Raising Tech

Patrick Leonard (00:06):

Welcome to Raising Tech, a podcast about all things technology and senior living. I’m your host, Patrick Leonard, and today I’m really excited to welcome our guest, Ramiro Maldonado from Nobi. Ramiro, welcome to the show.

Ramiro Maldonado (00:19):

Thank you so much, Patrick. So happy to be here.

Patrick Leonard (00:21):

Really interested to learn more and educate our listeners on our topic today, which involves Nobis innovative technology solution for fall prevention and detection. I was actually fortunate enough a few weeks ago to get a live virtual demo of the solution myself from Ramiro, and it was fascinating. But before we dive in, Ramiro, can you introduce yourself real quick, your background and role with Nobi?

Ramiro Maldonado (00:44):

Sure. Yeah. So, thanks so much for that. It was a lot of fun to kind of demo the product to you a few weeks ago. So, my background is, you know, somewhat interesting. So, for a long period of, of, of my professional career, I actually practiced as a clinician, as a physical therapist for roughly a little over 10 years, and I kind of geared my practice towards fall prevention and just fall kind of prevention in the community that I served. So, I got my certification of vestibular therapy and neurotherapy and kind of worked with the, the community in that way. So in that world of physical therapy, I got just kind of exposed to a lot of different kind of technologies that are available to individuals for, you know, improving their, their strength, improving their balance.

Ramiro Maldonado (01:36):

So, I just really kind of fell in love with the technology side of things. So, I transitioned my career into a more tech -related role. So, for few years I’ve worked with a few different companies as either their business development specialist or clinical application specialist, where I kind of served a dual role where I was, performed somewhat of a sales role as well as a clinical applications role of training clinicians on how to use these new devices and and rehab equipment. Then, kind of fast forward to me learning about Nobi and my interest and, and kind of, uh, passion towards kind of improving the balance of, of the community. I just really just saw the value of nobody right away. So, it’s a device that is able to kind of detect and prevent falls, which is exactly the kind of space where I wanted to, to be, you know to be able to get into a situation where we could start to help improve the health of individuals as opposed to getting them after the fact and trying to rehabilitate them after the fact.

Ramiro Maldonado (02:38):

Anything that could help beforehand, if I, we could if there’s a device that can kind of prevent that larger kind of severity of injury happening is where, where I kind of want it to be. So, that’s where I came in and with Nobi as their business development manager for North America, and I’ve been doing that since August of last year.

Patrick Leonard (03:01):

Awesome. Thanks for that background. I love to hear people’s kind of intro into senior living, into technology and, you know, your physical therapy background is certainly applicable and relevant here, so thanks for sharing that.

Ramiro Maldonado (03:15):

For sure.

Patrick Leonard (03:15):

So you touched on it a little bit and we’ve, we’ve said, you know, fall detection, fall prevention, that’s such a buzzword right now in this industry, and there’s certainly a lot of cool solutions out there, but yours is, is very unique at, at Nobi, um, that I learned, like I mentioned, really in depth a few weeks ago. Can you, from a high level, just tell people what is Nobi? Where did it come from, and what are you all hoping to accomplish as it relates to its presence in senior living?

Ramiro Maldonado (03:42):

Sure, sure. So, first and foremost, Nobi, we like to say that Nobi is the smartest lamp in the, in the world, right? So it’s a lamp first and and foremost and it’s you, it’s indiscernible from healthcare technology. You would walk into someone’s room, you would see it, you would just say, oh, that’s a very nice, nice lamp that functions very nicely. It actually even provides something called circadian light. So, as you start to rise in your morning, it’s just a very nice soft light to kind of help you with arousal throughout your day, becomes a little bit brighter, so again, can help with your arousal and, and make sure it’s you’re awake during your day. At nighttime, it starts to calm back down again because it’s allowing the resident to kind of get back into that nighttime routine.

Ramiro Maldonado (04:29):

So, even just as a lamp, it just functions very nicely, but the smartness behind it, so it’s an AI, so artificial intelligence enabled lamp that at its core can prevent and detect falls. So doesn’t matter what kind of fall it is, we have feted so many data points that it has learned any kind of fall that can occur. So should a fall occur, fall, you know, would it be a fast fall, slow fall, just kind of stumbling to the ground, whatever it may be, it recognizes that fall. At that point it opens up a two-way communication through the lamp, via the lamp, allowing you an opportunity to now speak to that resident and say, Hey, I heard you had a fall. We are, we are on our, on our way, you know, uh, so, you know, you can stay relaxed.

Ramiro Maldonado (05:17):

Caregiver comes in, they can now, uh, do whatever they need to do to help that individual and then also what they receive is feedback of how that fall occurred. So, The caregiver will have a 30 seconds of feedback of footage before that fall occurred until they closed that escalation, so that when they closed that fall, allowing them the opportunity to see what caused that fall. Was it that they tripped on something in the room? Did they just not have the strength to be able to get up or any number of, of, uh, of factors that could have potentially have caused that fall? And what we’re finding is that in facilities that have implemented Nobi, they’re on average per you know, producing about a one fall preventative measure per a residence’s room roughly every six days or so. So if they’re able to kind of prevent any type of major falls from, from happening to, and, and, and severity of injury and prevent that severity of injury for their resident, and that’s what it does at its core, and this is a, a lot more of other kind of interesting stuff as well. But at its core, that’s what it, what it does.

Patrick Leonard (06:25):

Yeah, that’s amazing and that status is impressive. One per resident room every six days. I didn’t butcher that too much. That’s a huge, huge difference in impact on senior living residents. So that’s awesome. Thanks for sharing that.

Ramiro Maldonado (06:41):

For sure.

Patrick Leonard (06:42):

So how are I, when I think of something like this, I think of two sides of it, the residents response and then the staff. Can you talk a little bit about both perspectives a little bit? You, you gave us a little, a nice overview of kind of how it functions, but can you dive a little bit deeper? How are residents responding to this? And then on the flip side, how are staff responding to it?

Ramiro Maldonado (07:04):

For sure. Yeah, so, we have some really interesting, uh, data coming out of some of our pilot studies that have been performed in Belgium. So, you know, small bit of background. So, Nobi is a company founded in Belgium 2018 by a lot of leaders and smart home and elderly care. They got together and developed Nobi, completely manufactured factories in Belgium. We control the process from manufacturing to, you know, just kind of conjuring it up and to getting it out there. So we have full quality control over the, over that device. So, and then in that situation, so we have a pilot study in an assisted living facility in Belgium. I’ll start from a resident’s perspective. So we do have this kind of really cool test testimonial on the website. I believe the woman’s name is, is Helen.

Ramiro Maldonado (08:00):

She had to enter an assisted living facility because she was just having more, more falls at home, brought her into this facility and actually on her very first day of, of being into, being in this facility, she ended up having a fall. She fell slowly. She was at her bedside and just kind of slowly fell down until both her knees touched the floor, very similar to the kind of fall that she had at home that brought her to this facility, and so because of that, you know, she has a lot of fall anxiety. She was just very fearful of falling and just kind of worried and now, she was in a situation where she just kind of like, oh my gosh, you know, it’s happened again. Here I am first day in this facility, and I’ve, and I’ve had a fall again, and I, and I just don’t know what to do.

Ramiro Maldonado (08:48):

You know, she knew, she kind of understood that there was a Nobi in the room, but didn’t really quite kind of grasp that technology, right? She wasn’t kind of there long enough. You had to really have that understanding of Nobi. So within just a few, few seconds of her being on the ground Nobi then asked her, “Hey, Helen, have you had a fall? I don’t, I don’t, I don’t see what I, you know, like, uh, I see that you’re not upright,” and Helen unbeknownst to her, she’s like, “oh my gosh, where is this, you know, voice coming from?” It’s like, you know, the voice of the lamp above, and she’s, she’s just like, “yes, yes, I’ve had a fall.” So, that nobody responds with okay, help is underway, opens up that two-way communication. The caregiver, the nurses at that site now have an opportunity to help decrease her anxiety levels, letting her know like, Hey, I heard you had to fall.

Ramiro Maldonado (09:36):

I’m coming to your room. I’ll be there at no time flat. So, and we were able to kind of find out what that timing was. So from the incident occurring to caregiver giving help was under two minutes of being able to help this woman off the ground and then help her, you know, with, with the kind of arrangements of the room that caused, to fall in the first place. So that’s what we’re getting from the resident’s side of it, that they just loved the peace of mind, the decrease of anxiety, knowing that they are always going to be helped, should a fall occur, which is you know, that’s, that’s a big issue with the elderly population and senior home facilities, right? The longer people spend on on the ground following a fall, it’s, it’s proven that there’s higher levels of severity of, of injury.

Ramiro Maldonado (10:26):

So the sooner we can get to them provide that help, decrease that fall anxiety is extremely important. So that’s the kind of feedback that we’re getting from, from the resident side of things. Now, on, on the flip side of that, the staffing, the, the clinical staff little bit for that aspect as well, right? So in a lot of these facilities, so let’s say in a memory care facility, right, where residents may not have the capacity to let you know that they’ve had a fall or, or when they’ve had a fall or, or, or, you know, if it falls even occurred often staff have to enter these rooms roughly every hour, right? So, this is a, a part of their workflow that they don’t necessarily enjoy. It takes away from other important tests they could be doing.

Ramiro Maldonado (11:12):

And on top of that it disrupts the sleep of whoever is in that room every single time you open that door which is, you know, I, not really the ideal case for someone that has memory care issues in a situation where you have Nobi. We found now, the staff can now kind of take a breather knowing that Nobi is in that room monitoring their patients, monitoring their residents, so that should something occur, they’re always gonna be notified because of that artificial intelligence within the lamp. We can, we can say that it has, it provides 100% accuracy and fall detection and in the situations where it provides a, you know, a false positive, we find that it’s often a situation where the nurses still want it to be notified of that event because they go into that room and it looks like the resident is in a situation where, you know, maybe something is just about to occur.

Ramiro Maldonado (12:06):

And that’s often a situation that we’re hearing whenever a false positive has occurred and and so 100% accuracy and fall detection, extremely low false positive rates and in situations where we get a false positive, it’s often a situation where nurse is like, you know what? I’m glad I got notified at this event. Now, I could help this in individual, maybe sit back up in a chair a little bit better, or whatever it may be. So to that point, we’re finding that there’s a lot of really beneficial kind of network effects, right? So, these, the nurses, the clinical staff are now able to kind of focus on, on, on work, that is, that is very valuable and more important to them. So if they could kind of continue caring for all their residents, they’re able to intervene sooner, before a major event occurs and then directors of facilities are telling us that this has helped them with their staffing as well. They don’t have to staff as much overnight reducing some of those staffing costs as well. So, and that kind of in a nutshell is what we’ve been finding out from both sides of the, of the camp of the, of the Nobi users.

Patrick Leonard (13:16):

Awesome. Thanks for providing those two perspectives. Those are some awesome kind of use cases, statistics, testimonials, um, from Helen in particular. I love, I mean, day one, no better. Yeah, unfortunately. I mean, obviously you don’t want to, to see a fall happen in the first place, but the fact that you’re able to have a response so quickly from the caregivers and going forward, I imagine Helen felt much safer at at Oh, yeah and much more at home after that experience of after getting over that initial anxiety. I’m sure that was, yeah,

Ramiro Maldonado (13:51):

Scary. And you think about the anxiety of, of, of her and then also, but the, and then the family, well, the, you know, the family piece, you know, the family hears about what nobody was able to do, and now they all of a sudden you could see the anxiety levels drop there as well. So, um, there is just kind of all the stakeholders that are involved, you know, the, the actual resident in the room, the the clinical staff the, the children of the resident, it all just kind of really kind of helps everyone just kind of breathe a little bit easier and knowing that their loved one is gonna be, gonna be cared for and attended to as quickly as possible. Another interesting stat that came out from that, pilot study as well was that so they, we outfitted an entire wing with Nobis, and then we had another wing where they’re were, you know, were without Nobis.

Ramiro Maldonado (14:42):

It just kind of compare and contrasted it two. So the wing without Nobis used there, a standard all preventative measures and what we’ve found was that the rooms where there were the Nobis that they identified 80% more falls than previous fall preventative measures that they were using beforehand. So that’s 80% more falls, right? So that says a lot, right? I mean, you know, CDC even mentions this, that most people have a fall, most falls aren’t as severe, necessarily one in roughly five falls is gonna be a severe fall but the highest predictor of whether or not you’re going to fall is a previous fall, right? But we also know that most people don’t like to fess up that they’ve, that they’ve had a fall because it might mean like some type of change and status of what they’re living or whatever it may be, that they don’t necessarily want to tell people just recognizes it. 80% more falls were recognized, which allowed them to do those preventative measures. So if these individuals can then continue to age where they want to be in, in the setting that they wanted to be in and didn’t necessarily have any kind of other, you knows severe effects from, from a fall.

Patrick Leonard (15:52):

Yeah. That’s fantastic. And that kind of leads into, you know, prompted another question as you’re talking about that I, I assume you’re, and what you just mentioned is you’re gathering all of this data, the Nobi is gathering all this data about their residents, their behaviors, and then that data is being used to take preventative measures and provide peace of mind. Can you talk a little bit more about kind of the technology piece of it, you know, what makes it different? What, what, where, what are you all doing with the data? What is the community doing with the data and, that leads into part two, I love part two questions, of course. Mm-hmm, the integration piece, this seems like, I’m sure a lot of this data is valuable in other systems within the community, can you talk about the data and integration side a little bit?

Ramiro Maldonado (16:41):

Most definitely. Yeah. So, so, you know, so again, we, we like to say Nobi is the smartest lamp in the world, right? So, it has a very strong processor on the lamp itself. What the, the lamp is processing at all times is, you know, what’s going on in, in the room? What is the individual doing? Are they just sitting it recognizes, are they just sitting? Are they sitting at edge of bed? Are they laying down bed? Are they just walking around their room? If that kind of data is what’s occurring it kind of records this data and as far as, an integration piece, we can integrate, via a API to electronic health records or via Bluetooth to any type of smart kind of device, smart scale, smart, blood pressure cuff, things of that nature.

