The caregiving crisis is real—but what if the solution is already on campus? In this episode, Elder Law Attorney Bob Mannor sits down with Neal K. Shah, CEO and co-founder of CareYaya, to discuss how this innovative platform is transforming elder care by connecting college students with families in need of affordable, high-quality caregiving. Neal shares his personal journey into caregiving, how AI is shaping the future of care, and why the traditional caregiving model simply isn’t built for the average family. Learn how CareYaya provides cost-effective care, gives students meaningful healthcare experience, and is scaling nationwide to bridge critical gaps in elder support.
Key Takeaways: CareYaya connects families with college students pursuing healthcare careers. The platform addresses the nationwide caregiver shortage with affordability in mind. AI-driven technology enhances caregiver matching and quality. Families pay caregivers directly—no hidden fees or middlemen. Over 25,000 students are ready to provide compassionate care. The future of caregiving lies in community-driven innovation. Tune in to discover how CareYaya is reshaping the caregiving landscape—one student, one family, and one breakthrough at a time!
Host: Attorney Bob Mannor
Guest: Neal K. Shah
Executive Producer: Savannah Meksto
Assistant Producer: Samantha Noah
Assistant Producer: Miranda Donaldson
Advice From Your Advocates Podcast
Mannor Law Group, PLLC
Transcript
you're listening to advice from your Advocates a show where we provide elder law advice to professionals who work
with the elderly and their families welcome back to advice from your Advocates I'm Bob Manor I'm a
certified elder law attorney in Michigan and I'm very excited about our guest today it's a very interesting topic
we've got Neil Shaw who's CEO and co-founder of Kaya Neil welcome hey Bob
thanks for having me tell us a little bit about yourself and then I want to get right into talking about car
sure so yeah I'm the CEO and co-founder of K A we run a Care Marketplace uh
connecting over 25,000 college students to care for older adults in their Community all the students are preh
health career aspirational doctors nurses you know physical therapists of tomorrow and they're doing care as a way
to earn some income on the side as well as a way to help people in their community and get valuable care experiences towards future clinical
careers many people around the country call us um care for America you know similar to Teach for America where we're
inspiring young people to step up and solve a unmet need in society and in this case the unet need is there's a
massive shortage of caregivers um who are you know who are able to help people uh and our population is only aging so
we need more help so yeah that's kind of um K and so the people that interact
with this Kera platform are going to be the students and then also the public
that needs to find caregivers or how does that work yeah so the way the car out platform works is it's similar to
Uber in terms of if you or a loved one need care for an aging parent or a
spouse you know then you go onto the platform uh typically through a website web app anywhere you have internet
access and you can go on set up a profile mention the care you need help with and then select days and times and
then we'll onboard you and then that care opportunity will be available to students in your areas you know you guys
are all over Michigan and we our first um Michigan Market was University of Michigan kind of broader n Arbor area uh
we are expanding to other cities across Detroit Metro as well as the western part of the state and any family can go
to the site book care be onboarded and then have students nearby ready to help them one of the key unique features is
it's all booking and matching and scheduling online and as a result of that the cost is much lower you know a
traditional local Elder Care Agency might charge 30 35 40 bucks an hour and
you know they typically the business model would be paying the caregiver half in our case you know we charge nothing for the service um we're completely um
Angel funded and Grant funded um and then you book and use everything through our online tools to find students near
you and then you just pay the student directly so in most markets the care is available at 17 to 20 bucks an hour um
so it's highly affordable and I would say final thing would be caregiver quality you know in the traditional care industry you might pay 35 bucks an hour
but because the company is turning around and paying less than half to the person doing the care they typically will attract you know less educated
people who are doing this as a full-time career and you can't blame them but it's just like it's low wage work that many times people burn out of and don't want
to do and in this case you'd get a University of Michigan premedical student you know to kind of come help
you um at half the rate as traditional care market so it's like really awesome from it's expanding access to Affordable
Care for many families who can't afford the traditional agency based care for people who are relying on themselves to find caregivers this is like a do it for
me option and for people who don't kind of have the time or the ability to go recruit students at Great universities
nearby um this does it for them so um yeah it's a very convenient solution yeah that's really interesting and I I
want to get more into the process there because that that sounded quite interesting So a family that's looking
for a caregiver and this could be an ongoing relationship right it could it could end up being where you set it up
and it'll go on for the next six months for two days a week or something like that um and it could also mean that that
student's moving on or something and they'd have to find a different student but that is it is an ongoing it's not
like just a one-time caregiver type of a situ yes 100% in fact actually we prefer that
the students prefer that you know I think everybody benefits when it's ongoing so the the power users of our platform are people who might need help
four days a week five days a week seven days a week and you know typically because these are students you know the
