, you get an invite for the family app to keep in touch with the community. Once you sign up through resident engagement module for an activity and it’s a craft beer tasting of $20, that charge automatically flows onto your invoice. So we integrate all these different elements that we can. You are a prospect coming in for a tour, it’s integrated with our digital signage. So your prospect name can appear on the digital signage. Hey, welcome Ms. Jones . In our community, once you upload your menus in Cubigo, they’re available on digital signage and the app on the POS you can print them. So you don’t need to put all that data in all these different applications anymore.

Amber Bardon:
7:53

Many communities already have a lot of these modular solutions in place for point of sale or visitor management, for example. So what is your ideal client? What is the best use case for Cubigo? Do you intend to try to replace systems if they exist or do you think a client that is maybe is lacking systems are still on paper, which they exist? I’ve been to several of those communities in the last year.

Geert Houden:
8:12

The ideal client is one that is working on paper and is making a huge leap forward by going not burst through all these point solutions and then to an integrated platform, but just skip all that and go from paper to an integrated platform because then they have maximum value. It’s true that most of the providers and operators today have point solutions in place and then it’s either replacement or integration and both can work. We can also integrate with physical management solutions for example, but we do have our own module which is fully integrated. That gives you always more value than trying to integrate because integration is also a very interesting word. Everybody says they’re integrating, everybody says they have APIs, but in reality when you look at what they actually can do, it’s sometimes very disappointing or it costs a lot of money. And that’s why we believe that integrated platforms have a higher chance of success and just try to integrate with everyone and everybody.

Amber Bardon:
8:59

Definitely that’s true. I always advise our clients when they hear the word integration to really ensure they understand what does that mean? What exactly are the data points and how do those data points translate back and forth and how does that actually happen? Is it automated? Because I’ve had some vendors say they have an integration and it turns out it’s an actual CSV file that has to be manually uploaded.

Geert Houden:
9:18

Yeah. Another example is a maintenance request, right? You do a maintenance request and then we integrate with the maintenance team and we do that by sending them an email. Well , that is not an integration for me . An integration is you as a resident created ticket in Cubigo, it flows automatically in TELS or Worxhub. It creates automatically a ticket in there. When a technician in Worxhub or TELS changes the state of the ticket or has another question or additional comments, automatically that flows back to the resident interface with a notification resident can answer that goes back again and so forth. That is a real integration, not just an email that is solution to a team member.

Amber Bardon:
9:52

So Cubigo is offering solutions to several of the different types of systems that are needed for a community. What is your long range plan? Are you planning to eventually have more solutions that can meet all the needs, such as EMR someday. Can you share a little bit about what you see as in the future?

Geert Houden:
10:08

No , that’s a very good question because you can think about indeed broadening your product scope also in the clinical direction. That is a choice we made to not do so. We will not compete with the clinical and financial systems out there. We believe we are very complimentary and should integrate with them rather than replacing them. The strategy we will follow is twofold or we have two angles. The first is the technology innovation angle or product innovation, and that will all be around integration data and AI. We currently are working on a happy aging indicator , so it’s not a word for a wellbeing score , which takes all the data points that we have. And that is a lot because we do integrate with a lot of departments. I’ve come up with a very objective core for that particular resident. Not only that, we will also give, or the AI will give three, four recommendations, what to do with that person to get the score up so they can focus your efforts and your resources instead of just doing everything for everyone. So we believe that there’s the direction that we should go into from a product innovation perspective. The other angle is way more around business model and then we are back to the beginning of not only this conversation, but also the beginning of our company. We believe that there is a big group of people living outside the senior living community that also can be supported by services in that community. Not only services like coming in for a lunch or coming in for an activity, but also the social side and being part of a community, being part of a group of people while you still just live in your own box . And that beyond the walls a concept is so prevalent in the UK and Europe. Also the opportunity of being a global company, of course, that we can bring these best practices from one part of the world to the other one. And so the US, Canada is maybe not fully there yet, but I’m sure in the next five to 10 years that business model of beyond the wall memberships is coming up and if you have all the experience and the product build aren’t around that, well, we can be a very interesting partner for companies that are looking for that type of new business models.

Amber Bardon:
11:56

So when you think about the biggest challenges and threats facing the industry right now, do you believe that those are related to your long-term strategy?

Geert Houden:
12:04

They are. Again, workforce challenge will not go away. There is the aging of the population and will have to do the work with less people. And the only way to do that is being more efficient and the only way to be more efficient is technology. So there is a very clear hat with digital transformation, AI, the use of data towards efficiency, that is clear. The other side of the changing expectations of the baby boomers that want way more personalization, totally different approach of our service offering a different product, more technology support and so forth. Well , that’s the center of the platform. The resident is in the center. We have built everything from the perspective of the resident. The resident is not able to use the technology. There was always a team member or a family member that can do it for the resident, but we put the resident first. In the beginning 10 years ago, people said, you’re crazy. Older people are not used to use technology and now we are 10 years later or further. You know better than I do that the adoption of technology with this target group of like 65, 70 plus people is exponentially growing. And so by putting that from the start in the center, we have a additive edge and we believe that the threat of the baby boomer will not in senior living anymore, can also be in a way solved by offering these services outside the community, beyond the walls supported by this technology.

Amber Bardon:
13:16

What do you think a community should know if they’re thinking about implementing a solution like Cubigo? What should they consider in terms of preparation and what would be the biggest successes to an implementation?