Ramiro Maldonado (17:32):

So, in this situation where let’s say a wing wants to be notified, again, I’ll, I’ll use the, example of maybe a memory care unit, maybe in that wing, they want to be notified whenever a resident sits up at the edge of the bed because they know that they’re a little bit out of a, a higher risk for falls. You can program the no in such a way that it’ll notify the care station. Okay, Hey, John, in room 302 has now set up at the, at the edge of the bed, and you could fully customize that for the entire wing, or even by individual, let’s say on the other side, the independent living side, you’re fine with just you know, just having it escalate when a fall has occurred. But maybe you wanna know when you know Jane has been in the bathroom for a little bit over, some long, long period of time, you wanna be notified anytime she’s been in the bathroom for longer than 15 minutes.

Ramiro Maldonado (18:20):

Then Nobi again, can also notify you of that situation as well. You could customize that fully by wing or by by individual. All that data is processed on the lamp. Once it kind of does what it needs to, to do with that data, right? Notifying the nurses or putting, you know, some of that, those, that Bluetooth enabled like heart rate detection or blood pressure cuff, blood pressure monitoring into the electronic health record, the data on the lamp is, is purged off. You know, it’s important for us that the, that the resident knows that their data is their own, and we’re only using the data that’s important for their care staff to, to be able to make clinical decisions on. So that data is now purged once we’ve kind of used it, in, in the capacity that we need to use it in, in a situation of escalation, that’s when something gets pushed off into the cloud.

Ramiro Maldonado (19:12):

That’s the only time when you now have those video recordings that I was, that I was mentioning and by video recording it’s really more so a second by second snapshot of what occurred prior to that fall happening. Until you close that escalation, and by closing escalation, that means that you’ve gone to the room address, the individual and I have either closed it onto the app on your phone or onto dashboard on your computer. You now have a video image of that to be able to kind of, again, assess what occurred, why did that fall occur. Even that data that only exists on the cloud for two weeks before it gets purged off of the cloud as well, allowing the, the clinical stats, we able to make the reports and whatever they need to do. Now we’ve gotten a step further and protecting that privacy as well.

Ramiro Maldonado (20:02):

By allowing the resident, the resident now has to choose guests to choose how this video is going to present to the clinician. They have three options. They can say, you know what? I am okay with them actually seeing me fully in that video and that way the clinician would then see the full run video. What we see overwhelmingly is the second choice, which is, what, what happens is it breaks down the individual into a stick figure, a stick figure avatar. So an 18 figure, 18 point stick figure where you could see what’s going on, but you cannot discern if that’s a male, female or any other kind of demographics. But you can figure out what happened in that room and make the changes that are necessary. That has been by far the most widely adopted imaging that nursing homes and, and residents and assisted living facilities have selected.

Ramiro Maldonado (20:53):

and then on the very end what we’re fi we, there’s a, we also offer this selection of, I want nothing. I want no images to be shared with my caregivers. I am completely fine with them getting the escalation that I’ve had a flaw, but that’s where I wanted to stop. I don’t want them to see any images and at that point, no images get sent to the cloud and it just continues with business as usual and so that’s the kind of the data that we can put out there and how we use that data and what we want to do with that data and recognize that that data is owned by the resident. And again, with the, with the integration piece, again, we can integrate with any number of electronic health records or any number of smart devices via Bluetooth on the smart device end or via API into a software or like electronic health record end.

Patrick Leonard (21:50):

Great. Excuse me.

Ramiro Maldonado (21:52):

No worries.

Patrick Leonard (21:55):

Great. Thanks for thanks for walking us through that. That’s super helpful because I know that’s a big question you get these days and rightfully so with any new technology installation, you know, you wanna know not only what is it doing on a day-to-day basis, but how we’re using the data that’s being collected through these innovative solutions and use them to just make the community, the resident and the staff’s life easier.

Ramiro Maldonado (22:18):

Right. Most definitely.

Patrick Leonard (22:21):

So that leads me to a question around installation and kind of ongoing support that’s needed around this. Not to simplify it, but is it as easy as installing a normal lamp in a room? What does that look like from your, your perspective and how did the, from the senior living community’s perspective from the resident’s room, and how is it, how does it need to be supported on an ongoing basis?

Ramiro Maldonado (22:48):

Yeah, so great question and I mean, I can honestly say that it really is as simple as just installing a ceiling lamp into, into your room. I mean, I actually happen to have one in my home office that I was able to install myself. It is, long as you have electricity and wifi, Nobi can function in a space and again, if there was already a ceiling light or ceiling fixture or some type of fixture already in place there, that is as simple as just swapping that out down the line. We even intend to make this an even easier process of installation. There’s some really cool things on the product roadmap where they’re going to have an ability to kind of, you know, so you have that ceiling light fixture, you can adhere a magnetic plate to the, to the ceiling fixture, and then you could even do that before you even get the Nobi.

Ramiro Maldonado (23:46):

And then once the Nobi arrives, you just snap it into a place with the magnetic, and then that magnet will also provide the power to the Nobi as well. So, but right now it is as if you’re just hanging a normal hanging, ceiling light fixture. As far as kind of installation and ongoing support, we are actively working with our distributors who have a very strong installation network. They have their own level of customer support at the, at the first level. But again, since we control the process of engineering product you know, of manufacturing it from beginning to end, should there be a, a necessary, you know, they need to kind of escalate it up to headquarters. We have a direct line to our distributors, they can call our engineers and they have that level of support right there as well. But, luckily it is truly a very easy and simple device to use. Not a lot of issues with, with things kind of falling apart or anything like that. If typically if there’s any issue, it’s usually just something like just helping with the wifi connection usually.

Patrick Leonard (24:56):

That makes sense. Do you need to swap out light bulbs?

Ramiro Maldonado (25:01):

No, no, no. Light bulb swapping. Yeah, so, the LED I mean, you know, as far as, if it’s normal, normal usage, it’s, it should have a, a lifespan of, you know, normal LED, normal LED light.

Patrick Leonard (25:17):

Awesome. So this has been really helpful for me personally to learn more about it. I’m already looking up at my ceiling and wishing I had a Nobi instead of my boring ceiling lamp up here. But thanks so much for taking the time today. I know before, you know, we started chatting today, you’d mentioned, you know, recently being at the, out at the CES show in Vegas, the Consumer Electronics Show, and you had some exciting things, you know, on the horizon. Without sharing any secrets here, are you able to kind of tell us a little bit about what’s next for Nobi and any kind of final thoughts or words for our listeners?

Ramiro Maldonado (25:55):

Yeah, so, um, another really thing that I love about Nobi is that because it is a, a learning device and, we’re very much so committed to making sure that individuals in their home have the most up to date and, and kind of highly functioning Nobi. Whenever the AI learn something new or has a new functionality, we’re gonna push that functionality out onto all Nobis into the field so that a resident will wake up new the next day and they have this new functionality. So for instance if, uh, a senior home, a senior facility were to purchase Nobis today, they will get our, our newest model of the Nobi and this Nobi looks even closer to just kind of, a really beautifully designed lamp like I was saying before, I, I really enjoy the current design of the, of the lamp, but if you were to see it, you, you might say, okay, that looks like a high technology kind of, kind of lamp.

Ramiro Maldonado (26:53):

The newer design looks almost identical to something that you potentially purchase at, at like an, ikea. We’ve added some new hardware to this device as well. So it has radar technology in it as well and what this now allows for the device to do is vital sign detection. So we are now able to do breath rate detection as well as cough detection with the device, and very soon roll, rolling out likely at some point this year, because of the fact that this is alerting device, we’re gonna now be able to provide predictive analytics. So we’re, we’re finding with a lot of the data that we’re getting from, from the device and what the device is learning, is that an often 60% of cases, there is a very specific kind of way that individuals are moving that are highly predictive of a fall.

Ramiro Maldonado (27:47):

So we can now tell the nurses, the nursing staff, the clinical care staff, like, Hey, you know, resident room 302 is acting kind of strange. Again, this is highly very indicative of a fall. You should maybe go, go check on this individual because we could start to provide that and we’re gonna start to provide that very soon. So those are some of the cool things that are, that are on the way that are currently in the process. And then, you know, as the lamp new learns more things that, uh, that functionality will be out there so that any owner of a Nobi will always have the most up-to-date version with the highest functionality.

Patrick Leonard (28:24):

Fantastic. Ramiro, thanks so much again for being with us today. I really enjoyed the discussion and I know our listeners will, will get some great value out of listening as well.

Ramiro Maldonado (28:33):

Thank you so much. Thank you for your time. It’s been, it’s been great.

Patrick Leonard (28:38):

Awesome. And listeners, thanks for tuning into another episode of Raising Tech. I hope you picked up some valuable information today. If there are any other topics you want to hear about or wanna be on an episode yourself, please feel free to reach out on our website at www.parasolalliance.com. Have a good one!

(Amber 0.05)
Welcome to Raising Tech Podcast. I’m your host, Amber Bardon, and we are doing our first episode for 2023. So, to kick us off for the year, we have a guest who is a personal friend of mine, and I’m so excited to finally have her on show. Jackie Ramieri, welcome to the show today.

(Jackie 0.17)
Hey Amber, thanks for having me!

(Amber 0.25)
Jackie, you have done something so interesting with your company, and I think the solution that you brought to the market is something that’s really been needed in senior living for a long time. I think there’s been a really big gap that you’re filling with CareWork, which is your new company. So, to start off with, can you just tell me a little bit about your background? How long have you been in senior living, and then what led you to found CareWork and what is CareWork at a high level?

(Jackie 0.48)
Yeah, so, I’ve worked in senior living specifically since about 2008. Prior to CareWork, I was a fractional CIO for multiple operators,  kind of all over the country, and I was trying to buy something like CareWork. So, as a buyer I was demoing solution after solution and very quickly realized, and this was in early 2020, that what I was looking for didn’t exist at all on the market. So, I was frustrated.  I reached out to my clients and just asked them if they’d be willing to be patient with me so that I could see if it was something that I could build  and have developed, and they were very, very patient to the tune of about two and a half years, which has gotten us where we are today with CareWork.

(Jackie 1:40)
So what CareWork is, it’s the first ever unified operations platform, specifically designed for long-term care and senior living operators. We integrate agnostically with the systems that operators already use, tie that data together, organize it across their operational flows, but what makes us really unique is that we build in custom report automation and workflow capability.

(Jackie 2:06)
So, operators actually have the ability to add in operational data to this database that now exists. So, stuff that they could never really trend and track or have a part of their data. Picture things like how many state and federal visits have I had? We wanna be able to take that data off spreadsheets and put it into an intelligent platform so that they can use it to make decisions improve and get better.

(Amber 2:31)
That’s fantastic! To help our listeners who are listening to this podcast, can you sort of, can you describe what does CareWork look like when you log in? What’s the information that you see? How do you navigate through the system? Are you able to give us a, a visual picture of the system?

(Jackie 2:48)
Absolutely. So, the first thing I’m gonna start with is to say that it is ridiculously easy to use.  We designed the system to be usable without training because none of us have time for complicated, especially in long-term care and senior living. So it is a very clean layout. We do offer obviously new client, what you would call training.

(Jackie 3:12)  
We don’t even call it training. We call it a tour because training implies that it requires real time and effort to learn and it just doesn’t. So, the entire site is searchable. If you have a brand new DON who started in, you know, for example, day one, and she comes in and has never used CareWork and hasn’t had time for her tour yet, but just wants to see everything having to do with infection rate.

(Jackie 3:17)
She can type in infection rate and the search bar just like she would do in Google, which everyone’s familiar with, and it’ll pop up every report that contains the search term, requested. Every report and function task is favorable. So, you can very easily access the things that you use over and over again, and everything’s really organized across industry standard operational flows. So,  census labor, financial procurement, clinical quality, everything is very, very easy to find, and just super organized in a very, very intuitive way. We also have when you first log in, communication functionality, so multi-user, excuse me, multi-location users are able to broadcast notices out to specific title groups, specific  locations. We’ve built in some fun stuff like our, I call it the “Good News” reel.  It’s basically a highlight section so that the first thing you see every day is just a reel of everything that you’ve done really well, either really well or every improvement you’ve made. We have a lot of tools inside for fostering stafflove, right? So, we want to shout out staff work anniversaries, staff birthdays, also resident birthdays. So, I think that it’s really the key here, designed for the way that we should and want to operate in long-term care and senior living.

(Amber 5:07)
One of the key parts of CareWork that makes it such a great product is the integration piece and that you cross multiple platforms and you bring all that data together in one place. Can you talk a little bit about the types of systems that you integrate with, and how that data gets pulled into CareWork?

(Jackie 5:24)
So, sort of the beautiful thing about this, and this was by design, it was one of the number one things on my list of things that were important back in 2020 when we started to scope the system. So, we handled the integration piece as a service. There are operators that might use Power BI or Tableau, and those require a staff to support them or very hefty consulting fees, and we know that we wanted this to be something that was accessible to all. Operators, even smaller multi-location operators, not just the biggest of the big.

(Jackie 6:02)
So, the first thing we do is we handle the integrations as a service. So, commonly the core systems that we’re integrating with are going to be electronic health, health records, H R A S or time-and-attendance solutions, ancillary scheduling systems. There are a lot of common ones, also procurement systems. You know, you have the common ones in the sy in the industry, you know, DSSI, right? That’s a common one. Financial systems, a lot of times that’s found in the EHR, but we’re going to be integrating with actual other financial systems. So, people might use Acumatica, they might use, you know, Sage, whatever that is, right?