same student might not be available all five days so a care team develops so that's kind of the best thing that we would offer is that let's say you're
somebody living in like an arbor Detroit metro area and you're taking care of your mother or frankly let's say you're
somebody living in Ohio and your mother lives in you know the Detroit metro area and you're worried
about her remotely or let's say somebody living in Arbor and your mother lives in Atlanta you know I think by the way we
you know we're all over the country um you know so you would go online book The care you know book recurring care as you
need and then the days and times would be in our system and then you would find and match um students that are available
so if you had a student at a nearby University who is available on Tuesdays and Thursdays in the afternoons they would come help you then you get to
leave reviews of them how they did they get to leave reviews of you and we really prioritize long-term matching and
relationship building so we are able to offer care 5 days a week and seven days a week but we also have people using a couple days a week um as needed and some
people are wanting different people to come by you know they're very specific about just the days and times and some people are like oh I really like these
three students that I met and I want to have them as part of our care team so it kind of it's pretty flexible and people can use it you know however they want to
so tell me more about the payment process so they're not paying through the the consumer the the family is not
paying through the website they're paying the person directly is that what I heard yes 100% yeah and we set it up
that way you know in our early days we've now been around for almost 3 years in our early days we were processing the
payment through our site but we found that the payment processing companies were taking four or five% of that cut
and we were just like well we don't you know we don't need to make money ourselves so we're like why are all these families just wasting the money so
we switch it to person to person because it's free so if people most people I would say use venmo venmo P2P is free so
there's no fees um and then people are also able to do cash or check or other
methods like zal as they want but we found personto person methods are you know you can get around a transaction
fee um and then most families it's beneficial for them and then students it's like okay it's just like they receive the income instead of kind of a
middleman taking it out so it's gonna mean it for everyone I believe there's a lot of skeptical people in the world so
I like to get into the the details so uh you know the old uh saying follow the
money so when we follow the money I heard I think I heard and I want to kind of clarify this thata is funded by some
Angel Investors right yes and that is there is there profit being made by Kera
where did they get figured into the financial Arrangement yeah great question so
currently uh no profit being made I think we hope at some point we can make it sustainable but initial funding and I
can tell you you know as you kind of get into the interview you know my own personal story but initially it was just like funing it myself I was
bootstrapping it because I had a previously successful career in finance and I actually had become a caregiver in my mid-30s and I saw how broken the Home
Care Market was so initially it was just kind of like a passion project so I was like okay what can I fund you know build some technology and deliver something
cool that can help a lot of people and then just go off and do something else and make it kind of just like survive on its own as that movement grew we were
attracted um or actually uh we attracted a bunch of retired Healthcare Executives so retired doctors Chiefs of large
departments at hospitals Healthcare Executives who came up and said hey I'll just put some of my you know retirement
money with you guys because I want you to hire a team of people and really scale it so we started scaling but thankfully when you kind of find very
social Mission aligned investors like that they were basically like quasi funding a nonprofit where they were just
like I want you to do something good and if ever becomes sustainable great I'll earn a return on it but I don't really
care about the return start part I care about like doing the right thing and then the decision making from us and
Them was in order to attract very talented young people who don't have a lot of savings they would rather work
for a technology startup you know like you can't find the best software developer at University of Michigan is not going to join a nonprofit you know
so we're like okay let's make it a technology startup stay toward to the social Mission and not monetize off families or take money from caregivers
rocket so we did that and then after that got going you know after the second year of us being around we started
getting a lot of Grants so there is a tremendous amount of money at the National Institute on Aging that is then
also through Partnerships with universities being kind of like um given out to innovation compan that are making
an impact on advancing care for the older adult population so please to say we've won a grant from Johns Hopkins one
from National in on aging and also Grant from Atrium Health which is one of the largest um Hospital Systems in the country so through this combination of
funding uh we're able to kind of keep not only sustaining but even rapidly growing the service and then of course I
think at some point we'll have to make a decision on is there a indefinite amount of national and Sudan aging funding
which I believe there is because it keeps growing every year or will we have to Pivot to find social impact investors
do believe like you know if we can pull it off the vision and the mission is free to Consumer forever and then find
another way to make it sustainable and I believe a lot of the Tailwinds are on our favor Medicare is starting to do
Innovation programs starting to pay for in home care and you know we're talking to a couple of large hospitals about partnering with them on the demena guide