Geert Houden:
13:27

At the same time, probably our biggest challenge today in selling Cubigo is that we are not selling to one department. We are selling to an organization. That means that you have to have your different nonclinical departments on the same page when you go from fragmented ecosystem of apps to an integrated platform because everybody has to has to tap into that platform with their department. So it’s a challenge and an opportunity if you are successful in that as an organization. And that’s typically driven by an operational leader, COO or VP of operations. If you’re successful in that, you have a way more streamlined organization. But to get everybody on that same page, it takes time and it , and there is , uh, a bit of change management and leadership that is needed to to do that. I would say that that is the , the , the most successful clients are the ones that are having the leadership and change management capabilities to bring the, the departments on the same page and go , uh, for a more integrated platform than they had before.

Amber Bardon:
14:21

I think those are definitely indicators of success on the community enterprise , uh, staff culture. How about from the resident perspective?

Geert Houden:
14:29

And so that is a , by the way, a number that we see growing every month , uh, almost, but the current adoption of, of our technology in let’s say an IL and independent living setting, which is still of course this sweet spot because you have , uh, a younger demographic that is a bit more used to technology is around 75%. So that’s pretty high. That means that 75% of the residents are actively using this tool to help them in their daily lives. The success there is that first of all, you have to make , uh, your , uh, your platform, in this case cubicle. You have to make it part of the daily life of the resident. Also the training aspect, that means we don’t do the training. We want the community to do that in a, let’s say a weekly iPad class or a weekly cubicle cafe or something, which is baked in into the, the work that the community is doing anyway. The same with the onboarding. If you onboard a new resident, this platform should be part of that onboarding. This is how we do things here. If you do that successful in a year time, you reach these adoption levels of 75, 80% and that means a lot more efficiency. ’cause if 80% of your residents is doing their service requests through the platform all straight with the different departments, instead of going to the front desk calling people, walking up to people and talking to people, that’s a lot more efficient. And then the people that have to deal with all these transactions can have more valuable time with residents instead of just sitting behind the PC and registering everything.

Amber Bardon:
15:51

When you say 75 to 80% adoption, is that independent living or is that community wide and CCRC independent?

Geert Houden:
15:57

That that’s independent. Living in assisted living, we see that dropping to like 50%, something like that. Sometimes a bit less . It depends of course also on where the community’s located, the , uh, average age and so forth. But on average, I would say 40, 50% in , uh, in ai .

Amber Bardon:
16:12

Thank you so much for joining me today. Where can our listeners find out more about cubi Go

Geert Houden:
16:16

Cubi go.com . We also have a very active LinkedIn page where you can find new customers, new people on the team, new product releases, all that kind of good stuff.

Amber Bardon:
16:25

Thank you so much for joining me today.

Geert Houden:
16:26

Thank you, Amber. Bye-Bye.

Amber Bardon:
16:28

And listeners, if you’d like to provide feedback on this episode or if you have ideas for an episode you’d like to see, you can find us online@raisingtechpodcast.com. Thank you for listening.

Amber Bardon:
0:07

Welcome to Raising Tech podcast. I’m your host Amber Barden and today our guest is Sanjeev Shetty, who is the co-founder of HelloGard Robotics. Welcome to the show.

Sanjeev Shetty:
0:15

Thank you Amber. Thanks for having me.

Amber Bardon:
0:17

Let’s start off with telling our audience who you are, what’s your background? How did you come to be a co-founder of HelloGard?

Sanjeev Shetty:
0:25

I spent 20 years in the telecom industry: AOL, Time Warner and Spectrum. After exiting Spectrum I wanted to get into healthcare because I decided that I wanted to do something completely different than telecom and I got into the senior living space working for providers and looking at various solutions such as aging in place for the state of Maryland. I was looking at all kinds of solutions related to falls, to safety, to engagement. After doing that for two years, I joined an engagement platform company and got to do that for two years, had a lot of fun and then decided that I wanted to get into the integration space. So I ran an integration platform as a service company. I did that for two years and then found my calling with robotics. I was always really passionate about it. I was passionate about AI and I saw the need for it and started HelloGard with my partner.

Amber Bardon:
1:16

And when did you start the company?

Sanjeev Shetty:
1:18

About a year and a half ago is when we started, but we really didn’t start to take off until later this year.

Amber Bardon:
1:24

I know that there are a lot of different types of robotics companies out there. It’s definitely going to be something we’re going to see more and more in the future. So tell me more specifically about HelloGard Robotics and what type of robots you have.

Sanjeev Shetty:
1:36

We actually consider ourselves a workforce automation company and robots just happen to be in our toolkit. You are right, Amber. There’s a lot of robotics companies out there. A lot of them are one trick ponies and others are trying to white label the robots that are out there. The way I see ourselves is we sort of start with the problem statement and then we apply robotics to it. So you know, the problem statement could be someone is down on the custodial staff and don’t really have a solution for it. So we find them the best in breed solution to solve for that problem. And then the same thing goes for healthcare. We’re building out a generative AI platform to solve for all the healthcare challenges that exist today in the market, such as outdated nurse call systems and not having 24/7 nurse call monitoring. And then the list goes on and on, right? You look at a nurse’s day, she’s spending 20-30% of her day doing note taking and things that are very mundane and tedious in nature. So we’re actually building out a platform called VCare Companion to solve for that problem. And then there’s a whole slew of other solutions we’re building behind that to address some of the issues that the hospitality industry is facing as well. I really consider ourselves more of a workforce automation solution company that just happens to be selling robots.