(Jackie 6:45)
So, the idea is to get the core business areas that those core systems are supporting, which is really gonna be, it’s really gonna be clinical labor, financial and staffing business development as well. So, like CRM systems, whether or not that’s part of the EHR separate system. So, we have a pretty organized way of approaching that.

(Jackie 7:05)
Many of the larger players in the space, the ones that are more widely adopted, we’ve already built those integrations, but when we start talking to a new client, and they are using a system that we have not yet built the integration for, we just build it. We just build it for the customer, and we know what we’re doing on that, on that side of it, we also know that every system vendor may have a different way of allowing customers access to their data but we nav we navigate that for the customer. We don’t want them spending time on that. We don’t even want our customers thinking of care and technology almost in the same sentence. Right? Because for them, for them it’s about simplifying operations and, and we’ll handle all the tech stuff, you know, we’ll take the complicated stuff on. We don’t want our clients doing that.

(Amber 7:56)
Yeah, and that’s, that’s what I love about it. I’ve seen the system, and it’s so easy to use and navigate through. It’s very intuitive and simple. Can you walk me through a use case for a community? What would a community look like that would be a good fit for CareWork, and what would be the important things that they would need to know when making a decision to purchase a system like this?

(Jackie 8:20)
Yeah so, really we are a fit right now for multi-location operators. Probably, I would say more like a five location plus operator right now. I’m hoping to change that in the future, but for right now, that’s sort of a sweet spot.  So, five locations and up, although we know CCRCs are sort of specific, right? So, a CCRC could be 16 locations in one. That’s a different story. It’s a different setup. It’s a different way of operating. So,  the other thing that, that I think is important note is that when we have a conversation with a prospective client, we like to talk about what systems they’re using or aren’t using, right?

(Jackie 9:06)
Because, if you, so for example, we engaged with,  and we work by the way, in both, in both long-term care and senior living. So, our clients operate everything from skilled nursing to, you know, assisted living, memory care, independent living, all of the above, right? We cater to all of that. I was speaking with a larger Al operator that was almost all, it was like they were almost exclusively Al, and they have 60 plus locations and were scheduling on paper. They weren’t using an EHR in a really, almost at all. They weren’t, their foundational systems were not ready for CareWork, right? They had a lot of work to do internally, I think, just to get themselves to the point where they had data to work with.

(Jackie 9:58)  
So, we don’t ever, you know, for us, we would never say, “okay, we’re gonna install CareWork.” If it’s not gonna do anything for you, you need to have that data. That’s really the way that it goes. If I have a conversation with a customer, and they’re not, at least at the core, sort of foundationally set up, What I like to do is refer them to the companies that I think might be the right fight or maybe like a top three or share with them some of the systems that our clients  are using and liking, and then we circle back.

(Amber 10:06)
Yeah, that makes sense. Think, speaking of implementation, you know, I think sometimes people hear system implementation and all they think about is how much extra work is this going to add to my day-to-day? So, can you tell us a little bit about what does an implement implementation plan look like? What’s the schedule? What do you need from clients to participate in that process?

(Jackie 10:53)
Absolutely. So, we need, we need input from. Ultimately, it’s three people, whatever that title may be but typically it’s at a corporate level, so it’ll be director level plus is usually who who works with us. So one operations, one clinical, and one finance. So, those are the three key players in the setup. What we’re gathering from them are targets, goals, and budget. So, really the first step is gonna be bringing those systems in. So, we have to work on getting the systems integrated, although we do some of this stuff in tandem, but the first step is bringing in the EHR environment because from the EHR, we’re able to pull information on how the locations are set up in the EHR, and information on how, for example, AR codes are set up that tie to both census and financial data. So, we like to start with that starting point because it gives us a visual of how they’re set up.

(Jackie 11:59)
Then, we take that and we have to work on mapping. So, targets, goals and budgets, and then how do we want the information to display? So, payer-type mapping because we wanna bucket that you might accept, you know, you might have 20 different insurance types, right? We don’t want, we don’t want 20 different rows of data. We want all of that to flow to a category called insurance or managed care. However, we wanna set that up, right, or both. So, the, the configuration, or excuse me, the effort from the customer is really what do you want it to look like? But we have that very structured, we run with all of the sort of hard work.

(Jackie 12:34)
So, once we get that information, we  first build the environment, and, you know, load out the locations and then we take it section by section and work on mapping. We also roll it out to the customer. Section by section, but in a three phased rollout. So, the first rollout is rolled out to the corporate users. So, it’s really the key stakeholders. They use it for a couple of weeks, make sure that we don’t need to do any final tweaks. Did we, you know, miss this in mapping or was there a code that should be there that isn’t there? You know, just kind of the stuff that when it’s brand new you have to deal with. So, they use that for a couple of weeks.

(Jackie 13:17)
Once they say, oh, nope, this is pretty good. Then, we roll it out to the regionals. We want the regionals to get comfortable with it before it’s rolled out to the facilities and the communities, because by the time it gets to the facilities and the communities, it needs to be just solid. The regionals are already using it and they really only need to use it for a week.

(Jackie 13:34)
I just want them to get used to using it. The other thing that we do is we provide customers and ourselves with a utilization tool. It’s built right into the system. So, we manage closely monitor the planners for the first couple of months and then once a month thereafter, the utilization down to the actual job title at each location, because the idea here is the users of CareWork are all management- level plus employees. So, the idea is that it should be used Monday through Friday consistently. So, we can actually drill down to that usage, and we can drill down to what is being used by what job title, because we CareWork as a company, and this was a huge peeve of mine in my CIO days, rolling out a system that wasn’t being utilized or adopted. We’re paying for it. I don’t wanna have, my personal goal is I don’t wanna have a single customer inside of CareWork that isn’t actually using this system. You know, 80% to 90% across the organization, because, you know, you’re gonna have some people that you have to maybe, maybe train a little bit more, but generally speaking, we wanna see 80% plus utilization as a standard average.

(Amber 14:43)
Yeah, definitely system optimization and usage is a goal to work on for all clients of all their major prize enter systems, and I would even say it applies to some of the systems that would feed into CareWork. You need to be able to fully utilize PCC or your financial system or whatever to have the accurate data go into care work as well.

(Jackie 15:04)
Can I make a point to that? Because that was a really good that, I’m so glad you brought that up. One of the, it was like an unintended afterthought bonus, right? Of using something like care work is that it shines a spotlight on incorrect data in the source systems. So on the clinical side, You know, it very easily points out when things aren’t charted properly, right? Or aren’t charted at all. On the financial side, it points out when things are maybe incorrectly added on the, I mean, everything, right? So, it’s such a shortcut to say, “oh, this is incorrect in the source system. We really need to fix this. Or we really need to train our teams how to input this correctly because we wanna have good data.”

(Amber 15:47)
Yeah, absolutely, and I think that leads to a bigger question about ROI. So, obviously CareWork is a system that that you have to pay for, but I think, the bigger picture is that there’s so much process efficiency that you’re gaining and so much more information that you have at your fingertips in addition to reducing a lot of manual and paper processes. So, can you talk a little bit about how you see CareWork replacing some of those inefficiencies, and how do you really sort of capture that full return on investment with this system?

(Jackie 16:18)
Okay, so I’m gonna talk about this in two directions. One is opportunity-cost savings. So, we’re talking about saving time, doing more with less and then the other piece I’ll talk about is hard- dollar savings. Our goal as a company is for CareWork to always pay for itself plus, plus, plus, right? So, from an opportunity- cost perspective, I’m gonna give you a few examples, but I’m gonna start with we believe that the system will reduce the administrative burden for management level plus employees by 80% or more.

(Jackie 16:51)
So, what that means is 80% time, 80% less time spent sitting at a computer, and 80% more time focusing on fostering, developing and retaining staff and spending time with residents and family members. So, from an oppor, that’s a high broad statement, right? So, let me give you a couple of real world examples. One of my VPs of clinical 27, facility-skilled operator, so she’s a VP of clinical. She spends a day and a half, this is her quote, not mine, a day and a half every month, compiling one quality measures report. So,  a day and a half of VP of clinical time, yes, there’s a hard-cost savings there, right? You’re paying a VP of clinical to sit in her in front of her computer for a day and a half, but she has other things to do.

(Jackie 17:42)  
So, we automated that report and now all she has to do is click it. So, it is five minutes to review the report, not a day and a half of manually compiling it. So, when I talk about custom report automation, our goal with CareWork is for these organizations to completely ditch the spreadsheets. We want them gone.  So, we want, we want over time zero spreadsheet and document-driven reports being emailed back and forth across departments, in between regions and up to up to the corporate level. So, we start by saying, “alright, let’s talk about what reports on a spreadsheet or a document. Do the department heads at the facilities or communities owe the regionals every month or every week or every day?”

(Jackie 18:27)
We start with that, and then we say, “alright, we’re gonna build those over time into CareWork. So, the idea becomes that any of those reports, here’s the, here’s the typical way those are completed, I open up my spreadsheet, I dig in three different systems to pull out all this information from a bunch of systems I have, I add in my notes and thoughts and feelings, and then I send it to my regional. My regional gets it from a bunch of locations. They roll it up and they send it to corporate. Next week, I go pull all the same information over and over again, and I might do three different reports that ask for 30% of the same information that I just had to do over and over and over again, right? So, when you build that same report inside of CareWork, what what we’ve found is 80% to 90%, I would say 80% on average, 80% of the data that li, that is requested in those reports, lives in a system somewhere. About 20% is what we call observational data.

(Jackie 19:24)
It’s my thoughts, my feelings, my notes. How many state and federal visits did we have? So, when you build that report inside of CareWork, the 80% that already lives in the systems, auto-populates for the person who is required to submit the report. So, that report we call a “task” in our system. So, if it’s a clinical report, it’s due every Wednesday, 80% of it auto-populates.

(Jackie 19:46)
I enter the 20% that didn’t, and I click submit. So, it just took me 80% less time to complete that report. So, those are, those are examples of opportunity-cost savings, and there are more than that. Just analyzing your data can bring tremendous opportunity-cost savings in, in, you know, things like overtime and all of those things, but I actually asked three of our clients to give me in their own, what they felt the cost savings would be just, and I mean, it was like a quick conversation and I put them on a slide. So, here’s what they gave me. Reducing labor costs, reduced waste, revenue loss prevention, and faster time to cash increasing revenue, and this is what they said about that allows us to do more reporting than we could do manually, which allows us to be proactive and more responsive. This results in better star ratings, making us more attractive to potential patients and residents, which leads to more revenue. They talked a lot about clinical insight, and I had one operator tell me the less time our ED has to spend doing administrative work and digging for information, the more time they have to focus on sales, and lastly, they said a reduction in fine by reducing clinical errors. So that’s just kind of a short list. I didn’t want to as CareWork answer that question. When people ask, I’d rather have our customers answer it in their own words.

(Amber 21:07)
I’m so glad you spent so much time diving into that because when I first met you and you described what CareWork was, I, this is what got me super excited because I know you’re, you’re talking a lot about bigger communities, but our clients are mostly single sites. They still spend so much time on these manual processes that you’re talking about, and I think the ability to just move all that to be completely automated is such a gift to the industry in general, which is why, you know, I’m so glad that you’ve developed CareWork and that, you know, you came on this podcast to talk about it.

(Amber 21:36)
So, do you have any other words of wisdom or advice or anything else our listeners should know about CareWork before we wrap up?

(Jackie 21:44)
No, I would just say with regard to words of wisdom, technology has historically been kind of a scary thing in our space for operators and for, you know, employees, but I would say that we’re at a point in, in our history in which it, it has to be adopted, and there are clever ways to do, but I would say make sure you’re looking at your core systems. Make sure you have the right ones in place, and once you do, you should be looking at unifying your operations to be more efficient.

(Amber 22:19)
I love that! I agree a 100%. Jackie, thank you so much for joining me today! It’s been really a pleasure to speak with you.

(Jackie 22:26)
Thanks for having me.

(Amber 22:27)
Listeners, you can find us online at www.parasolalliance.com and go to our Resources page where you can see all of our past episodes. If you would like to submit an idea or feedback or a topic you’d like to see on the podcast, please reach out to us on our website, and as always, thank you for listening!

Amber:
0:05

Welcome back to Raising Tech. This is your host, Amber Bardon, and today we’re talking about a topic that I’m actually really excited about. I’ve been really looking forward to this interview and this conversation. On today’s episode, we have Tiffany Naticchoni, hopefully I said your last name correctly. And she is a Regional Director of Sales for CarePredict. Welcome to the show, Tiffany.

Tiffany:
0:24

Hi, Amber. Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to talk about the CarePredict technology and all the ways for innovating the senior living space.

Amber:
0:33

I wanna tell the story really briefly about how I first heard about CarePredict, because I was actually not aware of your product. And I’ve done,, several conferences at, local leadingage states over the year about innovation and technology, resident technology, technology, strategic planning, that type of thing. And one of the things that I talk about is new technology design and new construction. And I actually had an attendee at one of the conferences bring up CarePredict because we were talking about innovation and emergency call responses and how there hasn’t been a lot of change in that industry. And somebody brought up your company and I think from there we connected with you. And I’m just really interested to hear about what you’re offering and what you’re doing in this space. So can you tell us about what CarePredict is?