program and you know there if we get that partnership the rate that Medicare is set would be nicely profitable for us
which would be awesome because you can make it sustain on that and then run a free consumer business you know through this there are um a lot of Workforce
Development programs reaching out to us wanting to train and upskill the students even further to prepare them for future Healthcare careers so that
could be kind of a monetization opportunity so I think it's a little bit harder in the early days to do it this way but I think longer term you can
build a more elegant product similar to like let's say Google you know like everybody gets Google search for free
but then they're kind of monetizing through advertising that's one way of doing it but if you had to pay each time for a Google search you know the cost
would add up because they're spending five six cents every have somebody searching but it's like just a great public benefit so I think in this case
you know our expenses we are able to keep low enough but it would be nice if like in definitely through grant funding
and through other Partnerships with Medicare you're able to keep the basic Consumer Care matching um platform free
forever because then that just delivers logically the most affordable cost of care and critically it allows the
caregiver to walk away with 100% of what the family is paying and I believe that py that it's a small thing but in the
psychology of the caregiving experience it makes a huge impact in the positive attitude that both people feel towards
it and the frankly the negative attitude that people feel in the traditional care industry when they over 35 bucks and
then the person you know the caregiver doing 99% of the work gets less than half both sides are sour in that transaction yeah absolutely and I think
that's an important conversation that you just had because uh I think people want to have a good understanding of how
this all works and is there caregiver getting paid enough you know to attract the right care good caregivers things
like that and the uh conversation that you you really made it clear for everybody is this is bigger than just
the that transaction this is this is a mission this is a this is a bigger picture and you're really looking
through the the length of it the the Long View of this and I think that's
going to be very important for the listeners to know this isn't just something that is uh you know a small
option or that you're looking to really grow this and you set everything up in the way this will be a long-term
solution yes yeah I mean I think that you know as we set out like the mission was to revolutionize caregiving you know
I I kind of dealt with the problem firsthand I had to leave behind my career you know to do it full-time and I
think to me it was just obvious that there is a huge unmet need over 50 million Americans are caring for a
family member that's aging that's living with serious illness that's nearing end of life or that's living with um a major
long-term disability and that's one in six people and the care Market is not designed for them you know the care Market is designed for like the top 1%
if that and moreover even if you're in the top 1% and you have unlimited means the user experience in the care market
sucks all around you know because of the structure of the industry you know because it's this kind of national
franchise or local franchisee industry because they're profit maximizing for small Geographic markets because there's
this Antiquated 1980s and 1990s business model um that results in very high prices and very little less than half
being passed down to the underlying care you have this break in the entire system the tremendous amount of money that's
wasted on sales and marketing advertising you know buying Facebook ads Google ads newspaper ads I mean it's
just ridiculously inefficient economic structure that then results in like a poor customer experience and a poor experience for the caregiver too you
know so then everybody's complaining about caregiver shortage and I'm like well yeah there aren't logical caregiver shortage there's caregiver shortage
because the current industry sucks you know like if you developed a different system there would be not unlimited but
there would be a lot more people caregiving like single-handedly like a team of five of us you know at this relatively earlier stage startup has
gotten 25,000 new caregivers Across America into the system so talk about
what caregivers shortages you know I'm not seeing any yeah yeah well and it is interesting and we we're seeing it
across several Industries and even not just home care giving but uh care you know caregiving facilities assisted
living nursing homes in particular are arguing or or um saying that they there's a shortage that they that they
can't fill the positions that they want and uh you know on one hand I very much appreciate apprciate the Revolutionary
uh approach that you have and this is a great way to start to look at Solutions
criticize so much the the the old way either because that's that is the way I mean that's the way most people if
they're going to get into this business and run you know our area we have a number of homeg giving companies um that
were just started by families and of course there's a lot of franchises too but the idea is you really have a big
picture idea and so the other ones are still going to be around maybe they'll find ways to innovate and things like
that I agree with you that the system isn't great for that but it is the system so can't criticize them for being
part of the system that exists I also like the idea of moving towards a better system in finding this Innovation and
that's and that's what you're you're providing you're really rethinking the the whole model that's around home care
giving no 100% agree and and you're you're 100% right I mean every individual that I met I've met a lot of
Home Care agency owner operators and they are all kind-hearted mission-driven people 95 plus% of them something
happened to them like what happened to me and they left behind another career to take care of someone and then after