Amber Bardon:
2:46

Can you elaborate more on the nurse call solution? That’s something that’s really interesting to me because a lot of our clients are trying to find something more modern for that type of system.

Sanjeev Shetty:
2:54

What we’re building is really a digital twin. When you think about the nurse call system as it stands today, it’s really what I call a dinosaur. It hasn’t changed much in the last probably couple of decades, I should say. And there’s a lot of difficulty and challenges that come with it. It’s a very simple technology but doesn’t do a whole lot more than just being able to call a nurse. What we’re looking at is sort of a more comprehensive platform that can address all of the challenges that exist in a acute care setting or post-acute care setting, such as being a nurse’s aide , providing that continuous digital monitoring, being able to detect a fall, being able to differentiate between what’s truly an emergency and what’s not. And then the list is really long, it just goes on and on. But the way we’re building it is it’s from the ground up. We’re sort of working with partners that actually come up with the challenges and then we’re building generative AI algorithms to solve for it. A lot of the solutions out there just kind of throws up at the wall and see if it sticks. But we’re actually taking a very different approach to building out this platform and I think it’s going to be truly transformational when we announce this because it’s from the provider’s perspective and we have someone that’s running it that actually came from memory care and senior living has written several white papers on digital twins. So I’m even more excited to have that person run that company for me.

Amber Bardon:
4:13

Yeah, I completely agree with you. I was helping one of our clients pick a nurse call system for their new construction building and she was really frustrated because from her point of view, you know, she said we’re building this brand new building. It’s modern, it’s sleek looking and we’re putting in technology that looks like it’s from like 1960s with like the yellow pendants and the things on the wall. And so definitely that industry is really overdue for some major change and there is some small innovations happening in terms of some of the software and some of the tracking. But I think a lot of the hardware and a lot of the general concept of what those systems are has really not changed at all in years and years. Other hurdles or barriers around the regulatory or compliance side of that?

Sanjeev Shetty:
4:53

I think there’s always the HIPAA question, right? That’s on everyone’s mind and there’s obviously certifications that need to be had. And so I think we’re taking all of that into consideration. Amber, the truth is no one can do this alone, right? So we have partnered with the right folks who are a lot smarter than I am who are bringing all the pieces together and then the VCare companion is going to bring the AI layer on top of all these pieces that already exist in the market and bring a very cohesive, comprehensive solution that solves. So all the little nuances that are out there and makes it really affordable. If you look at it today, there’s all kinds of solutions out there, but they’re really unaffordable. There’s not a lot of margin out there. People are surviving by the skin of their teeth, especially post covid reimbursements don’t look the same anymore as you know. Everyone’s moving to value-based care, everyone’s looking at cutting operational costs. So we’re finding creative ways for operators, providers to adopt this technology, make it affordable and yet show ROI . So that’s really what VCare is all about.

Amber Bardon:
5:55

One of our clients who is a bigger client, they have 35 communities, they have about 3000 employees in senior living. I met with their head of HR and he said something to me that I always think about. He said, there’s 10% of our open positions that I will never fill, it’s just not possible. The workforce is not there and they’re out in California primarily so that’s even more difficulty with labor shortages. And so he said robotics is going to be the answer to this. So can you walk me through, in a future environment, what would a Senior Living community look like with your robots in place? Which components would robotics be doing? Can you walk me through a vision of what that would look like?

Sanjeev Shetty:
6:35

If you sort of distill the whole senior living industry, you can sort of break it into three buckets. You have your day-to-day operations, like your housekeeping, your grounds and all the stuff that keeps the community running, right? I call it the operations bucket. And then you got your dining bucket and usually that’s like the number two thing on your p&l for any Senior Living community. And then you got the healthcare bucket, right? Especially as you go into assisted living and skilled nursing. In each of those buckets, we have a solution. So let’s just take operations for instance. Everyone we speak to talks about the strain on the custodial staff. No one wants to go and do carpets 600,000 square feet of space. No one wants to go to the third floor and do it. They’d rather do more meaningful things like maybe disinfecting medical devices or doing laundry or something more meaningful like collecting data. So we actually just launched our first Senior Living community at Beacon Hill in Grand Rapids, Michigan this week. And Jeff, who’s the CEO there, I mean we have this great testimonial from him where he was like, listen, we know it takes 20 minutes for our custodian to clean a thousand square feet of carpet. This robot does like 28,000 square feet an hour and by the way it works seven days a week and we don’t have to pay overtime and it never calls in sick. My point is that the robots just take the operation space, it’s not there to replace human labor, but it’s there to reduce the strain fill jobs that are hard to find. And it’s really there to make the staff really upskill them . Rather than having them vacuum carpets and scrub floors, you’re now allowing them to sort of manage these bots and collect data and see how efficient they are and map the floors and it’s more meaningful to the staff. You increase your staff retention, you don’t need to go hire staff. The ROI is immediate. So that’s the operations piece. Let’s switch gears and go to the delivery piece. Same thing goes for delivery. If you just look at sort of the dining setting, no one wants to work the morning shift, no one wants to bus tables anymore. People are moving around. It’s a revolving door in the dining space, our robots are very unique in the sense we have automatic door openers. They don’t spill food. So we did a lot of due diligence and research before we pitched our wagon with the manufacturers. Beyond that we’ve also developed custom apps and gadgets that actually connect to the robot. So it makes it more efficient, like you know, click buttons and apps. We’ve integrated with POS systems, you really get a full service solution with our delivery robots. You were one of the first ones actually even integrate with the top three elevator companies. And if you talk to a lot of people, elevator integration is sort of key, right? Because the robots aren’t going up and down floors, then it’s really not as effective. So you know, that’s on the delivery side. And by the way, we have also introduced outdoor delivery robots that actually work truly autonomously. So no one has to drive them. So for example, if you’re in a setting and let’s say you’re in a cottage and you want something delivered late at night or some package delivered, we can deliver packages up to two miles away. So that talks to sort of the delivery aspect. And then of course we talked about vCare and how our robots are functioning in the vCare setting, providing that 24/7 monitoring, providing that peace of mind at night when no nurses around, especially in independent living when there’s an emergency call, there’s just a security guard. What do you do then? How do you bring a nurse in? We kind of address those three buckets. We’ve kind of found the best solutions for each of those areas.