Tiffany:
1:15

Yeah, absolutely. So, so we are an AI technology platform. very technical, lots of features. but what we’ve done is we’ve, we’ve been built out to empower caregivers to provide better care for our seniors. we’re on a mission to, drive a purpose built company built for, built from our, CEO and founder Satishmo’s very personal need to take care of his aging parents. and he was also the successful founder of, a couple of other healthcare technology software platforms in the past. So he built us out. so all of the technicals involved, like you had already mentioned, um, call system, fall detection is another. Um, all of these point solutions that our senior living communities are shopping for and looking to upgrade and update and, they’re looking for solutions that are meeting the needs of the current and, modern operation. Right? And we’re facing staffing shortages. We’re facing occupancy issues. quite frankly, our staff just need an easier experience at work, right? So we’ve built our, our platform out to be easier for the end user experience for our caregivers. And we started basically focused on health insights in the congregate living setting. And then we evolved significantly to detecting falls through all of this. We’re reducing falls, unplanned hospitalizations, um, increasing the length of stay and of course improving the staff response times. So we do all of this through a wearable device called a Tempo that’s worn on the dominant wrist, and it’s going to, um, have some gesture recognition. Um, so it’s going to detect like activities of daily living, um, walking, um, brushing teeth, brushing hair, eating, all of those different activities and behaviors. Um, and also it has, real time location information in it, which allows, the AI platform to, to provide data to the operators, the caregivers on, you know, what activities are our residents and staff engaged in every day, and what type of utilization are our, um, residents and, and caregivers experiencing each day. so are wearable unobtrusively, and in the background collects data on activity behavior.

Amber:
3:26

That’s a lot of information. Let’s, let’s unpack and dive into that a little bit more. So I wanted to mention, you know, before we get into what some of these different offerings are that you just mentioned, I wanted to bring up sort of a, a case in point about what you just described. I was working with a client on, uh, new construction technology design, and we were specifically researching and looking for a solution. Like what I found out later that CarePredict has, and the conversation I was having with this client is, you know, we’re building a brand new building and we need to put in emergency call, we need to put in technology for life safety, but why does all of this technology look like it was made in 1980? And we don’t wanna be giving residents things that look like, you know, pieces of plastic that are yellow and not attractive, and we don’t wanna be putting devices on the walls that look like they were made, you know, several decades ago. And I think there is an importance on the visual aspect and the design of the devices. So can you talk a little bit about that and how CarePredict has approached that problem? And then can you dive a little bit more into maybe specifically to start with just the emergency call and the wander product that you have?

Tiffany:
4:31

Yeah, absolutely. So I’ll touch on all that and I’ll start with the caregiver’s experience using the product. So when we talk about modernizing technologies that they are using every day, we all know you and I know if, you know, if we’re using a, you know, a DOS system to do our job every day, we’re probably going to be less efficient, right? We’re probably not going to enjoy the process. It’s just not modern, right? So the design of our product is focused, on being user friendly to the person who’s using it, right? Our product is a dashboard displayed on a smart or mobile device, that your caregivers would use to take alerts and also see location, um, and interact with the, software on the dashboard. so number one, they’re, they’re using a mobile device on their shift, right? So m walkie talkies, and then the staff or, so the residents are then going to be wearing a, a wearable on the wrist that looks much like what their caregivers are already wearing, such as the Apple Watch or the Samsung Watch, or the even Fitbit style wearables. So the residents are actually adopting these a lot faster. In addition to, the staff members who are okay with wearing these in the sense that they are very modern looking, it’s a small, sleek design. the, there’s one piece of technology that we use, for the, location information, and it’s a beacon, right? The beacon and the tempo are both battery operated. so there’s no infrastructure needed as far as electricity or, or ethernet. It’s all wirelessly operated. very easy to use and maintain, no construction needed. So, um, the stigma of a pendant, right? So pendants are currently what are being used for call buttons, in most congregate communities. And so the stigma of a pendant can make a resident feel as if they are institutionalized. And so CarePredicts mission was to empower the dignified care and to reduce that, that stigma or, to make their residents feel at home because quite frankly, these are their homes most times. And so using technology that looks like the technology that the rest of the population is using is very important to our design.

Amber:
6:34

So can you walk me through what exactly can be done from that device? So can you maybe describe what it looks like? I know you mentioned a Fitbit, if you, you know, does it look like that, like an Apple watch? And does that device, does it have the capabilities to do all of the different things you mentioned with the falls technology the wander guard, the location management, things like that?

Tiffany:
6:52

Yeah, absolutely. So, the technologies that operators and caregivers are using and shopping for these days are the, you know, the laundry management systems, the fall detection, the two-way audio, um, and the staff communications devices. So what we’ve done is we have built out our own platform, um, that provides these four things and more, and I’ll go through the extra features, um, but to, to start at the top with those essentials that operators and caregivers are using every single day. so what, what does the device do? So, it’s not a touch screen. Like we may equate like our, like our generation uses, um, like on the Apple Watch, it’s not a touch s creen, and that’s on purpose, right? Because there are dexterity issues, there are visual issues. the device that’s w orn on the wrist t o the tempo, it’s, built. It’s just, it’s a black square much the size of an Apple watch. we compare it to that often because it just is very similar. it’s not an Apple watch. It could, it collects much of the information that the, uh, that those devices, those other smart wearables might heart rate activity level. it’ll detect falls because it has sensors on board that will, that will do that. It’ll detect acceleration, and, humidity sensing and all of these different pieces of technology that, that other, folks in the population are wearing. but it d oesn’t specifically for the senior living setting. So focusing on call buttons, right? So the face of the tempo wearable has a button. So if a resident presses the button, just quickly, it’s actually going to read the d ate, the date and the time. And then fourth, it’s going to tell the battery level of the tempo. so it’s always possible to know what, what the battery level is there. and the battery is swapable and we’ll get into to that technical, in just a few, but I wanted to mention that because it allows for 24/7 wearing, and so that’s going to, the call button’s going to connect to a caregiver in the mobile device that they’re carrying. And so that mobile device is going to be, we’re agnostic to which device you choose for your staff. but it’s going to show an alert on the screen much like your caregivers are used to when they accept a text message or a phone call, right? so they’re gonna open up two-way audio with their resident, and this is the most innovative in the space because no other wearable is doing everything we’re doing and providing that peace of mind to the resident to be able to speak with their caregiver immediately, right? What this does for the caregiver is it’s allowing them to prioritize their calls. So it is no mystery if you’ve ever been in a senior living community that at any given time, a caregiver has 10 things going on at once. Right? so this allows them to triage their calls, um, and prioritize their work.

Amber:
9:28

One of the things I imagine people listen to this podcast are wondering is that an investment in emergency call system or a call system or, uh, pendant system, things like that. It’s a pretty big investment. So if, if a community has recently made that investment or they’re not interested in reimplementing that, do you integrate with existing systems or can you talk about what would be the use case in that scenario?

Tiffany:
9:47

Absolutely. So we are, we are integration ready and we’re interoperable with other technologies as well. So in, in most cases where we use this is say, a, a operator has, pull cords and they wanna keep those pull cords in the community and they, they wanna keep the existing program, those are on. but they wanna use CarePredict primarily. this is specific in the case of, when you have a CCRC community, and you have a skilled nursing setting, and then you also have a assisted living, independent living. Well no doubt the, the uses and the operations are very different. but to unify across one platform, we pull those alerts from the, say the pull cords to the Care Predict platform. So, the caregiver, the end user is going to have the very same experience, despite having multiple softwares, pushing the alerts, they’re going to receive the alerts on one platform.

Amber:
10:38

Okay. Got it. That makes sense. And I know you mentioned earlier that these devices are dependent on wifi. So can you talk a little bit about what you’re looking for a community to have prepped or what should they know before they would be looking at a solution carepredict?

Tiffany:
10:53

Yeah, so we are wifi dependent, and that is, that’s been built out for the, uh, the, you know, the operator who’s focused on having a lower infrastructure. You mentioned, you know, in a construction planning setting, you we’re looking at infrastructure, right? Electrical happens very early on when you’re mapping out low voltage electric for, for, a call system that’s reliant on the low voltage, you’re gonna have to map that out with electricity and wiring and all of these things. Carepredict runs on wifi exclusively. for the very purpose of it being a simpler design, no need to map those out, no need to spend the extra, um, cash flow capital on that. w e, our infrastructure is built to be easy to use and there is no it, p rofessional requirements to, t o live on s ite as far as, y ou know, you don’t have to have, an IT person to manage your system. Your end u ser’s really going to be the driver of the, the input in addition to the most significant driver of the input is just, just simply the residents and staff wearing the wearable, c uz it’s gonna collect all of the information.

Amber:
11:57

Got it. That makes sense. And yeah, this, this is in line with something that I say at all the, conferences that I present at is that wireless is definitely sort of that, that core system we wanna have in place when we’re doing new technology design or new construction, to make sure that systems like this are able to be implemented and, for the community to be innovative. I wanna go back to in the very beginning of our conversation, you mentioned that Care Predict is an AI system. Can you explain what that means? Cause I feel like we hear the term, AI a lot and it can be used in a lot of different contexts. So can you just dive into that a little bit more?

Tiffany:
12:29

Yeah. The AI I involved in when we’re talking about Care Predict is, um, we’re using activity based information. We’re, we’re pulling data, from multiple different sensors and locations and, you know, folks who aren’t very technologically, you know, savvy or literate, you don’t have to be to, to really understand the background of it. We’re just pulling a ton of different information and we’re putting it all together in algorithms that are producing a consistent data result. And these data points are allowing, um, for easier operation. So for example, when we’re talking about, UTI prevention or detection or prediction, right? the data points that are being pulled through the care predict system would be, um, how frequently does the residents visit the restroom, right? And so this, this could be, uh, the restroom, whether it’s in their unit specifically or if they’re in a, a different level of care, if they’re using the, the public facilities, doesn’t matter, the system’s gonna pull the information frequency and duration of when that resident is interacting in with a bathroom location, right? So, it can be, it can be assumed that they’re using the bathroom when they’re in there, right? We even have a, detection on dwelling time. So if the dwelling time in the bathroom is, um, longer than the predetermined range, say 15 minutes, right? There’s going to be an alert that can be sent to caregivers to indicate that the resident is, has been toileting for far too long. They may need some assistance, right? And that alert will be driven directly to a caregiver. and on the screen you would see, the caregiver would see the name and the location of the resident, the location right down to the room.

Amber:
14:10

Got it. Yeah, that’s, that’s really interesting. Is there, do you know, is, I’m just curious, I dunno if you’re allowed to say this, are there other products in the marketplace that have that capability?

Tiffany:
14:19

So there are different products that do sensing, ambient sensing very, very well, and they should, um, our product follows our resident throughout the entire community. So yes, there are technologies that do, um, sense or, um, or monitor remotely the bathroom usage or, or the ambulation or, or different activity movements. what is unique about ours is we baseline the information. So we take the information after a resident has worn our Tempo device for, uh, greater than two weeks, um, they’re going to get a baseline established, right? And then every, four weeks, the baseline is calculated as a rolling baseline. So we know how often Jane Doe frequently uses the restroom. We know that it’s typically five times a day. What the AI does in this scenario is it’s going to detect when they’re outliers and then it’s going to, push a report through to the caregivers and management to say, Hey, Jane Doe and, you know, these X amount of other residents are outside of their baselines, for this, this week, the past two days, past month, right? So these reports are gonna be pushed to the caregivers. and this is a very attractive feature because they don’t have to go searching through medical records to find out, um, exactly what behaviors have gone on, what activity has gone on. This is what keeps our residents in their, their place longer. It allows them to age in place and reduce their hospitalizations. Um, as we know, those can tend to be factors that, that pull them outta the community permanently or it can bring them back into the community with other issues. or just simply the disruption of of them leaving the community can be, um, pretty significant to, a resident and the community both.

Amber:
16:01

Yeah, that’s really interesting. Are you able to integrate with the electronic medical record system so that all of that, health information could be pulled into one place?

Tiffany:
16:11

Absolutely. Absolutely. Operators are asking for, demographic information for that census based billing, for live and real time information to be transferred through. Um, and we are actually, yep, we’re in P’S marketplace, matrix Care, e t c etera. So we have an open internet api. we are willing to integrate if, if the other party is. So we’re very proud of that. That’s been s uper, super helpful for that interoperability, reform in h ealthcare, which is so necessary.

Amber:
16:40

Yeah, that’s really fantastic. I think it’s been an issue in this industry for a really long time to have so many disparate systems and the inability of those systems to talk to each other, to really give us this more complete picture to the residents health for better quality of care overall. So I think it’s really exciting to hear that you’re able to do that and to just take us a little bit closer to that, you know, ideal world in which we can have essentially managed location for everything to do with the resident.

Tiffany:
17:05

Absolutely. Yeah. And, and that’s our mission. We’re we’re here to provide that easier experience for the end result being so that everyone benefits.

Amber:
17:13

Yeah. So one of the things I wanna ask you about is, I’m, I’m curious to hear what are some of the common challenges that you, you have heard from your clients? And specifically I wanted to go back to what you mentioned earlier with the device and the battery. And I know I’ve heard some concerns from some of the people I’ve talked to about the, you know, kind of how that works. Could you talk about that a little bit?

Tiffany:
17:34

Yeah, absolutely. And, and that is a valid concern. I would say I hear from most prospects. They, they ask, help me understand this battery change because all my caregivers are hearing is one more thing to do, right? And that can be triggering or buzzing. when you have caregivers who’s, you know, quite frankly, their hair is on fire, you know, as we speak, like I said before, at any given moment, they have a thousand things to do, right? so Care Predict is focusing on putting the care back into the caregiver’s hands and allowing them to prioritize it and give it in the best way possible. So when it comes to the battery changes, so the battery and the tempo, and then the battery and the location Beacon are both, they’re both changeable. So the, I’ll talk about them respectively. The Tempo Battery has a 24 to 36 hour wear time, right? Depending on how much the resident is using it. I know when I got my Apple Watch, I was, I was surprised by, how long it would last if I didn’t take a phone call on it, right? and the utilization definitely correlated with the li the duration of the battery. So, um, same goes with our device. The reason we have the Swapable battery, like I mentioned before, is to allow that 24 7 monitoring. So with all of that being said, it’s being a very popular question. any of my customers would agree that it’s a non-event to change these batteries out. It simply pulls right out of the side of the tempo and gets replaced with a full battery. Each tempo comes with a duo battery charger, so they come with two batteries. and then of course, caregivers have a, they have a, plethora of, of charged full batteries too, and they have, um, chargers at their stations or wherever they choose to put it in the community. So there’s not typically a shortage of charged batteries. The caregivers find that it’s a non-event to swap these out, so they’re able to build it into their workflow. They’re already touching residents at least once per day. so it’s an easy task to add on. They can also, if they’re interacting with a resident, they can also press the tempo button, like I said, that one time and get the date, the time and the battery level. Also, the third precaution that we’ve taken is on the caregiver’s device, on the home screen of their CarePredict platform, they’re gonna see two little options. And one of those is tempos not worn, and it’s gonna show the number of tempos that are not being worn at the current moment. So it’s always on the dashboard, that the caregiver can access of who isn’t wearing their tempo. And that list can even provide qualified information on, well, maybe you have two non worn tempos. Well, maybe those are both out of the community at this time, and that’s why. So, um, that’s one report. And then the second report is the battery life. So the battery, report and status shows all of the battery levels. So as long as the tempo is being worn and it’s online, it’s going to report back to the system, tell the system the battery level. So with that being said, you can get alerts scheduled when the battery gets to be too low. So say you have 10 residents with a battery that’s on yellow, you have five hours to replace these. Um, typically it’s able to be built into the workflow.