that they were drawn by the mission or many would call it a calling I certainly would you know if like okay things happen in my life for a reason that are
very painful very traumatic but you know you kind of you know reframe it as like okay maybe this is my calling and I
found it Midway through my life so I I think most of the people I've met are like very well intentioned people and the ones that go go into the franchise
system it's the system wins you know that they don't win you know they can't do it their way and the ones that are
doing it independently I mean God bless them you know because I think they have a lot of leeway to do it a different way
and experiment and test different business models and I think many of them will end up you know designing things that are more unique and more kind of
like user friendly but I think the franchise part of the system constraints the individual's creative ability and
ability to kind of solve the needs on the ground and then they just kind of have to execute against what the franchise says and I think that
that to me that Limits The Innovation that should be happening on the ground yeah that makes sense I wanted to get into how you came to this because this
is more than just a job for you obviously you you've given up other work and this is really a mission for you so
what brought you to this and what is your background yeah yeah sure great question so my background prior to this
I so I'm in my early 40s right now and from my early 20s until my mid-30s I was
um living in New York City I was working in the finance industry I started my career in investment banking at a a
large bank at credit s and then I very quickly went into the hedge fund industry where I was managing
Investments across a series of sectors including Health Care technology and others um I rose up the ladder very
quickly due to um good Investments and high returns and became a partner uh in my late 20s at a multi-billion dollar
fund um where I was running an entire portfolio and then by my early 30s one of those investors backed me to start my
own fund um so when I was 31 I started my own investment fund with 10 10 million um and by the time I was 35 I
grew that to 250 million had um university endowments and large charitable foundations investing with me
um and I was investing in more like kind of like mid-stage and mature companies um across you know kind of multiple
Industries but Healthcare was a decent Focus um you know had nothing happened to me I would have just stayed on that track you know I was good at it I like
doing it but I would say in hindsight you know there was not much of a mission or calling it was just kind of I was analytically good at thinking about
businesses and seeing Trends in the economy however you know fortunately or unfortunately became a caregiver um you
know I first secondhand saw the experience when my grandfather aged and then became severely ill and had a
series of difficulties from cognitive decline to kidney failure to cancer um
and then to end of life and you know I'm the person in my family that everybody relies on for research and advice so
while my mom bore the Brun of the Direct Care work I navigated the entire kind of care ecosystem including both Healthcare
clinical care as well as like homebased and I kind of realized like one of the big insights I had from that experience was you know 95% of kind of the Care
work is outside of the healthare system that the family ends up having to deal with and that's the harder part where there aren't a lot of resources so you
know in my mom's case um at that time she was in her um mid-50s and she had a career and she had to leave her career
to manage the care because like the care we were getting was not good enough and you know she felt like hey this is my
duty and you know we all thought it was going to be like temporary Etc and what was supposed to be a few months starting it at several years and then she was
never able to go back to the workforce and I kind of realized like that to me was like aha that um okay if this
industry cannot support families when they're going through this difficult time you're going to have a lot of people burning out of the workforce
losing a significant sense of their identity dealing with a lot of stuff without getting help and it's going to
leave lasting damage so at that time I was still running my fund and I became kind of like obsessed with like the car
economy and why isn't there more Innovation happening and you know then unfortunately at the peak of my fund my
wife became cely ill um and when through years of serious illness cancer multiple
hospitalizations and failed therapies and I became her primary caregiver um and it was like a very very difficult
experience because I also firsthand dealt with you know you can't get good care help you end up doing it yourself
end up taking a bunch of sabatical for my work which at that point just became kind of like after a while it became untenable we kind of like were flying
all over the country to get treatment including um significantly at Michigan medicine and yeah then I just had to
basically shut down my fund and become full-time caregiver uh which was like very difficult but you know it was like
eye opening you know in terms of like and inspiring in terms of like hey there's so many people I think my biggest positive learning from an
otherwise very negative and painful experience was that meeting so many people through caregiver support groups
cancer support groups just like all the time spent in hospitals all the time spent in you know all the other
treatments and just kind of like seeing how many people are going through this you know without the support that they
need and you know the burden that it places on the family caregiver I think I I love learn things and experience
things myself that I would have never guessed before but one in four family caregivers deals gets their own health
issue because of the stress of caregiving one and three family caregivers gets their own mental health issues so both physical and mental
health you know it becomes extremely taxing and I think that they're the ignored part of you know kind of the