Amber Bardon:
9:54

I think that there’s a huge opportunity, these are all needs that our clients are telling us that they have to be fulfilled through these types of solutions. But I’m curious, can you talk a little bit about what are some of the current barriers to some of these solutions? So for example, I’ve heard with the cleaning robots, if they can get stuck in a corner sometimes and no one’s there to get them out. I’ve heard concerns from our clients about some of the lawn care robots with are they going to run over someone’s cat or something like that. So what are some of the barriers and what are you doing to address those?

Sanjeev Shetty:
10:22

Yeah, those are great questions, Amber. We’ve spent the last three months overcoming all of those barriers. In fact, a lot of our larger clients have tried just about every cleaning robot out there and they came back to us saying “we want to go with your solution just for that reason” because we made it a point to find the best of breed solutions and our robot actually has a 3D lidar. What that means is that it just is smarter. It can see dimensions in 3D. So if there’s barriers, it doesn’t get lost, it works in tighter spaces, it’s got an Nvidia AI chip so it’s more intelligent. You can remotely troubleshoot it. In fact, 85% of the issues can be remotely dealt with. No one has to be constantly coming on site . We take support and maintenance really, really seriously. So a lot of our technicians not just go on site and install it, but they want to make sure that you’re realizing your ROI from day one. And you’ll see that with a lot of our clients and their testimonials as they really like coming to us. Because of that, I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had clients come to me and say, “Hey Sanjeev, someone just dropped off this robot and literally I haven’t heard from them again.” It’s like buying a car without a key, right? That doesn’t work. So we have gone sort of the extra mile to make sure that every client of ours gets a care package, gets the white glove service and really sees us as that outsourced robotics as a service partner rather than just someone who dumps a robot on them .

Amber Bardon:
11:42

Yeah, that’s a really great point. Can you talk a little bit more about how you do provide that day-to-day support of these types of devices?

Sanjeev Shetty:
11:49

This is still evolving Amber, but sort of my vision for support is proactive support. The best support you can find is when no one has to call you, when the phone’s never ringing. Of course we want to answer the phone and help people out, but the best customer service is when your phone never rings. The way we’re going do that is we’re building a command center. So we can tell you when your robot goes down before you even call us, that’s where we want to get to. We’re not quite there yet, but we’re looking for partners who can come along with us on this journey and help launch robots in senior living the next coming years. I think there’s going to be unprecedented growth. We’re already seeing it in the robotics space. We really need partners who share our vision, who can support us, who know the industry. Senior living is not the only industry we’re in, we’re in hospitality and healthcare as well. We really need partners such as yourself to help us along this journey.

Amber Bardon:
12:40

Speaking of support, what kind of infrastructure or IT set up do communities need to have in order to use the robots effectively?

Sanjeev Shetty:
12:48

If you think of technology as a pyramid, where the bottom of the pyramid is your basic infrastructure like wi-fi and wires. As you go up that pyramid, you have your nurse call systems, EHR systems and then at the very top you have things like AI and robotics, but everyone wants to get to the top without investing in the bottom. One thing we realized is that we have a very exhaustive, thorough checklist that goes out before any deployment. We want to make sure that your wi- fi is not just good but it’s ubiquitous and it’s strong everywhere. So we do things like we kind of had to do this heat maps and things of that nature, but to make sure that there’s good continuous wi- fi throughout the space where the robots are functioning. That’s real key. Then if you’re doing things like elevator integration, there’s another checklist against that because we have to work with elevator companies and a lot of these companies are… They’re not cheap. We’re dealing with labor unions. Depends on the setup and the configuration of what you’re trying to do. For example, if you’re in a kitchen setting, you may have doors that open and shut, you may need to have the robots communicate with those doors through what we call ADO’s. So it really depends on the setting, the type of use case you’re dealing with. But generally I would say having good wi- fi is sort of key. The other important ingredient is having a champion there, your lead on the site, boots on the ground to be our main point of contact.

Amber Bardon:
14:12

I agree so much with everything you just said. It’s something I talk about all the time. I actually talk about the technology pyramid with the infrastructure at the bottom and then building up to get to innovation. So I’m just curious, do your robotics rely on wi- fi or do they have their own network or how does that work?