Amber:
20:34

Okay. That makes sense. Are you considering doing a chargeable battery in the future?

Tiffany:
20:39

So the, interestingly enough, so I’m not, I’m not building the product out by any means, but I know that this is a pos or it’s a hot question because we don’t want to add any work to our, our caregivers, right? So this is essentially the only maintenance task involved since our system is picking up all of the information that it needs to based on just being worn. so to answer your question, I don’t know what’s in the, the pipeline for that other roadmap. but I can say that the function for 24 7 wearing is at the forefront. So that is the priority right now.

Amber:
21:11

Okay, got it. Are there any, one thing I always like to ask, vendors or partners who come on this show is, are there any specific clients that you’ve worked with or any success stories that come to mind that you can share?

Tiffany:
21:25

Yes. Yes, absolutely. So, we actually have a, a local CCRC here in Cincinnati, where I’m from, and they have, they’ve established care predict across their, their continuum of care, and they, they’re finding value in each level. a little bit to build on the last question you asked about, challenges that we see. and then to add that to the success story, um, in this specific situation, we had a resident who, um, who wasn’t bought in to care, predict upon initial installation and implementation, didn’t like it, didn’t wanna wear it. and this is representative of personalities who just simply feel like they don’t wanna wear it. And, and we have those. And so that’s, that’s no mystery, and it both certainly is something that, that can be overcome. so this specific community I’m mentioning, they had, a guy who didn’t wanna wear the wearable, didn’t agree, didn’t, didn’t see the benefit of it, just hearing, you know, um, the, the original pitch, so to speak. He actually experienced a fall, um, a couple days later after the Care Predict system was implemented. And, he realized how valuable the care predict, wearable would have been for him, how, much quicker he would’ve been discovered, and how much he, he could have gotten care sooner. and not to mention he could have been in communication immediately with a caregiver who could have come and helped him. but unfortunately he didn’t. and he, he suffered a little bit, he’s okay now, wasn’t, wasn’t a significant event, but he’s okay now. but he immediately saw the value in that and, and adopted it immediately. So, I don’t believe he’s had any subsequent falls since then, that were undetected, but the Tempo device is definitely seen as a safety feature, and it’s worn. It’s the only device that goes with the resident everywhere in the community. So he definitely saw the value in having that on him at all times.

Amber:
23:17

Yeah, that’s a, that’s a great example. Tiffany, everything we’ve been talking about is so exciting, and I just love that this type of technology is coming to the industry. Can you share what is in the future for CarePredict what are you working on in the next 12 months?

Tiffany:
23:30

Yeah, so I’ll, I’ll, before I go in, into what we’re working on, what’s going on in the future, I’ll say a few of the things that I haven’t mentioned yet. as far as features go, um, the, the device, the Tempo device is able to collect data through Bluetooth. So that’s something that we historically were working on and finally released recently. So, there we have some approved devices that, can feed information directly into the tempo and thus pushing it into the ADL activity. So example being, you know, a Bluetooth glucose meter or a Bluetooth blood pressure cuff, can, can these feed readings into the tempo? The answer now is yes. so that’s an exciting, uh, growth feature that we’ve had this year. so it, we’re allowing, we’re, we’re creating baselines, right? So every time a resident is recording their blood pressure or their glucose or their weight, right, these are now being pushed into the system to, to receive a baseline and then also detect detects changes and degradations and alerts the caregivers through that. that the changes and, degradations, or, sorry, degradations, report. So we called that the out of baseline report. So that’s been a, a huge feature that’s been new recently. Another new feature, is called Care Voice. care Voice is where we’re able to set reminders for our residents, um, in the voice of their choice, right? So maybe it’s their, their grandchild or their family member who wants to say, you know, at 4:00 PM every day the recording goes off and says, Hey mom, you know, it’s time to take your meds. Or, Hey, grandma, don’t forget to go walking today. so that’s a huge popular feature now too. Um, we are also able to open up electronic door locks as a key fob. So instead of a resident more in the independent and assisted realms, instead of them carrying that key fob or that key card or, um, where that could potentially get lost, or it’s simply just one more thing to carry, we’re taking that off their plate and we’re, we’re putting the key fob feature inside of the Tempo wearable so they can open up their unit door with their tempo. That’s been a huge sticking point for our independent living residents. and also passive check in for independent living residents. They’re able to simply wear their tempo. and then an exception report is sent to, the caregiving staff to let them know who has moved around, who has not moved around yet today, and, and maybe they need to be checked on. so those are just a few features that I hadn’t mentioned yet, that are pretty popular. But as far as what’s coming next, um, we we’re seeing some quality of life assessments and scores. in the future. Automated voice prompted assessments, so much like our care voice with a reminder, um, our care voice couldn’t, could prompt a, an assessment to ask, you know, scale of one to 10, how are you feeling today? Or, or, or, um, or any, any subjective information that needs to be collected, could be done that way. We’re also looking to detect early signs of mci. The mild cognitive impairment, as we know, is a prelude to dementia. So we’re looking at, cognitive impairment scoring and detection, um, sleep phases, duration, or even having some hardware evolution, so cellular and GPS detection for the residents when they’re outside of the community. So we think in the independent living space, um, these folks don’t stay at the community all the time, right? So, you know, if a fall is detected offsite, um, the caregivers are able to be alerted. And and that’s a huge feature, um, that’s, that’s popular with the independent, population these days. We are looking at FDA approval that should come in the next year. Um, we’re really, really excited for that as it’ll give, you know, that validation and that benchmark of, you know, how accurate our, our technology is. so that’s really exciting. Um, and then of course, continuous measurements on automated gate, stride length, et cetera. We are committed to meeting the needs of the industry. and one feature I didn’t mention, that demonstrates that was the contact tracing. So since we have all of this robust data on our residents, our staff, our visitors, we’re able to provide a contact tracing, dashboard that is very easy to use, very user friendly, and it has, um, it has real time location information so we can filter down to see a person of interest. So maybe someone was diagnosed with a contagious illness, um, and they need to be isolated, right? So we’re able to, to filter per date and in person and see all of their primary contacts, secondary contacts, um, and even the areas where they, where they, they hung out, right? So we can even decontaminate based on the report that is given to us, from the contact tracing solution. The cool piece about this is, and the reason I’m mentioning it now, when you ask kind of about what we have in the future, this was something that we, our, our engineers and technologists were able to build and release with from, from seven days, from inception to, to general release. So we were able to provide in the midst of the pandemic our caregivers with an automated solution to help them complete a contact tracing task that formally took them hours and days to complete. And it was exhausting. It took them out of their caregiving, right? So this just speaks to our, our mission and our commitment to evolving with the industry and continuing to deliver in whatever way that we are capable to our customers and to the industry.

Amber:
28:43

That’s fantastic. I really like the door FOB integration. That’s something that we hear a lot of requests on, is they wanna be able to manage everything from, from just the one device that they can wear. one of the things I wanna ask you before we wrap up, has Care Predict considered moving into the home care market? I’m wondering if some of this technology could be used to keep people in the home longer, or is this really meant for more of a residential situation where there can be, uh, staff monitoring the alerts?

Tiffany:
29:11

Great question and great call out. I, would be remissed if I didn’t mention that feature. So we actually are, are in with home care agencies across the nation, and these home care caregivers are utilizing the Care Predict at Home feature. and that division of our business is handled, in a different department. I don’t handle that at home, which is probably why I hadn’t mentioned it yet, I apologize. But we do facilitate that. And Home care is a huge, a huge source of information because we’re able to collect information and still provide that value to the resident while they’re in their, in their home. and then of course transferring that information, to their caregivers when they go into the community. so we are looking at, you know, some CCRC have home care businesses, and so we talk a lot with the CCRC that we’re with to, um, to build that out into their home care realm for expanding the care and expanding the, touch and the the ability to serve that resident longer.

Amber:
30:08

Yeah. And then there, there’s the home care side, which you’re talking about, which is the, you know, still provided by a community, but I’m curious if it’s just would be available to seniors just individually who live in their home independently.

Tiffany:
30:17

Absolutely. Yep. And we have a, we have a base of customers who actually utilize it just independently on their own, in their community. and it was cool. I was actually at the Ohio Assisted Living Association conference, and a woman came up to me and she said, we just got this from my father-in-law at his home. And we love it because we live two hours away and we’re able to see and check in on his activity, um, and also received critical alerts whenever there is something going on. so it’s really adding the peace of mind to the resident or to the, sorry, to the person in their home, and then also to their family members. So it is an exciting, and hot, um, hot feature for the at home product.

Amber:
30:53

Yeah. And really a lot of implications for seniors who wanna remain in their homes longer. So that’s really fantastic to hear. Yeah. Tiffany, is there anything we didn’t cover that you want our listeners to know?

Tiffany:
31:05

I think we covered most of it. we’re really just continuing to just emphasize how we’re built for caregivers, for residents, for family members to provide the safety to our seniors in a simple and easy manner. And, and even in situations where, operators are having staff shortages or they have agency staff in their buildings or, you know, there’s, they’re, they’re looking for utilization analysis. We have that data, so we’re able to provide data that operators can use in their own unique way. So we are not a one size fits all standard system. all of our alerts reports, data, everything is customizable in our Wonder Management feature. I don’t think we delve too deep into that, but the Wonder Management feature, is huge too because we’re, we’re able to detect when a resident is wandering outside of a predetermined boundary and that alert goes straight to the caregiver, and opens up a call or, or however that alert is customizably set to that, caregiver or operation. just continuing to build it out to make it easier with a low infrastructure and at a budget that the community can afford. Lot of lots of people ask, this all sounds wonderful and great, what’s the cost? Right? We’re very competitive, um, in the sense of we’re, we’re comparing very closely to just what is a call system. And so in that regard, people are finding that they have all of this, this breadth of feature and this robust data and all of these features, and they’re getting it at nearly the same cost as a call system. Um, so that’s something that I, I always like to shout out. We are budget friendly, um, and it sounds like a lot and it’s really good. and, and of course I’m passionate about it, right? I’m here. I was a formerly a clinical dietician in this senior living space, and so I get it, and I, I know how frustrating, it can be to search for data that you can’t find. and to have it in our system to be driven straight to us is just such a, a blessing and a convenience.

Amber:
33:02

Well, thank you so much for joining me, Tiffany. This is a podcast episode I was really looking forward to, I was telling people we’re gonna talk to Care Predict. I’m so excited to ask them questions and learn about their products. So really appreciate your time and joining the show today.

Tiffany:
33:15

Thank you so much, Amber. Yeah, no, I appreciate you, you having me on and, and then and tell people, more about us. So,, thanks. Appreciate it.

Amber:
33:23

Thanks so much again for joining me today. And listeners, if you have ideas or topics or you’d like to be featured on a future episode, you can find us on our website parasolalliance.com. And thank you for listening.

Amber:
0:05

Welcome back to Raising Tech, the podcast about all things technology and senior living. I’m your host, Amber Bardon, and today we have a very special guest from one of our clients. Nicole Pretre, the CEO of Cedar Community, is joining us on today’s show. Welcome to the show, Nicole.

Nicole:
0:19

Thank you very much for having me, Amber. I’m excited to be here.

Amber:
0:23

To start off with, I just wanna give a little background about our, history with Cedar Community, what we’ve been working with you on, just to let our listeners know. So, Cedar Community became a client of ours, about three years ago. And we came in and we did a strategic plan, which we’ve done, with all of our clients, and we work through the majority of that plan. And we actually just did a new three year strategic plan, which was really exciting because I feel like the first three years we had to focus on a lot of infrastructure and back office backend infrastructure, things that, you know, aren’t super exciting, but how to get taken care of. And I’m really excited, for the next three years. Cause I think there’s a lot of chances for optimization and system efficiency, and especially innovation, which we wanna talk about today. And I had asked you to join the show because Cedar Community is doing some innovative things. You’ve tried some innovative things that didn’t work out. I think our listeners will really enjoy hearing your perspective. So would you mind giving us a little intro of your background, yourself, and a little bit about Cedar Community to start with?

Nicole:
1:17

Sure. So Cedar Community, we’ve been around for just about 70 years. We were founded back in 1953, a Faith Based not for Profit. We’re located in West Bend, Wisconsin. We have five campuses and we have been serving seniors, like I said, independent living through end of Life Care. So Full Care Continuum plus Home Health and Hospice. About on average 900 to a thousand residents, and a large staff too. So, you know, 400 and plus staff members, which obviously tech is hugely important too. But you know, as far as myself, I’ve been with Cedar Community for 11 years. I’ve been the CEO for a year and a half now. So I’ve had experience in just about every department of the organization, I should say. In my background of sales and marketing and fundraising, which is my primary world that I came from. as well as a, I have a media background, but, so obviously those three areas in sales and marketing and fundraising, I literally touched every aspect of what we did as an organization throughout my career here. So it was really nice to be able to take that experience, both professionally and at Cedar community inside and outside Cedar community, I guess you could say, into my current role.