experience because the person with the issue is what the entire medical system is focusing on but what about the person taking care of that person so yeah I
thought that it was like really eye opening and after that point you know I kind of like walked away from my fund and I was kind of like thinking okay and
thank God knock on wood I didn't finish the story but my wife ultimately had a successful outcome and has now been in
remission for a few years you know even more miraculously we had our first child after the whole experience so we have a
happy healthy three-year-old daughter which you know they said was sophistically impossible um so really
thankful for that and then after that I was just like I could either just go back to my finance career but I'd kind of like lost meaning in that and then
I'd gain the new meaning of like hey there's something here that needs to be fixed um I have like skills and
background and like um of passionate interest in this so you know why not just try to fix this so that was kind of
the journey and in the early days of starting out I thought I was going to do something for a couple years make an impact and then kind of go back to what
I knew how to do but seeing the growing impact and seeing the positive feedback from the families we robing I think has
gotten me like way more excited that wow there's like something here that could make a huge like impact around the country so yeah now I'm like all in
that's great now where were your first so you kind of center around universities and things like what were
your first entries into it I know that you're in an arbor in Detroit where did you start out um so I'm based in Raleigh
Durham North Carolina and our first entries were in our in our backyard at Duke University and UNC Chapel Hill so
we started there and you know in the first year we went from like a couple dozen students to like a 100 students to
eventually 500 students So eventually we got to over a thousand students just at these two schools and then we're like
that's kind of cool like there's like way more people that are interested in doing this than would have expected then we expanded to some other universities
just in our area you know kind of like across the South to South Carolina College of Charleston Emer University in
Atlanta so we ended up getting like 5,000 students on and then I'd say at some point in the last like I'd say nine
months or so it kind of like went viral around the countries um then then it rapidly expanded to Boston you know so
we ended up at Harvard toughs Northeastern Boston University there's like seven different universities in Boston area um we end up going all over
Florida Texas at several very large schools University of Michigan of course and of course the Rival Ohio State you
know these like big universities have like large Healthcare focused populations and it was awesome you know
the students were telling each other and really the professors were telling each other you know a lot of these universities have what's called preh
health career advising um anyone who wants to become a doctor become a nurse become a physician assistant the
undergraduate University departments will advise them on like what else you can do to improve your career path and
opportunities and I think the career advisers loved the K platform because they were like this is a great way for
students to get paid experience at flexible hours they don't have to wait till summer they don't have to wait till after graduation to get this experience
so we started really partnering with a lot of these departments and you know had several presentations with the University of Michigan career advising
and then they started kind of endorsing and recommending the service so yeah now and then we're also expanding to the West Coast we're at Stanford Berkeley um
UCLA a bunch of universities across California so yeah now we have over 25,000 students on it and um yeah it's
growing very fast I think we we found know interesting statistic Across America is that there's 20 million
college students of which something like 18% of them or so want to go into Healthcare professions so let's just use
round number around 4 million and ker is getting 20 to 25% market share of those
at most universities when they expand so if we can get this right at a grand scale level you could have up to a
million students on this so that's kind of like cool to think because most of these people are not in the care economy otherwise at a time when there's huge
Workforce shortages to have some way of getting a million new people into the
care Workforce even if it's going to be temporary you know for a few years and I would say some of the best people in the
workforce you know these are people are going to be future doctors and nurses that would be just I think a home run for society well there's the other side
of it too which I think is really important that yeah if there's criticism of the healthcare industry that it can
be very impersonal and that the you know that sometimes the people feel that the doctor really kind of lost touch with
the the patients in some cases and so what a great opportunity to have these future you know doctors nurses uh
Physicians assistants that have that home care giving experience which is the most personal the most intimate type of
care and that they probably wouldn't go through the traditional industry they're not going to be able to commit to the
same hours or the the same requirements of that traditional industry and having that experience that Human Experience
before they get to the you know the next stage in their career I think that's
just amazing and really is encouraging of the idea that there's so many people
so many students that are are excited about this yeah that great Point Bob I mean thanks for you know highlighting
that we just had this wonderful young man Josh who got into med school and he's on his way to BEC an orthopedic surgeon and you know he he literally
wrote his essays about the care that he provided for a family uh where um the gentleman was living with Parkinson's
and it it was interesting because the guy did everything you know he did rounds at the hospital you know as a nurse State and all stuff but you know