Sanjeev Shetty:
14:26

Well you have two options. Either you go the wi- fi route or you can go the LTE route. We can put a SIM card in and then you tap into this cellular network. Depends on how strong your wi- fi is. We have customers in very, very remote areas in New Mexico where it’s a sprawling community and they don’t have wi- fi everywhere. I mean they put repeaters and try to enhance the wi- fi, but in some areas we do need to put in that SIM card and provide LTE cellular service as well. So it just depends. Not every customer is the same. And that’s the nice thing about us is either we can come out and do the heat map or get someone out to do a heat map.

Amber Bardon:
15:00

Yeah, and the wi- fi crisis is something I talk about a lot as well is that so many communities are not prepared because the use case for wi-fi design is not what it is today. When wi- fi was usually installed a few years ago and our rule of thumb estimate is $2 a square foot to upgrade your wi- fi to wall to wall . So you know, it’s something a lot of communities have to figure out. How are they going to get there and pay for that in the next few years?

Sanjeev Shetty:
15:22

It is positive to see, I was reading a report recently from McKnights about how IT budgets are being increased to like 10%, the overall budget from like two to 5%. Almost half of the communities are putting in money for robotics next year. So that’s really a breath of fresh air for me being in the robotics and AI business. We’re really looking forward to asserting these communities next year.

Amber Bardon:
15:43

Is there anything that you haven’t shared yet that you think our listeners should know about what’s coming in the future or pieces of advice you would like to offer?

Sanjeev Shetty:
15:52

When it comes to robotics, you kind of want to walk before you run because you have a lot of communities that want to do it all. And I would say start small and then grow and learn from those lessons. Obviously I want to sell , every one of my 20 + robots to everyone. I also am a realist and want to make sure that people are successful when they deploy our solutions. So I would say start with a very simple use case. Simplest use case is the housekeeping and the cleaning. Everyone needs to clean their carpets and their floors, right? Everyone has a need and the ROIs very simple. Our robots do about 80% of our custodial staff’s duties when it comes to cleaning. We have a very simple ROI calculator. Maybe start there and then look at delivery, both indoors and outdoors. Then start looking at things like our virtual care companion for healthcare. Maybe that’s the depth you can take if you start want to start small. That would be my advice for people who want to consider robotics. Start with a simple use case. Prove out the ROI because these robots aren’t cheap. Average cleaning robot is anywhere between 30 and 40 grand and you’ve got the service package that comes with it too . So these are not items, you’re not buying a computer here. Generally people have to see an ROI and we help them realize the ROI , not only do we build that ROI calculator, but then we ensure that they see it. So as part of our HelloGard care package, we do outbound calls, we make sure they’re seeing the ROI , they’re using it. We show them how to look at reporting and analytics. So they’re really, really getting the best use out of it and we make it affordable. So let’s say you’re one of those communities that don’t want to put out 40 grand for a robot, right? We can look at leasing options. We have a great financing company that can look at very low cost leasing options and you can do a robotics as a service or machine as a service model, right? So there’s so many different ways to adopt robotics without having to break the bank , so to speak.

Amber Bardon:
17:38

That’s really interesting. I haven’t heard of it approached from that perspective as a service. I’m glad you mentioned that for our listeners. Sanjeev, this has been such an interesting episode. I definitely learned a lot. We have had other robotics companies come on, but no one has been able to speak from this perspective on so many different aspects of robotics. So really enjoy the conversation. I want to thank you for coming.

Sanjeev Shetty:
17:58

Thanks for having me, Amber. It was a great conversation.

Amber Bardon:
18:01

Sanjeev , can you let our listeners know where can they find more information if they are interested in learning more?

Sanjeev Shetty:
18:06

Easiest way to find out more about us and our products is go to HelloGard.com. There’s links in there where you can reach us directly. They can also dm me directly. Depending on what they want, I’ll point them in the right direction.

Amber Bardon:
18:20

Thank you so much. And listeners, you can find all of our episodes at raisingtechpodcast.com. You can find us on social media at Raising Tech. And if you’d like to submit feedback on this episode or future ideas for an episode, please reach out to us on any of those platforms. And as always, thank you for listening.

Amber Bardon:
0:07

Welcome to Raising Tech podcast. I’m your host, Amber Barden, and our guest today is Jim Murphy, who is the SVP of Healthcare at Ageless Innovation. Ageless Innovation is best known for being the makers of the Joy for All Companion Pets. Welcome to the show, Jim.

Jim Murphy:
0:23

Thanks so much for having me, Amber.

Amber Bardon:
0:25

So Jim, tell me who are you, how did you come to work at Ageless Innovation? What’s your story? And then let’s talk a little bit about what is Ageless Innovation?

Jim Murphy:
0:34

My background is I actually spent about 15 years in the Medicare Advantage Arena, beginning with special needs plans , so focused on folks with chronic special needs, chronic conditions for those that were both eligible for Medicare and Medicaid. Traditionally, a marketing communications background. Found my way to UnitedHealthcare in the Medicare arena. Had a number of different roles there. Everything from marketing to product to ultimately innovation the last few years that I was at United. So I was the innovation lead with our biggest partner, which was AARP. Wherever there was joint interest between AARP and UnitedHealthcare’s Medicare business, and it was innovation related , we got to work on it. As a lot of my coworkers used to say, I got to work on all the fun cool stuff. And it was everything from family caregiving to in-home non-medical care, looking at different ways to combat social isolation and loneliness. That innovation role is actually how I first learned about the Joy for All Companion Pets. It was shortly after their launch at the time within the walls of Hasbro and then I ultimately joined the company three and a half years ago to lead the healthcare business.