Amber:
2:33

Nicole, can you give our listeners a little bit of a background of the evolution of technology at Cedar Community? It was in one place before we started working with you, and then since you became the ceo, I know you have a very specific vision of how you would like to see technology utilize at Cedar Community. Do you mind sharing that?

Nicole:
2:49

Sure. You know, we were probably like a lot of you know, senior living organizations, especially in the not-for-profit part side where, you know, we had sort of an internal IT department with a number of individuals here, great individuals but I would say that, you know, not a lot of advancement, you know, we were kind of maintaining, we were kind of status quo, um, with our tech. And had an opportunity with a leadership change in our tech, area to kind of start to look at what else could be out there. started to look at the companies around us, tried to partner with one, um, company that didn’t work out. fortunately, through some connections and some networking with some of our peers, um, we kind of, hooked up with Parasol. And so, and like you said, when you came on with us three years ago, we were still at a point where the infrastructure was, I would say antiquated. I guess that’s a nice word, a nice way of putting it. I’m sure a lot of other senior living organizations are in that same boat. And we really needed to look at, like you said, that back of house stuff, that stuff that, really needed to be brought up to date. and the, as you said too, the hard part about that was that’s the stuff that your, your team members and your residents don’t see. so it’s all o f a sudden we have this new partner a nd technology and they’re doing all this work, but they weren’t seeing it. So it was like, what are they doing? You know? And so that’s hard. So communicating that what’s going on I think is really important. I think we learned along the way that we needed to do a better job of communicating what was actually happening behind the scenes since it wasn’t necessarily front f acing to residents and team members. Like you said, we’re getting to a point now where we’ve turned that corner a little bit. We’re starting to pivot to those systems and programs and whatnot that are impactful to residents and to team members. and that’s really what we need to do as an organization is continue to advance our technology, continue to work, to put systems in place that talk to each other. Becuase I’m sure like a lot of other companies too, we had, you know, 50 different programs and none of them talk to each other. and so that’s I think a really important part. But technology is so pivotal to the future of the delivery of aging services in our sector that we need to continue to find ways to, you know, optimize technology, find that return on investment in the technology that we have. and you know, the bottom line is the impact it has on the engagement with residents, the, um, making your, your team members lives a little easier in the very difficult jobs that they have. so really kind of bringing technology out from, you know, just talking about up updating servers and wifi and those types of un not not fun things, important things, but not necessarily fun, but, um, being able to implement and move us forward in the technology sector, um, so that we can take advantage of some of these really cool programs and, and companies that are emerging out there, um, that are so gonna be so important to us in the future.

Amber:
5:54

Yeah, I really love everything you just said because it’s so in line with a lot of things that if anyone seen me and speak at any of the leading age conferences, we talk about building this technology culture, right? Mm-hmm.<affirmative> and kind of moving from this idea that it is just the computer at your desk to it’s ai, it’s robotics, it’s resident engagement, staff engagement, and, everything you just said is such a great example of how that, uh, company can make that progression and have that change and have that mindset shift. one of the things that I often say when I’m doing presentations is that I was at another conference and someone from Hershey was presenting and he said, Every company today is a technology company. Hershey’s is a technology company that happens to make chocolate. And I think if you kind of shift your mindset to thinking like technology is kind of the backbone that we do so much of our business on, um, it can kind of have people start to think about technology in a different way. I wanted to circle back to something that you mentioned and what you just said is, that staff buy-in and that leadership buy-in. Can you talk a little bit about how did that evolve and how did that happen at Cedar Community?

Nicole:
6:55

Well, I think, you know, early on, you know, we kind of had the one individual, the organization that was sort of the liaison and kind of in charge of it. and they were trying to communicate a lot of things that were happening in the change work that was happening. Um, and initially the leadership team wasn’t really involved kind of in what was happening. We were just kind of being told about what was going on. And then I think we realized that, you know, it was so much more efficient and effective for us to all be at the table, so to speak, when it came to understanding what was going on with those changes that were happening. There were very complicated changes in some cases, you know, some were not so complicated. But at the same time, if it’s not being communicated well and if your tired leadership team doesn’t have buy-in and support for what’s going on in those technology changes, that’s just gonna make it that much more difficult. You know, I think one of the biggest lessons we learned from, from the pandemic was that, you know, all this sudden technology was, you know, front and center for us, and not just in the care of our residents, but in the communication with residents and family members and team members. And we learned pretty quickly that we all needed to be at the table and understand exactly what was happening, because that was how, that was how we were communicating with the outside world for, you know, those, especially those early months of the pandemic. And so that was a really important part and I think an eye opener for many, for many of the folks at Cedar community, for our leadership team. and really understanding that we all needed to be a part of this conversation and a part of this advancement for us and that technology part of what we were doing, which as you said, it impacts everything we do. you know, you think about those days when your email goes down and you’re just sitting there and you’re like, Okay, I can’t really do anything today,<laugh>. I mean, you can’t, but you can’t, right? And so you feel kind of helpless, and it’s not until you hit those days that you realize this technology in our infrastructure affects every single aspect of what we do here. And so it needs to be that important and it needs to be the conversation at that leadership table for sure.

Amber:
9:08

Yeah. Yeah. I love that. So let’s talk a little bit about innovation and technology. And I think there’s so much exciting things happening in senior living technology. I always say senior living technology is the most exciting technology field right now, but if you come from outside the industry, you might be like, what? But it’s such a growing market and we’re starting to see such a generational shift both in staff and residents that there’s so many new companies popping up, so many new things happening. And, I wanna talk a little bit about, what you, what Cedar Community has done, because you’ve had some successes and failures with innovation, and also what is the process that you go through when you’re thinking about innovation and technology? What are you looking for and what do you think are some of the risks?

Nicole:
9:50

Well, I think, you know, we, having, having an experience with trying to implement one of those new and exciting technologies, here at Cedar Community and hitting a few bumps along the way, I think you, like you said, it’s, it’s growing like crazy. I mean, you know, you step onto those expo floors at leading age or at Argentum and, you know, most of the folks out there are tech. and so it, it’s exciting, it’s overwhelming, I would say. But the thing is, is as exciting as it is and is the impact that you see, the positive impact it could have on your residents or on your communication or on some of your workflows or things of that nature, it’s a really important to make sure that you take that step back and make sure that your infrastructure can support that. that was the biggest lesson we learned in trying to implement one of those exciting new technologies out there. And we got to this point and realized we did not have the technology infrastructure we needed to completely implement it the way we envisioned. and we had to take a step back and we had to work with that company who helped us to restructure the contract and restructure our future plans for the, what, what was that tech able to do for us, you know? And, and we’re still working with them and it’s, it’s what we do have and what we are able to do is, is going well. But it was a, it was a tough lesson learned and, and in some cases it a little bit of an expensive lesson learned too. So I would say, you know, make sure that it’s, it, you can, you have the capability to implement it and that what you think it’s going to accomplish. You know, make sure that you’ve got the information to be able to really back that up. You know, what are the, what is the data that they have, what are the metrics that you can look at to make sure that that investment you’re making is going to have a return for you, Whether that’s a financial return so to speak, or a return on the engagement level with your residents and your team members because there’s nothing more painful. Well, there probably is, but it’s pretty painful to get all excited and have all this hype around this huge launch and then have to walk it back. that was really hard. It was hard for the residents to understand why we had to walk it back for the team members. And, so that was a tough lesson learned. And I think with all of the new tech that’s out there, like I said, it’s pretty cool stuff and it’s exciting. but some of them are very, very new as well. And you might wanna, it’s like you don’t wanna buy that first model year of that car, right? You wanna give’em a little time to make sure that, that they can deliver on what they’re talking about. And so, I don’t know, I would probably be reluctant to jump into something brand new. maybe, give it a little time or make sure that they have, they have the metrics to back up what they’re talking about in terms of what they think they say that they can deliver.

Amber:
12:40

Yeah, that’s something I was thinking about while you were talking is I do think there is a burden on the vendors, especially vendors that are coming from a different industry such as hospitals or retail or something like that. A lot of them, a lot of the ones that I interact with, they don’t really have a real understanding of how behind the senior living industry is in a lot of aspects. So their system may rely on wall to wall wifi, and they’re making assumptions that that will work. and then may put their product in and then realize later, Oh actually this is not going to work. Basically some of the requirements that they have for their system to work, uh, we’re not able to be met and those were just kind of glossed over as not being a big deal and we’ll figure it out. And I think it doesn’t, um, it’s not a good look for the vendors either if they’re promising you that the system can do something and without doing their due diligence. And I think that’s just a learning curve, um, that both providers and vendors, uh, need to work through as all all of these new and exciting things are happening.

Nicole:
13:35

And I think another part of that too, Amber, is, you know, like you said, a lot of the tech companies, they’re, they’re from the world of tech, right? They’re from, you know, different and they don’t understand the regulatory environment that we sit in as well. And so I think, you know, I, there’s a couple of different times I’ve gotten these, you know, emails and pitches of different, at different points and they’re like, We can do this and this with video and this with, and okay, well, and where we are located video is illegal<laugh>. So you know it, you know, and they, it’s the greatest thing and they can, you know, solve all these problems or help you with these issues. but regulatory-wise we can’t do it. you know, I have a, my administrator i s, i s looking for what types of tech is out there for fall detection, um, i s a good example. But there are some things out there that just regulatory-wise we can’t do, in our, and especially in the skilled nursing environment. and the other part of it is, you know, we’re sitting, most of us, I shouldn’t classify all of us, but many of us are sitting in very old buildings, concrete block buildings, and we simply don’t have the ability to, to put some of these things in place. because we are, you know, these black holes of cellular service or wifi service or even, you know, some of the things I’ve seen that are like in floor sensor technologies and stuff like that, we can’t, we can’t dig into our concrete floors, you know, so not everything is applicable to our environments from either a structure perspective or a regulatory perspective.

Amber:
15:07

Yeah. That falls, falls prevention, falls detection is a really, interesting concept. There’s, the virtusense product, which they’ve been in our podcast. And that’s a great example of a tech innovator who came to the industry from a personal experience and created a great company. Um, I think that they’re trying to extend their system to assisted living. I’ve kind of heard mixed results on, um, how well it works in assisted living cause it’s really meant to be captured in in one room. and then there’s the safely you product, which has the cameras, which has, privacy concerns, especially in common areas or shared rooms and things like that. And the newest one I’m super excited about, I’m working on scheduling a call, is with a company that has smart socks. they’re currently in the post-acute, uh, actually acute setting and they’re looking to expand a senior living. So I wanna have a conversation with them about that, cuz I think that that’s really interesting. But one of the things I wanna ask you about is there is so much emphasis right now on how can we increase staff efficiency or reduced costs in staffing. And this is a really hot topic actually, I’m hoping to do a podcast on this in the future. We’re working on planning something to focus on this specific topic, but how do you balance competing needs across infrastructure, staff efficiency, um, staff engagement, resident needs? What is, uh, what is your perspective on how to balance that?

Nicole:
16:26

I would say, you know, when we first started talking about programs and, you know, advancing technology, our initial focus was on residents and you know, how do we get that resident engagement part, you know, moving forward and with the new technology that’s out there. But I think now, if you ask that same question of us because of what we’re facing when it comes to workforce and the shortages and the challenges we face, I would probably say that workforce is our top priority now, in terms of the technology component and how can we, um, you know, automate some things if we can, How do we create efficiencies, you know, how do we make our workforces lives easier, um, when they’re doing their jobs? Because, you know, in many cases these are very difficult jobs. And again, I go back to that regulatory environment, it’s, it’s, it’s so incredibly important for us to, you know, have everything documented the way it needs to be documented. And I think right now you’re gonna see a shift, um, you know, with the workforce challenges we face cuz these are not, this is not a short term workforce challenge. This is here to stay. And so that’s gonna continue to be incredibly important. Um, and so it’s gonna be important for us to continue to find the balance of advancing our technology for both the workforce and for the residents. Um, and, and how we can do that efficiently and how can, how do we afford to do that? Um, quite frankly. So that’s gonna have to be something we’ll continue to evaluate as we go and, you know, make sure that that’s a huge part of, of our strategic planning, our strategic IT planning, um, as we move forward as an organization.

Amber:
18:09

One of the things I wanna ask your, um, thoughts on is, let’s say you do find some new technology, it’s exciting, we get it in, it’s working as intended. How do you then go back and measure the roi, the positive resident outcomes, the workforce impact? What are your, what do you think is the best way to measure that and to get a good sense of that?

Nicole:
18:28

Well, obviously I think it depends on the tech and depends on what the outcomes of that tech can be, because obviously some things are very measurable. when it comes to, um, you know, when it comes to a workforce technology for example, is it, is it, you know, decreasing staff time in certain areas? Is it, is it decreasing redundancy in staff processes? You know, those types of things. So I think those are some things you can look at and measure when it comes to some of the workforce tech that’s out there. for resident engagement tech, um, you know, it might be something where you see, um, you know, a particular attendance increase for residents or feedback from residents, you know, so that might be a little bit more challenging. But, um, I think that, you know, depending on the technology that you’re looking to implement, I think identifying things you can measure because, you know, what’s, get me what gets measured, you know, shows accomplishment or shows that, you know, a return, like you said, that return. And so that’s important for you to be able to share too with people like your boards of directors, um, as to why you’re making these types of investments. Not just because it’s cool tech, but because it’s actually accomplishing something. So I think depending on the tech you have, kind of thinking about that at the beginning, how are we gonna measure it? Because I’m guessing, depending on the type of tech, there are many different ways you could do that, but it’s hugely important

Amber:
19:47

With so much new technology coming out and so many options, what do you see is going to be the future impact when it comes to marketing communities based on the technology that they have?