kind of his observation was in a lot of the clinical work you're in and out you know five minutes 10 minutes change the
IV do this do this do this but you don't really get to know the people and when you take care of the same man living
with Parkinson's for six months and you're visiting him twice a week and you're seeing all the stuff his wife's
dealing with you're seeing his condition progress over time you're seeing kind of like the the emotional toll as well as
the physical toll and you're seeing like the moments of happiness and developing a long-term relationship it's like that shines and I think that develops like an
amazing bedside Manner and for many of the students it's like you know they are so stressed with like I got to hit all
the biology classes get the grades take my standardized tests go do rounds to the hospital this is like the fun
positive thing where like you know one of the students at tus wrote an essay in her school paper about this that that
this I was about to burn out of my clinical career Journey because it's so stressful and it's so impersonal that
then taking care of a older lady in her community in Boston through Kera
reminded her of like this is actually why I want to go become a doctor you know if like I have five years ahead of
me of all this stress but ultimately I want to make it impact like this so I think that a lot of times like as
medicine becomes like overly complex I think you lose that human touch and I think that kind of results in like
people not want to do it anymore so I think yeah something like this is like great to encourage people to stick with it so for the caregivers that use your
platform do they have to be a student they have to be associated with one of the the schools that you work with uh
yeah great question for now yes you know for now I think we want to go for like you know it's a high quality Workforce
that um the traditional care industry doesn't want you know so I don't want to like kind of create you know it's not a zero sum game I don't want to compete
you know and I think most care agencies are looking for people who can do full-time care work so we're like hey look these students can't so we can
bring them into the workforce um we also find it's very high quality and vetted for the families that we run background checks on all the students we interview
all the students but it's nice to have the assurance that the university has also checked them and the university
they are currently enrolled because we find that that creates a second incentive of both a carrat and a stick
in terms of your professor knows you're on it your P adviser knows you're on it and your friends are on it so multiple
disincentives for any kind of bad behavior combined with multiple positive incentives for good behavior that if
you're at University of Michigan and you do a good job on this you do x amount of hours you might get glass credit you
know because we like strike relationships with these um departments and we get you like three credit hours for doing x amount of care giving then
if you do a good job on this we will give you an official download of your hours and a letter recommendation I
personally have written so many l recommendation to people for physician assistant school mad school nurse practitioner School Etc so for the
student it almost becomes like so many reasons to do a good job which then I think feeds back into the Care Quality
for the family so for now yes we're operating in a very constrained way like that I think over time I could see
openness to expanding to community colleges and potentially even expanding to to other people in the community but
I think for now want to go with like quality first and it just seems like a great way to have like a very very high
quality I would be confident enough to say right now like now I've been running it for a while like I would not only use this to get care for one of my loved
ones like if my family members like my mom's going through some health difficulties right now I would be happy to do it but we've gotten the quality
down so well and the name on campus is down so well that even if we got
somebody that we didn't do any of the checks on I still would be comfortable just because of how many inherent checks
there are in kind of the name and the system which I think is like kind of cool and I I wouldn't say that about the traditional care industry you know so
yeah so I think it's a good way to keep a high quality product well I definitely think that we'll be using this uh
platform so we do as part of our Law Firm what we call care navigation so
what we found was traditional lawyers that get involved in this help find you know some financing help set up things
legally so that they might be able to qualify for government benefits like veterans benefits and you know Ma
maximize Medicare and Medicaid things like that yeah but what we found was
that's really only a very small portion of what the family is dealing with uh kind of as you described it earlier and
so we've started this care navigation where we do care advocacy but also helping people find the care helping
them set it up properly and we're definitely going to be interacting with the K platform because it just sounds
fantastic and you are in our area so will be connecting our clients through that and through our care navigation
program I I know one of the things that we had discussed before before we got on
the podcast live is that you've been incorporating some artificial intelligence and I'd be interested in
hearing more about that and how platform uses some AI oh yeah yeah thanks so
there's some like I'd say there's two components of the AI that we've been incorporating one is kind of the boring behind the scenes stuff that people
don't see but that really improves the Care Quality and then there's the in front of the scene that people see so
I'll start with kind of like the boring first so the boring is on the back end of we have so much data of we've now had
you know tens of thousands of care sessions each session has details on what happened in the session the student
uploads that and reviews from Z to five stars the family the family reviews Z to five stars the student please to say