Amber Bardon:
1:41

So Ageless Innovation is primarily associated with the Companion Pet, which are robots. What else does the company do before we dive into that topic a little bit more?

Jim Murphy:
1:52

We are really well known for our flagship product, which is the Joy for All Companion Pets. They were birthed within the walls of Hasbro back in 2015. The brand grew within the walls of Hasbro and then there was a friendly spinoff back in 2018 where basically Ageless Innovation was formed. We took the Joy for All brand with us and it’s really continued to be our focus- the Companion Pets, the cats and dogs. More recently, we have expanded our offerings, so we introduced a new Joy for All Companion Pet, a pet bird called the Walker Squawker. I think you’ll really love the inventor story. Then more recently we reconnected with our friends from Hasbro about a year ago, and they really highlighted for us the growing interest in older adults and playing board games. We recently become the exclusive licensee of Hasbro’s Library of Games relative to reimagining for older adults. Our umbrella that we work within is to reimagine how we positively live in age together by unleashing the Power of Play. So if it falls within that realm and it can help older adults and their family caregivers, their family members, that’s where we feel like we’re uniquely qualified to serve those individuals.

Amber Bardon:
2:59

Are you in primarily the senior living space or are you in other industries as well?

Jim Murphy:
3:05

Lots of different segments within healthcare. To take it back to the beginning of the launch of Joy for All , as you can imagine within the walls of Hasbro, a lot of the focus was retail and direct to consumer. The first few years were primarily distribution of Joy for All Companion Pets through retail partners. It was really within that timeframe that it garnered the interest of a lot of different healthcare and academic organizations. That was the time that I was at United and it really caught my attention from a healthcare perspective. There were some early adopters in the senior living long-term care space, primarily nursing homes, assisted living and memory care. We continue to work with many of those organizations domestically and internationally today. We’ve grown a lot of different lanes within healthcare as well. We have some Medicare advantage organizations that offer our Companion Pets as a supplemental benefit. We have some Medicaid organizations that offer it as assistive technology. We have a huge variety of different providers that provide our C ompanion Pets. Everyone from hospice and palliative care organizations t o VA medical centers to different hospital settings. A lot of different segments of healthcare are utilizing our Companion Pets.

Amber Bardon:
4:16

It’s so interesting that the senior living industry actually came to you to see how they could use your products in their communities. So tell me more about that. What is the use case in a senior living community for the Joy for All Companion Pets?

Jim Murphy:
4:30

Use cases within senior living are pretty typical of the use cases in general, the two primary use cases and that’s really where the most utilization and the most research has been done as it relates to our Companion Pets. One is combating social isolation and loneliness, and the other one is Alzheimer’s and related dementias. Those are two big kind of hairy bird’s nest of problems as it relates to senior care and supporting older adults. There’s certainly a lot of overlap and comorbidity between the two, right? We know that people who are socially isolated and lonely are at higher risk for Alzheimer’s or related dementia. And we also know that social isolation, loneliness, and depression are certainly at a higher prevalence for people with Alzheimer’s and related dementia. When you look at the overlap of the two, it’s tens of millions of individuals across the US. Our two primary use cases from the early days and still to this day are folks with Alzheimer’s and related dementia, and then individuals who are suffering from social isolation and loneliness.

Amber Bardon:
5:31

When a community is making a purchase, are the pets primarily used in like a group setting, like a shared type of resource, or are they individual for each of the seniors?

Jim Murphy:
5:41

I think that’s a really important point of differentiation for us compared to some of the previous robotic Companion Pets that were out there in senior living. It’s early as the early 2000’s, right, where you talk about 1 to many utilization of PARO, the robotic seal, as an example. We really designed the Companion Pets, which were an enhanced and rebranded version of an existing Hasbro product. This was really input from older adults and their, and their family members. So 1 is make it as lifelike as possible, but balance that with affordability. And that’s been the balancing act for many years now. So they’re very, very intentionally designed to be a one-to-one utilization relative to residents. One aspect of that wasn’t evident early on by the input that we got from older adults, but it’s really evidenced itself every day, frankly, for many years now, is this idea of pet ownership, right? It’s not just a cat or a dog, it’s my cat or my dog, and they’ve named it and they take ownership of it. So whether you’re talking about within the senior living community or whether you’re talking about an older adult who happens to live with their extended family, for example, in a variety of different settings, the idea of pet ownership is really important.

Amber Bardon:
6:57

I’m really curious, are there any studies or any specific outcomes or trends that you can share as a result of someone living with Alzheimer’s having a Companion Pet?

Jim Murphy:
7:08

There are over 15 studies that have been conducted with our Companion Pets in a variety of different settings. Some of them focused on individuals who have Alzheimer’s or related dementia, others where individuals didn’t have a diagnosis as it related to cognitive decline, but instead were just socially isolated or lonely. And that was the nature of the study that I proposed and led within United Healthcare in conjunction with AARP. The Alzheimer’s dementia related use case was one where it was pretty self-evident and I knew that others were studying it as well. The social isolation and loneliness and this notion of an individual who is perhaps moderate to severely lonely but cognitively intact, do they know it’s a robot or not a robot? How do they interact with it and do they really even care if it is a robot? That was a really interesting dynamic for me. So getting back to your question, the common set of psychosocial benefits that have been evidenced through these variety of different studies really go to at the highest level, whether an individual has dementia or not, improvements in the quality of life, such as reduction in social isolation and loneliness, improved sense of purpose, resilience, and then really specific to Alzheimer’s and related dementia. It’s kind of the additional layers of being able to reduce cognitive decline or the evidence from these variety of studies as it pertains to individuals with Alzheimer’s or related dementia. It wasn’t just the reduction of social isolation and loneliness, increased sense of purpose, resilience, things like that. It was also about reduction in behaviors such as agitation. There were a few studies that actually had indications of being able to reduce the administering of psychotropic medication, which if proved out at scale, these are smaller scale studies, but if proved out at scale we know could be really meaningful to Senior Living communities. And so those have really been the primary findings of these variety of different studies, some of which were in Senior Living communities, others of which involved community dwelling older adults.