Nicole:
19:58

Well now you’re speaking my language, right? Marketing. So honestly as you know, it’s, as everybody knows the mark, most marketing starts on Google<laugh>, or I shouldn’t say Google. Most marketing starts on the internet. And if you don’t have a dynamic and content filled website, um, if you’re not facing or you’re not focusing on your, you know, your digital marketing, if you’re not focusing on what that, what your digital presence is, um, you know, that’s, that’s key. You know, I think I read a recent statistic that something like, you know, about 37% on average of leads coming in right now to senior living are starting on the internet or coming through the internet and, you know, referral based business is always important. I think paying attention to your, your reviews and your ratings online, um, you know, that’s something that people are starting to pay more attention to. You know, how many, how many of us shop online and decide what we’re gonna buy based on what everybody else says about it.<laugh>, you know, it’s really important technology and the ability to put, um, technology based, different types of, um, programs, embed those things into your website. You know, we have several of those embedded into our website. We’re taking advantage of tech that’s out there in our digital marketing space through our, our online presence. And that’s really important to be able to do. That’s gonna continue to be incredibly important. Paying attention to the back side, the backend, the, the, you know, the SEO and the SEM is really important as well. And, but I I would also go back to the metrics, right? You need to measure and what you’re doing, you need to go into those analytics. You need to see where your traffic is coming from, why it’s coming from those different areas, what’s driving, what content are you using in other areas of the web, you know, the internet, um, to drive folks to your website. And then once you get to the website, what actions are they taking and what actions do you hope they take? Is it a phone call they’re making? Is it a pdf they’re downloading? You know, marketing is, marketing is about metrics and technology makes that a lot easier. And there are so many different platforms out there that are so critical to what you do and it makes your process easier. so if people aren’t paying attention to that right now in the marketing world, uh, for senior living, you know, cuz and it’s interesting too because we have two audiences, you know, in senior living we have the senior themselves and we have the adult children or the, you know, as they call’em the decision maker or the influencer. And so you have to always think about it from two different perspectives as well in terms of how you’re coming across through that technology. Mm-hmm.

Amber:
22:44

<affirmative>. Yeah. Yeah, I think there is a lot of new technology around that marketing component that I think is, is really cool and interesting. And we’ve had some of those products on our, um, podcast before. Another aspect of that that I was thinking about is how much does the technology that’s in the building factor into the decision making process for potentially future residents? And I, I we, you know, we work with pretty much for the most part, not for profit. So I’m not really sure what’s happening in the for profit world. I’m not sure if brand new buildings are going up that have just like wall to wall, innovative, cool, new technology. I’m kind of thinking maybe not because that’s more cost, but I’m just curious as, as we start to see more and more of this new things and new exciting things and trends put into different buildings, if that’s going to eventually lead to be being a decision point.

Nicole:
23:34

I think right now it’s a decision point more from the perspective of the adult child mm-hmm.<affirmative>, uh, versus the prospect, you know, the prospective resident. We have touted some of the technology that we’ve put into place and you know, it’s a mixed reaction I would say, um, based on the audience that, you know, that you’re, you’re talking to. So I, I think it’s gonna continue to be important to think about that. And if, if you’re renovating or you’re building, not necessarily, you know, putting all this stuff in place right off the bat, but maybe making sure that your infrastructure is prepared for that in the future as that continues to evolve. And as we see this generational shift begin to happen in senior living, you know, everybody talks about those baby boomers, you know, the baby boomers aren’t really to us yet. I mean the beginning, there’s no question about that. They’re, they’re in our independent living right now, but the bulk of those baby boomers are not, they’re not here yet for us. And so, um, that’s gonna be something we’re gonna have to continue to be prepared to continue to evolve with in terms of that generation and, and the future, um, technology options that are gonna come. Because, you know, if the last couple of years have shown us anything, it’s, it’s shown us that there is going to be so much technology available in so many different realms of senior living, clinical and residential and communication and marketing and all of those areas. Um, we need to be forward thinking and think about how are we going to be prepared to implement those, those different technologies from an infrastructure perspective.

Amber:
25:07

Yeah, and I think going back to what we were talking about with outcomes as well, is if you can show positive outcomes, it comes from the technology that could be used in your marketing to say that we’re able to prevent up to 90% of falls or we have wellness and active monitoring happening where we can, um, people can, you know, wear a a, a Fitbit type looking device and we can get their vital signs. So we have ongoing analytics and there might be some people who don’t want that too, which is interesting to think

Nicole:
25:31

About. That’s very true. I mean, I think one of the things we’ve looked at, you know, I mean there’s a lot of, a lot of, um, voice technology out there right now and there’s a lot of skepticism about that too. Um, so, you know, we’ve talked about it. How neat is that? Let’s do that. It’s, it’s so convenient and easy for folks to use. Um, there’s a big group of people out there, um, you know, especially our older adults who are not, not crazy about that idea just yet. Um, so I think that’s gonna be something too, that we’ll see more adoption of that type of technology as we see this, this baby regeneration begin to move into the senior living space.

Amber:
26:05

Yeah, I think it’s gonna be a really interesting next decade as we’re straddling this transition. We’re working with a lot of clients on new design, new, new, new build and you know, it’s kind of like, do we build for today or do we build for tomorrow? Or you know, kind of how do we do both? Like you were saying,

Nicole:
26:21

I mean, I think we, we experienced that firsthand here when you were talking. You know, we were talking before about one of our, our newer, um, campuses, if you will, and, you know, building these smart homes and it was sounded so cool and, and the residents that started moving in didn’t want anything to do with it.<laugh>, you know, and we’re not gonna force them to have these smart, these smart homes. so the great thing is, is they’re wired to be smart homes in the future. Very few, if any of our current residents that moved into those new spaces adopted any of that technology.

Amber:
26:51

Well, Nicole, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. Is there any words of advice you would like to pass on?

Nicole:
26:57

Words of advice? I would just say make sure that technology is an important part of your leadership conversation because it’s so important to everything we do. And have a roadmap, have a plan. If you don’t have a strategic IT plan, um, you need to start working on one because knowing where you are and knowing where you wanna be is great, but how in the heck do you get there? Um, and so I think that’s really, really important as well. And the other thing we’ve learned, one of the other lessons we’ve learned is overcommunicate, what’s going on? Because if people are kind of kept in the dark or they don’t understand why things are changing with your technology and they don’t get the why, then you’re gonna have pushback on that. And so that’s gonna be really important too.

Amber:
27:44

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. I really enjoyed the conversation. Listeners, if you would like to submit a topic or you’d like to be featured on the podcast, you can find us on our website, parasolalliance com and thank you for listening

Amber:
0:04

Welcome to Raising Tech, a podcast about all things technology in senior living. Today we have a special guest and I’m very excited to introduce Doug Lane, the territory manager for Wisconsin and Minnesota for Bear Robotics. Welcome to the show, Doug.

Doug:
0:18

Yeah, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Amber:
0:22

So I have been doing speaking events at multiple leading age conferences in a lot of different states, and one of the topics I speak about is innovation in senior living and also resident technology. And robots are a topic that comes up all the time. And at all the presentations I’ve been doing, I’ve been asking for show of hands of who’s using robots. I usually get a couple of people and then I ask who’s using robots successfully? And out of all of the states I’ve been to, there’s just a very small number of people that are using the robots successfully. So I am really excited to dig into this topic with you. I would love to talk about so many different aspects of, um, what are the opportunities with robots? What are the risks? What are the things to know? But before we dive into that, do you wanna give a little bit background on yourself and Bear Robotics as a company?

Doug:
1:10

Sure, That’d be great. I,’ve been with Bear Robotics for about a year. We’ve been around since 2017. I have a background starting way back in, in media. I work for the Onion newspaper many, many years ago and dispensing fake information out to the world. But I, after the 2008 financial crisis, I spent a lot of time both in a main role, but also on the side in food service in some form. I ran, some restaurants. I did some bartending on the side while I was going through my professional career, but then I, I kind of ventured into running a distillery. I worked for Belter, on the beverage side, selling, you know, items, food service equipment and, custom things to the brewing and distilling industry. But that kind of led me down this weird path, um, to how I arrived at Bear Robotics. And we are a company that’s really focused on experience in food service. So many of us come from the realm. A lot of us havea very good comprehension and understanding of technology, and we have minds that kind of think like that. But we still, a lot of us have really tangible experience in food service. So, you know, myself, I thought this was a really exciting opportunity because I know how the struggle goes both in traditional restaurants and senior living. They’re dealing with the same realities, the same pain. And, um, you know, Bear was really focused and started by people from tech. So we have two of our co-founders that are former senior engineers at Google, but they also had dabbled in owning restaurants. And they were the kind of people like, Oh, I, I love food and drink. I should open a place myself. And, you know, they kind of stumbled into the reality of like, Oh, this is a lot harder than it looks. So they quickly realized how important front of house staff is, how you really hinge on the front of house to succeed. And when you’re burdened by a lot of these repetitive tasks and a lot of these things that are not providing high value, high impact effect on your customers, then you’re kind of straying from your goal of providing great service. So our whole mentality is we’re trying to help people provide outstanding hospitality by automating repetitive tasks. And those repetitive tasks are things like running food from the kitchen out to the floor, or busing dishes back to the dish pit, or, you know, maybe, helping at the host stand guiding people to their tables or even roaming around on a patrol at events or parties, um, or singing Happy birthday. That’s one thing that like staff really love to give up, You know, I was like, Oh, I can have the robot go sing for me. It’s, some people are very sad to have to lose that. But, you know, our, our thought process has always been that we’re not replacing front of house staff because they are the most important part of the equation, But we are trying to reprioritize them to more high impact roles where they’re not doing this back and forth, running around when they’re probably already understaffed and they’re already overstressed. So we’re trying to take some of the stress and some of the low level responsibilities off their hands so they can really focus on this high value stuff, which is interacting with other human beings. So when I’m out there, I’m, I’m selling our robots, but I’m really selling the thought and concept behind automation and robotics because there’s a lot of fears that come from this reality. And we’re, we’re trying to quell those and say that, you know, we’re trying to be a tool forefront of house staff. We’re not trying to be a replacement. And that’s really what I do out in the market, both in with restaurants, in, in the food service industry and, and a lot with senior living on the, in the same side there.

Amber:
4:38

I feel like there’s so many different applications for robotics. And when we talk about that, there’s a lot of things that come to mind for me. I was recently at the Missouri leading age conference, and there was someone in the presentation audience who’s, they’re using robot pets, which I thought was very interesting. She said they’re very creepy, but they are a big hit. They use them in their memory care area. I know there’s also robotics out there for medication, personal assistance, cleaning, and then of course the big one food service. So is bear focused exclusively on the food service piece of it? And if so, do you know why that decision was made or if they thought about branching out to some of the other areas?

Doug:
5:17

Yeah, I mean, our focus really is food service. We have done some sanitizing and, and cleaning, automation in South Korea where we manufacture our robots. But, I think it’s a more specialty need overseas that we’re not necessarily really focusing on here. There are so many realms we’re automation or robotics are, are entering. And even in food service, I mean, there’s back of house automation and robotics for cooking and, and some of those back of house tasks, but they’re very invasive. They require either, you know, new build outs or really invasive rebuilds, the kitchens, and they’re very expensive. Our thought is that we want something that can be put in place that is gonna cost less than a person or a new employee, because typically there’s someone you, you can’t even find. So we want this not to require this huge investment. We want individual independent restaurant owners and senior living operators to be able to afford to do this. We’re not trying to rely on having this massive, you know, restaurant chain partnership or huge senior living partnership for someone to be able to get involved. I mean, we have independent operators that are running a robot, that one robot in a, in an individual place is making a huge i huge impact. So, you know, we see the opportunity, but I mean, there’s so many areas you could focus on. It’s, it’s hard to, to focus on all those different facets. And, and so I think food service is where we come from. That’s where our experience is, and that’s really where we’re trying to focus. We’re trying to branch off and do other things like, you know, elevator operations so that we can do food service delivery, throughout the facility and do room service or, or even, you know, secure package delivery within the same robot. Those are some of the other robots that we’re gonna be debuting later this year and early next year. But food services is our origin, and I think that’s really always going to be our priority.

Amber:
7:05

Okay. That makes sense. So can you walk me through, at a practical level, sort of from the beginning, first of all, to start off with, how does a community know if getting a food service robot is right for them?

Doug:
7:16

Sure. Well, we go through a, typically it starts with a, you know, we’ll, we’ll hop on a Zoom call and just say, let’s, let’s talk about this. Let’s show some examples and reference points of, of different tasks that the robot can do. And some of its basic requirements to be able to operate effectively in a space and the impact that we think we might be able to make, current staffing situations, whether that’s, you know, you’re understaffed and you just don’t have enough, or maybe we can help you reprioritize your staff so that you’re more adequately covered throughout different times of the day. But when we get past the initial interest and kind of walk through, then we start to want to vet like, is this a good fit for the robot? So, is the facility logistically a good fit? You know, uh, is there enough access? Is there enough room for operation? Is there a willingness from the staff to accept a robot? I mean, oftentimes we may have a poor logistical fit, but if we have a, a site that is excited about having it, they’ll make it work. Sometimes we’ll have a great logistical fit, but we just don’t get the right communication from the team on site to the staff to understand why it’s there. And we, and we show up and we want to get started, and people kind of have this negative perception of what the job, what the robot is there to do. And a lot of times it’s that human component that is the more difficult thing to overcome. We have not perfect fits for sites that the robot has an awesome impact at. And we’ve had really great sites that should have worked that didn’t because we just never got past that, that resistance. And that’s something that I really focus on on new deployments is that, you know, the biggest thing is gonna be people’s willingness to use the robot and their acceptance of it, and the willingness to trust that it’s going to be there to do its job so that they can pivot and do these more high value roles. So that’s our, that’s our biggest challenge. And that, and we still deal with, and that’s part of the, I think, people’s natural fear of change and, and different technologies coming to market, is that they, they want to know that they’re safe and secure, and they wanna know that, you know, this new technology’s not there to take their jobs.