we're actually averaging like 4.87 out of five stars so it's like very high uh but we get a lot of data on like um
which people were better fit what was happening at the session who can do what so as that develops we're
basically training the AI of to become more predictive that when a new family
comes in and somebody books and says my mom is like this this this and this and she likes to do this and doesn't like to do this we now have a better prediction
model of okay which of the students is likely to make a better fit based on who's made better fits for people like
that in the past so I think that's been like a cool use of AI similarly with onboarding students like we use our
qualitative judgment between you know beyond the background checks and verifying enrollment we kind of see how people are answering questions and look
for non-monetary motivations to do the caregiving but nonetheless we now have so much data on not just who's on
boarded but how they've subsquently done and been rated in the care session so now we can kind of like dynamically use
that to supplement our own onboarding to predict who's likely to onboard and become a good caregiver you know then
you kind of get around okay somebody's just saying positive things on the interview but then you know how are they going to be reliability wise and quality
wise so a lot of the AI is being used to kind of power the care um so that's pretty cool and also that just kind of
keeps cost like very streamlined and keeps quality improved so I think that's awesome on the front end there's a lot
of AI that we're launching to help people we've iterated and launched a bunch of these um prototype projects
including life story capture you know a lot of people want to do Legacy projects so while you got students there with the
um older adult people want to get their stories out you know talk about their childhood talk about their middle age
talk about different fun things they used to do in their life and we've built AI to help prompt questions record and
then really the dream on that would be to create kind of like a digital autobiography combined with like a physical autobiography of people and
that stuff is so much easier to do with AI we've launched a bunch of Health Innovation projects that we're like
right now waiting for approval on from National andon aging to use AI to do a lot more Diagnostics and early screening
at home so we can kind of like use voice to both screen for dementia as well as help stage dementia progression which
has been in we Grant funded a project that we launched to help with loneliness and isolation which um we'd happy to
share with you and your listeners if you guys would like to try it out but this is for people when we are caregiving we
know there's gaps because families can't afford care all the time so sometimes certain days a week there isn't a caregiver there so we built a AI through
our side can call landlines and landlines or cell phones and have full conversation with people so we notice
for example there's um older lady in Ohio whose husband passed away a year ago and you know her um uh son and
daughter are booking care for her a couple days a week but then the rest of the time she's by herself and she's lonely and they know she's isolated and
depressed so she often has dinner by herself and she used to love having conversation you know she like very talkative person so yeah you know they
started having you know Frank what the Persona we set up um call her and just like check in on her and have full
conversation with her and this is something where if you kind of had to like staff somebody to do it would end up costing a lot of money and it would
just be so uneconomic that you know the family couldn't afford it but we built something that can do this for like a
few cents a call and just have like a full out half hour conversation with her talk about whatever and then overtime
running memory you know so that project got like a lot of Buzz and you know we're talking a lot of like foundations
about rolling that out all over the country so yeah there's a lot of like cool applications of AI that like you
would never think about but that can make like a huge impact we launched this one sorry last thing I'll say this was most most fun thing we launched a um art
AI tool that uh people with Parkinson and more advanced sea who you know can't
fully draw but who like creating art it's like very relaxing um so we had
this 89y old lady with Parkinson's in full Tremors trying to draw her um golden retriever that you know was her
dog a long time ago in bass and of course like it wouldn't come out well but between her drawing and then the
student kind of like telling thei what she was trying to do theyi went backfilled you know using generative RI
and created like an amazing picture and then it was just like she felt so great that she kind of Drew it herself you
know even though kind of like the did most of it so it's like like little you know we called that art therapy so I think yeah there's a lot of like cool
applications for AI like that that people aren't thinking about um that can just make like a huge positive impact on people and like and love interacting
with this new technology uh we know from research that especially with dementia part of the brain where memory is and
sometimes ability for your your brain to tell your hand what to do might not be
there but some of that more artistic you know this is where music comes in this is where art comes in and things like
that and to give an outlet for someone who has that that they still have that
ability they just can't actually do it anymore because their brain can't tell their hand to do it the way they used to
do it yeah but to use AI to be able to make it to use that creative part of their brain that they still have they
might not remember specifically you know what they've done in the past even but they know but that that is still intact
you'll see this with music with art you know all of these more creative Adventures that is something that is
often still intact with people with dementia they're just not able to express that so that's amazing to be