Amber Bardon:
9:05

I’m interested if you can share on the procurement side. If a community would like to move forward with the Companion Pets for their residents, is it typically something that the family members are purchasing or is it something the community’s purchasing on behalf, or is it mixed?

Jim Murphy:
9:21

Yeah, it’s really a mixed model. So there’s a variety of different ways that we work with senior living communities. In some cases they’re blended as to how they approach it. In some instances it’s where, for example, folks within specific roles such as an activities director may have discretionary budget where they see the impact of our Companion Pets and feel compelled to use that budget to be able to purchase our Companion Pets. It’s usually for select folks within a community, right? Individuals with Alzheimer’s or dementia, or perhaps they’ve done health risk assessments and found individuals that are profoundly lonely might be their focus. So in some instances, they’re paying for them outright. In other instances, they are putting the Companion Pets in front of family members to be able to explain to them what the benefits are of the Companion Pets so that they see, for roughly 125 to $150, that they can profoundly change their loved one’s life and their quality of life by providing a pet for them. In some instances, it’s kind of a mixed model. So where we’re providing content to a Senior Living community to be able to help them explain to those family members the value of a Companion Pet and helping staff understand it as well. So as much as we’ve been around for 8 years now and 5 years as Ageless Innovation, we know the brand is discovered every day by folks in the industry where they’re saying, “I didn’t know that this type of thing existed.” So being able to help folks, staff within Senior Living communities be able to explain the value to those family members so that they could positively impact their loved ones.

Amber Bardon:
10:50

Yeah, it’s really interesting how we’re entering the age of automation and robotics in so many different aspects, but this in a way is almost the most simple of robotics that are out there compared to these dining robots and serving robots and lawnmower robots and things like that.

Jim Murphy:
11:06

You’re exactly right. That’s something that we talk about all the time, which is there’s complex robotics within the Companion Cat or within the Companion Dog. It’s secret sauce is that it is simple to use and it’s so simple and intuitive that there isn’t a big barrier from a technology perspective.

Amber Bardon:
11:31

So along those lines, describe for me what is the experience with a Companion Pet? Let’s just pick a dog because I’m a dog person. So what does the Companion Pet Dog do?

Jim Murphy:
11:41

That’s a really important aspect of it too, which is whether you’re talking about a Senior Living community or a different environment, is to be able to understand the interest level of someone who is eligible and would benefit from a Companion Pet, and then be able to have them make their choice relative to dog versus cat. I mean, we joke about that all the time. There’s dog people in this world. There’s cat people in this world. There’s some that are both, and there are very few that are neither. It’s the type of thing where giving someone that choice is paramount to the bond that is developed. And like you, I would inherently bond more with a dog. I’ve grown pretty fond of our cats as well. We have a caregiver guide to be able to help people understand this. For folks in the industry, it’s pretty intuitive. Individuals who may not be familiar with that, or a family member who’s looking to explore it, it’s really a matter of exposing that individual to the idea of a robotic Companion Pet. Sometimes that’s sharing a video, sometimes it’s sharing of a collateral. In some instances, a Senior Living community might have a sample cat or a sample dog that they demonstrate and share with individuals. It’s using that kind of neutral language to be able to let them define, do they like this idea? Do they have an affinity for animals? Would they want one of these? And overwhelmingly, we hear the answer is yes, even for people who weren’t previously pet owners. That was something I was really curious about years ago, which is people who are previously pet owners, especially if they can’t have a pet at this point, are very keen on the idea. But we’ve also heard many stories of people who weren’t previous pet owners, but just have an affinity for animals and want to take care of something where they’ve adopted a cat or a pup and grown a strong bond with it. It’s that neutral introduction and letting them define, is this something that they’re gonna have an affinity for? And usually if they express that from the beginning, the bond grows over time. Similar to a live animal. You know , we’ve had a number of studies, the Alabama Department of Senior Services did a study a couple of years ago where they tracked 75, 80 users over the course of a year. They were looking to understand is there a novelty effect, and they found just the opposite, which is pretty amazing and really parallels a relationship with a live animal. Usually the longer you own one, the more attached you grow.

Amber Bardon:
13:46

Is your company an international company? If so, have you seen more adoption in other countries that have perhaps had more robotics in their culture such as Japan?

Jim Murphy:
13:57

We are primarily US focused in the sense that that’s where we’ve done the most business to date. You know, the years within Hasbro , and then as Ageless innovation. That being said, we do make our Companion Pets available in over 30 countries outside the US now. And so we’ve seen a good deal of adoption both through public health as well as private payers. We’ve seen a good deal of distribution through retail channels, so to individual consumers out there in these variety of different countries. Interestingly, we haven’t seen that dynamic that you described where I think Japan has an incredible history of development of robotics, especially as it relates to their use of humanoid robots. We’ve really not seen that much adoption there, and I’ll say we haven’t focused on it as an international market as much as we could. So most of our adoption outside the US has been Canada, the UK, and throughout Europe.