Amber:
9:20

Can you talk a little bit more about the logistical fit? What are the requirements, that need to be in place in order for the robot, in order for the robot to work effectively? And from a technical standpoint, what is the robot working off of? Does it work off of wifi? How does that all work? Can you explain that piece?

Doug:
9:37

Well, we do want a good wifi connection, but the robot doesn’t need that wifi connection to operate. It’s really more for, if we wanna remote in to provide support on the fly, or to be able to pull data for, you know, daily usage reports, things like that. If we wanna run a software update, that’s where we wanna have a good, uh, wifi connection. But, um, you know, let’s say WiFi’s down for the day, the robot owns that map of the space. It, it possesses all its knowledge that it needs to operate. So, you know, we’ll have places with spotty wifi or, or tough signals if, if we can’t get a good signal or maybe we’re blocked by the network, we’ll put our own networking kit in so that we can provide our own wifi access to the robot. But it’s really more for those support components. The things that we really look for are, are the, the simplest things for humans to, to get past. So like clean floors, transitions, you know, even flat floors and doorway access. So is the robot going to be able to get in and out of the kitchen or past a secured door? If there’s a door there, are you willing to have it open, uh, so that the robot can pass through it? We’ve been developing a door spring that the robot can talk to and communicate with so that when it approaches an obstacle, it can open on its own. But it’s been going through a lot of beta testing. It’s not available in the market. We’ve seen places that have put in motion sensor doors that don’t work integrating with the robot, but they work, they activate as the robot approaches and they open. And we see, uh, facilities that have gotten by with just that. We also see places that say, I’m willing to prop the door open during meal service to let the robot pass in, in and out. And we sometimes will have a place that says, I, we can’t have the door open, but they really want it to work, and they still have a long stretch from the kitchen to the dining room. So they might have their expo point where they load the robot up with food, be right outside the kitchen door. So there’s different solutions. We tend to find that places that want to make it work, they will absolutely make it work. And places that are more hesitant and kind of questioning the decision before we even get there, that’s where we typically have to deal with more of the human factor of getting past resistance. And sometimes we show up and we still have that barrier, and sometimes we win that war, and then sometimes we don’t. And we’re still in this early phase that we’re getting past that people are still learning about how this technology can be effective and helpful. So, you know, I think as it becomes more widespread, we’re gonna have less of that learning curve and there’s gonna be more willingness to do so. But you know, a lot of places you go and you see the robot and these are first interaction with it, and you want that to be a good interaction and a good experience.

Amber:
12:06

I know a really hot topic right now is wins in staff efficiency, and how can we look to robotics as a solution to solve some of the staffing challenges? Can you talk a little bit about what you’ve seen out there in senior living communities from this perspective?

Doug:
12:21

Yeah. Well, when we are successful, we tend to see two different effects. One initial thing we’ve seen a lot is when places are understaffed and people are just having to provide patchwork coverage, we see an immediate impact. When, when things are going well, we see an immediate drop in overtime spending because we tend to find that they need less coverage to cover every single shift so they can start to spread out their labor a little more evenly. And that’s the kind of initial effect we, we search for, especially if we just find staff being really overwhelmed. The next thing is just kind of the more intelligent placing of staff. We, we like to think that, you know, if you’re understaffed and you’re constantly looking for that next person, that maybe if se comes on board, that next person isn’t needed. And so instead of, we’re not really getting rid of anyone, but maybe just lessening the need for the next person, still, we, we still will find places that still are understaffed, but maybe we’re just taking some of the stress out of the room. But I think initially it’s gonna be the, the overtime is a, a kind of good indicator that we’re having a good effect. But from there, it’s more the, the trust that the robot is gonna be helpful. Hey, maybe we can staff one less person during lunchtime because we know the workflow is less and we can reprioritize that person to breakfast or dinner. We also find that the thing that is less tangible, and it happens on both sides, it’s the stress we take out of the room for the staff, where it’s like they just don’t have to do so much running around. We’re we’re taking some burden off of their bodies and we’re taking some stress off of their minds, but also the impact we have on quality of service for the residents. So, you know, one of the things that’s really hard to measure is that like, Hey, we know that we’re saving money on labor. That’s awesome. You know, and that’s an efficiency where it’s very tangible. But what is the effect we’re having on the residents daily life? And are we impacting meal time? Which is a huge time for a lot of people when it’s like they’re out of the rooms, they, they get to engage and socialize. We want that time to be a good experience because that, you know, that really trickles into the rest of their day and the rest of their life. So sometimes the less tangible thing is, the thing that we, we find has the bigger impact is like, people are happier both on the staff side and the residents side, and there’s less stress and, you know, there’s, there’s less complaining from, from both the recipients and the workers. That’s where we’re trying to get, But there takes trust to get to that point. And it takes the trusting the robot’s gonna do its job, that management feels okay with reprioritizing, staffing, things like that. But when it happens, it’s really beautiful because there’s a financial impact, there’s a, you know, this mental impact on everyone. And that’s, that’s our goal.

Amber:
14:56

Did you say it’s name is Servi?

Doug:
15:00

Servi is the robot’s name, but we find that almost everywhere, and we encourage it that everyone names their robot. So cervi is our name for the robot, but one of the first things we do when we get on site is say, you know, survey’s part of your team now we want, you know, make it, humanize it a little bit. Make it actually part of your team. So we’ll see. Sometimes staffs will have contests to name it. A lot of times residents will be involved in naming it, but we see a lot of, you know, Ros and, you know, old references from, you know, uh, things like the Jetsons and things like that. But we’ve, um, we see a lot of creativity and naming. We really encourage it, you know, we want places to make it their own.

Amber:
15:38

Yeah, actually that, I think I did have somebody tell me a story about how they had a contest to name the robot, and I don’t remember what the name they came up with now.

Doug:
15:45

That’s, that’s a very, very common situation.

Amber:
15:48

Yeah. So tell me what the experience is like for a resident in the community if they’re sitting down to a meal. What interaction, what’s the experience like from their perspective with servi or whatever they decided to name it?

Doug:
16:00

Well, you know, we used to think that kids would get the biggest kick out of the robot because it’s just like, it, it can be really cool to see it in action for the first time, but by far, senior living is the place that like, I think residents are in the most of it because it’s, it’s actually the future happening before their eyes of going from, you know, seeing this ascent of technology to now seeing robotics in auto automation happening in the front of us. You know, we’ve had robots working behind the scenes in a lot of roles, but this is actually robots working in front of human beings. So the residents usually really enjoy it, and especially if service is getting better for them, it’s, it’s really tough to argue that, you know, why they wouldn’t like it. It’s really more times the staff that we need to have more convincing with when it turns in into their interaction with it. You know, sometimes we’ll have a restaurant where at lunch they make it really busy and they may say, we’re gonna have se pull up to a table directly. We, we always want a server to be the one handling the service side of things when the robot gets there. But, you know, a restaurant might say, we’re gonna let the robot pull up and ask the guests to grab their own food. That’s something that is hardly ever a situation. We, we have happening in a senior living environment where, you know, we’re expecting a resident to be grabbing their own food or things like that. So in terms of what the robot’s doing and interacting with them, it’s pretty, it’s pretty quiet. There’s not a lot of direct engagement. I think having the robots sing happy birthday is one thing where it’s actually something that’s done directly to the guest and resident, But aside from that, you know, they’re, they see these little robots zipping around their space, and hopefully they’re seeing service get faster, and they’re, and their front of house staff and servers being present more often and just having a general positive impact on service. So there’s not a lot of direct interaction, but aside from seeing them cruising around and waiting for them to get by and navigating the space andavoiding, you know, running into anyone, but, so I think they’re entertained by it, but they’re never really having to directly engage with the robots.

Amber:
17:54

So I know that robots and robotics is still a really new concept. There’s still challenges and struggles to get even the basic food service robot into communities. But I’m curious, what is Bear Robotics looking at for the future? What do you see are the opportunities of what can be done once this becomes more common?

Doug:
18:11

I think in the, in the near term, we’re just, a lot of these leaps are made on the software side where it’s like we have smoother operations, smarter navigation, we’re advancing the technology with the existing robot. Then we have, you know, new models down the line where they’re able to do more, whether it’s, you know, se lift one of our new models that we’re running in South Korea right now, it’s a secure delivery robot that has enclosed doors. It can call an elevator electronically without touch, It can hop on, communicate with the elevator to what floor wants to go to get off, go to it’s destination, ping the recipient with, you know, a phone call or a text or an alert, and then it provides them the opportunity to access the robot securely and then it can go back to its home and do it again. And it’s able to travel across multiple floors of large buildings. That’s one of the next things that we’re gonna be debuting, ideally, hopefully before the end of the year and some, some test sites in the US and then more nationwide next year, we’ve also got higher capacity robots that are able to, you know, carry more, handle bigger obstacles. You know, I think down the line, we want absolutely being able to open doors on our own, get past small things like, you know, thresholds that normal wheels wouldn’t be able to go or someday, you know, navigating stairs, going outside. But I think food service being the kind of thing that you want humans on the, on the end of, we’re still trying to remain a tool for them. You know, we’re not trying to turn this into a human looking Android, that’s all a sudden walking out to the space and interacting because we’re not trying to replace that human interaction. But I think in the near term, it’s, you know, we’re, we’re just smoothing out the technology, making it function better. And then in the more long term we’re, we’re gaining, you know, new functionalities and the ability to interact with people directly. And, you know, if you’re patrolling around a party, maybe you can make eye contact with you and, and can pause and, and take physical cues from you as to when you’re ready to pass. And, but that’s the evolution, the technology and those are things that we’re working on every day. A lot of these things are very small and incremental, and over time you may not even notice as something is new. But you know, in over the course of six months, the robot is much smarter. It can and it can operate more effectively.

Amber:
20:16

Is there any information you can share around the ROI and cost part of the robot?

Doug:
20:23

Sure. One thing that’s unique to senior living is that, you know, in a restaurant you have this tip component that it’s not really defined, but we know it’s there. And because of that, a lot of restaurants are, are able to pay their staff less because there’s this other component. Now, there’s certain states, like in California, tip server still gets$15 an hour. So it’s, it’s very easy to argue how a robot that maybe costs two to$4 an hour, if you don’t have to hire another server, there’s a lot of savings that you can, you can latch onto with just by not bringing that additional person on. Now in senior living, you know, there’s rarely is there a tip environment where you’re able to, let’s say in Wisconsin, you can pay a server 2 33 an hour. That’s not something that’s happening in senior living. We tend to see between 15 and$20 an hour starting for, for servers, uh, in front of house and senior living. And if you’re looking at a robot that costs maybe, let’s say a thousand dollars a month, you’re looking at, you know, around 30 some dollars a day. You know, if it’s working throughout the day, you’re looking at a couple dollars an hour depending on how much they’re working. And you’re also not limited by things like overtime or sick days. And so, you know, we look at it as like, you’re getting this tool. You know, you look at like the dishwasher when the au the automatic dishwasher was put into the kitchen, it didn’t replace the dishwasher, it made their job easier. But you’re getting this tool that’s extremely reliable is that, you know, it works 12 hours a day every day. It’s always there. It doesn’t call in sick, and it does so at the fraction of a cost of a human being. So if it removes the need for that additional body that you might be paying$20 an hour and you’re coming in looking at paying it$3 an hour just broken down based off its monthly costs, then we’re immediately showing labor savings. But then, you know, I pivot back to what I said earlier about the effect it has on quality of service and de-stressing an environment. Those are the other things that are, they’re hard to measure with numerically, but they also have an equal importance in, in the value it provides on the floor. But I mean, just as a cost comparison, you’re looking at a fraction on the cost of what it would take to bring on a new employee, and then also to train them and to replace them and to go through that process over and over. And we do find that, you know, when the robot is in place and it’s having a good impact and people like it, we find turnover is reduced. We find that, you know, you’re not having to go through those struggle much because people’s jobs are easier and their, their environment’s better. So we see a financial impact, but we also see that emotional, you know, stress reducing impact that I think is just as important.

Amber:
22:49

Doug, is there anything else you would like our listeners to know before we wrap up?

Doug:
22:54

I mean, on the resident side, I think it’s more, it’s more exciting because I think when it, when they get that experience to see the robot in, in action, it’s not intimidating. It’s a, it’s pretty innocuous. They, they tend to quickly find out that this is, uh, a technology that’s serving a purpose to make their lives better. But for anyone that’s on the receiving end potentially of working alongside one or thinking about bringing one into their facility, I, I think it’s important to suspend judgment and to give it a chance because the environment and industry that we’re all operating in is, is for forever altered. And there is so much stress out there of trying to fill these roles. And food service, I, in its nature, is very stressful. And this is a tool that can really help people, and it can help people’s stress, It can help just the burdens that we can take off of their hands. I really encourage people, even if they’re, they’re not necessarily thinking about bringing it on board, but to at least open their minds to the thoughts of automation and robotics and how they can have impacts. Because we’re, we’re trying to take away some of these repetitive kind of menial tasks and let people focus on high value work. And, and that is really our goal. It’s not a replacement. We just want people to know that, you know, we’re, we’re, we’re trying to provide a solution that’s really meant to help.

Amber:
24:09

This is such a great topic. Thank you so much for joining us today and sharing all this information. I think it’s something our listeners will really enjoy diving into a little bit more.

Doug:
24:17

Yeah. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Amber:
24:19

Thank you to everyone for joining us for this month’s episode. You can find us online at our website, parasolalliance.com. Feel free to reach out if you have a topic you’d like to see or you’d like to be featured on a feature episode. And thank you for listening.