able to allow them to express that yeah I agreed no thank you thank you and it's it's so fun for us to do like you know
we have we have mostly like a team of like software people and like that type of project like we just like love doing
like sometimes we're up to like 1 or two in the morning working out the Kinks and you know just working hard to like launch his stuff into the world but then
because you know that as soon as somebody uses it the impact is just going to be you're going to bring joy and happiness to somebody who's in
otherwise very difficult situation and I think that's like really awesome like I'm surprised more people aren't doing this kind of positive stuff with AI but
I feel like yeah the social impact to bring these tools to help this population that people aren't Designing Technology for I think is awesome I also
am actually very excited about the part that you say you know you can really try to match people better with AI and and
it's very difficult to do I mean this is one of the things when we're Consulting with families we do a lot of work with
families that have a l them with some form of demen or Alzheimer's and and often with dementia there are some
things that they feel that it's going to be problematic bringing in a caregiver and so if you have the technology to uh
to see how this care this particular caregiver or over a range of caregivers how they've interacted on certain issues
or how they've been able to frankly just even dealing with somebody with memory
issues that repeats themselves a lot that's not always easy for everybody and so can match people that are more patient
or that uh that can talk about we had one of the clients that I often will talk about that he was showing some
agitative behaviors and one of the things that we eventually figured out and was able to really make that go away
was he liked to watch and talk about old western movies old cowboy that's
something that you know AI can figure that kind of stuff out a lot faster the right people to the right
people I think that's amazing use of the technology and could be very helpful in
really helping people on a a very personal level if we can match the right
caregivers to the right people who need care so no thanks Bob and and that's actually great example that you pointed
out I think it's exactly like I think that AI you know I think sometimes the industry has these buzzwords where it's like intelligence I kind of just real as
like it's data science you know like yeah you get you get a ton of raw data and you feed it into the thing and it
figures out a pattern that okay the times when he was calmed down were when
he was talking about westerns and then you kind of find okay through that how can we find either which students figure
that out or who might have a natural interest in being more conversational and talking about things that they don't know about but yeah you're right like I
think it's a it's one big data science project and I think that's a cool thing about this is like a you know Tech first
care company that kind of like built Tech and is doing everything with tech to improve the care experience is going
in there and like collecting a lot of data and able to make sense of patterns in the data I think is very cool and I
would say one thing we've been blessed with is the college student care Force these are like Tech native you know I'm
in my 40s you know don't sound like old person saying this but like basically today's kids are like they were born
with smartphones you know like they're so fast and Nimble about using this stuff that I think we can design a lot
of things where they can go in there and capture a lot of like data of what's going on in the care session and then
use that to optimize how we do care and I think that traditionally homebased based care is not like a super tech
industry so I think that that's like a yeah it's a big opportunity for like Innovation and Improvement and better personalization of care and I think at
scale I think you know power of AI combined with like guiding people better you can have full personalization of
care you know that right just um so much would be suited towards your own care needs and personalize that I think it
would just take individual people from a staffing perspective forever to figure out stuff well Neil I appreciate everything you do I'm really excited
about the the future that you describe and the expans men of this I would recommend everybody check out their
website kera.org or instagram.com at we
arearea and any any other thoughts that you want to leave our our audience Neil this has just been an amazing
conversation I'm really excited about it and I know that we're going to be interacting with this because this is
just very Innovative and just I think a great direction for for caregiving to go
any final thought you want to leave our listeners yeah thanks Bob last last thing I'll say is um follow me on
LinkedIn um I share a lot of health tips caregiving tips um a lot of stuff about coming up with policy federally as well
as Statewide and legislation so yeah uh feel free to follow me or connect with me on LinkedIn it's Neil NE middle
initial K and then last name s um or also just follow our company k c r y a
ya a but yeah between that and Instagram and other social media we share a lot of valuable information yeah I would love to build like a community of caregivers
whether or not you even need care help you know it's just awesome to like inform and educate people because I think that caregiving with our aging
population is a rising need um and there needs to be more resources to support caregivers yeah thanks for the
opportunity Bob really appreciate it thanks Neil if you enjoyed this podcast and found it interesting and you want to
keep up to date on these types of things remember to subscribe you can subscribe at any podcast to advice from your ad
Advocates at any place that you can listen to podcast you can go to our website at Manor log group.com or you
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get other guests that are so interesting so thanks Neil and uh we'll see you everybody next time thanks
[Music] Bob thanks for listening to learn more
visit Manor lawgroup.com