Amber Bardon:
14:48

Are there any other products that Ageless Innovation offers, or is there something you’re working on coming in the future that you can share?

Jim Murphy:
14:56

The Companion Pets, we see a long runway for those in the sense that unfortunately, we all know that a cure for Alzheimer’s or related dementia is a long way off. We also know that social isolation and loneliness where the epidemic that was with us before, the pandemic got greatly exacerbated because of the pandemic and is going to be with us in a very large way for a very long time. We know that our Companion Pets are going to be able to continue to address those. We have recently launched the newest member of the Companion Pet family, which was a Walker Squawker. It’s the Companion Pet Bird that I mentioned earlier. The inventor story is really cool. A woman who’s in her 90s, her name’s Rita Malone, she was very familiar with our existing Companion Pets in the team because her daughter used to work with the team years ago while they were at Hasbro. Rita was supposed to start using a walker a few years back. It sat in the corner, as it often does, got grief from family members. She thought about how can I change the dynamic with my walker where I actually want to use it, thought of our Companion Pets, which she knew well and thought of the social interaction that they often create. Came to us and said, “what if we perched a bird on my walker? It would create the social interaction. It would probably change the way I think and feel about my walker and I’d actually maybe want to use it.” We thought that was a brilliant idea and spent the last year and a half developing it and launched it late last year. It’ll be a long runway to prove out that it actually does get folks to use their walkers more frequently and potentially through many studies to be able to prove out that it could potentially reduce falls. For now it’s just kind of one more companion animal that hopefully gets folks to think and feel about their walkers differently and to use them more frequently. As it relates to the pets, I think that we also have a connected version on our roadmaps . So right now, the Companion Pets are very much of an island from a technology perspective. They’re very interactive based upon the way that you respond to light touch and sound. So they’re going interact based upon the way that you interact with them. But from a technology perspective, they’re not recording anything and they’re not connected to anything. We do have on our roadmap , a connected version of it where you can kind of think of the expanded value proposition that might occur relative to a connected version of the pet. You know, passive monitoring to be able to understand utilization trends and breaks in utilization trends. As an example, being able to have authorized parties such as family caregivers, professional caregivers, health plans, or other parties, to be able to gather that data once again in a passive manner, in a way that respects the pet owner. That’s paramount to us. We never want to break the trust with the pet owner, but to be able to have a connected version that has this expanded value proposition beyond the psychosocial benefit that one would get from owning a pet is something that’s on our roadmap . And once again, we realize it’ll take a considerable amount of time to be able to prove out that expanded value proposition. The most recent product expansion for us in general, still within this world of fun and joy and play and still within this world of combating social isolation, loneliness is the rollout of the Joy for All games, which were really the reimagined Hasbro games that we’ve licensed. And the first three out of the gate were Trivial Pursuit Generations, Game of Life Generations, Scrabble Bingo, which is actually a three in one version of Scrabble. And so while these aren’t as tech focused , obviously as our Companion Pets are, they really are still within that umbrella of our purpose or mission of creating social connections through the power of play. We’ve had folks ask, “Are there going to be online versions of these games?” Right, because they are beloved games. And that’s something that we’re exploring right now as we look at rolling out 3-5 new games every year, which ones would really lend themselves for multi-generational online play or peer-to-peer online play, as an example or through an app. So those are things that we’re looking at as it relates to Joy for All games.

Amber Bardon:
18:45

That’s really interesting. The passive monitoring piece is especially interesting because there’s so many different ways that different companies are figuring out how to do that today. Jim, I really enjoyed learning more about your company and your product. It’s a topic that I think is just really fascinating in general. So I really enjoyed our conversation. Is there anything else that you think our listeners should know that you haven’t yet shared?

Jim Murphy:
19:06

If there are any family caregivers out there, I think that thinking about the impact that they can make for a loved one, we provide our Companion Pets through not just healthcare channels to end users such as residents or health plan members, but also through a lot of different authorized resellers. Everyone from Amazon to Best Buy to Walmart , to Walgreens. When you think about what to get an older loved one who maybe had to give up a pet or is showing signs of Alzheimer’s or dementia, people often struggle with those decisions. I know plenty of people that have personally struggled with those decisions, right? What can I do to help my mom or my dad or my aunt or uncle from a quality of life perspective. I would just share that there’s so many family caregivers that struggle with how to support their loved ones, and this is a relatively low cost item to be able to positively impact them .

Amber Bardon:
19:54

So Jim, where can our listeners find out more about Ageless Innovation and the Joy for All Companion Pets if they’re interested in learning more?

Jim Murphy:
20:02

If you’re interested in learning more about Ageless and how we work with different healthcare organizations, agelessinnovation.com, our corporate site and the one that’s more product focused and more direct to consumer is joyforall .com .

Amber Bardon:
20:16

Thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate you taking time.

Jim Murphy:
20:20

Thank you, Amber. It was a pleasure.

Amber Bardon:
20:22

Listeners, if you’d like to find more episodes of Raising Tech podcasts or you have an idea to submit, or you’d like to give us feedback on this episode, you can find us online at raisingtechpodcast.com. As always, thank you for listening.