Amber: Welcome to raising tech podcast. I'm your host, Amber Bardon. Today our guest is Ken Reinstein, who is the Vice President of Business Development for CaringOnDemand. CaringOnDemand empowers individuals or their loved ones to request caregivers with ease and convenience with no limits on what you need and regardless of where you are, all at the push of the button.
Welcome to the show, Ken.
Ken Reinstein: Thank you, Amber. I appreciate the opportunity to be here.
Amber: Let's dive right into CaringOnDemand. Tell me, what is it? How did you get started? How long have you been around?
Give us the story and give us the background on the company.
Ken Reinstein: Sure. So I'm a relative newbie with the company. I've been about two, three months. It was great to meet you at Leading Age Arizona a few months back. Really appreciated the presentation you gave there. CaringOnDemand is a mobile application.
It's available to clients and to families. There's applications both for recipients of care and their families, as well as for [00:01:00] caregivers. And it's a, it's really a simple thing. You download the app, you set up a HIPAA compliant platform. And then what that allows our team and recipients of care to do is if they need care, they can literally push a button and say, I need to see someone on Tuesday at 10 a.
m. That information is shared with our caregivers around in the area where that person needs service. And then we fulfill that need. And it's like, it's really simple. The beauty of the interface is it allows. Let's say mom or dad to use it as well as an adult child or we have a backend dashboard that's built for organizations such as senior living communities or other healthcare organizations where they can monitor who's coming in and out of their building.
They know what's going on depending on their level of interest in what details they want. They can see care plans and things like that. And that goes for both the individuals as well as communities. And the beauty of it is, there's a live human being that helps people on board.
We have a client liaison, so you're not [00:02:00] just stuck dealing with kind of fumbling with the technology, if perhaps that is a challenge. There's an opportunity to speak with our live client liaison. Who's a person right here who lives in the East Coast, and they'll help build a plan to meet your needs and your budget, depending on how much time you need.
The real kicker and beauty and differentiator for what we do is there's no minimums with setting up care. When someone typically thinks of a home care service or a home health service, there's multiple hour minimums, two, four, six hours a day, et cetera. Although it's a little bit impractical to have a five minute visit, someone could literally sign up and use our services for five minutes once a day, all the way up to a 24 seven care plan if needed.
Amber: That's really interesting. We've spoken to other vendors in the space who are doing something similar, but it's only for providers. It's only for communities. So I really love how this platform is so flexible and can be used in so many different situations. Can you talk a little bit about what would usage of CaringOnDemand look like at a senior living [00:03:00] provider versus like you said, mom and dad out in the community by consumers directly.
Ken Reinstein: Yeah, there's some really interesting opportunities there to partner with communities. So first of all, as I mentioned, we do have a dashboard that we would set up and there's no charge to set this up for a community. There's a dashboard that allows the executive director or resident services director to see that caregiver Ken Reinstein.
I'm not a caregiver but to see the Ken Reinstein is coming into the community to meet with Sally Jones at 10am. The way our technology works is. Our caregivers check in when they arrive at Sally Jones home, and then they check out. So there's the ability to track that. There's the ability to track if perhaps the requested meeting wasn't fulfilled for some reason, and then we can follow up or if it's canceled.
If the client recipient of care needs to cancel, that's all notified in the app. The dashboard allows a lot of metrics in there, and I don't have all the nitty gritty details to share, but there's a lot of metrics that are really. Again, can be as detailed or as [00:04:00] simplified as requested by the community.
It's flexible. We can set up modules to meet the needs of each individual community. The really neat value add to this is we can work with the community and we can help them market. We can be used as a sales and marketing tool that we have this service and
process at their communities. We've worked out where we've been a bridge program for communities. Perhaps there's an interested party, a depositor who's not quite ready to move in yet, or perhaps in a great situation, if there's a waiting list, we could be a bridge program where we could work with X, Y, Z community and still be a Point of care or point of service for them in conjunction with the community while they're perhaps still considering that move in or on that waiting list.
Amber: Yeah, that sounds really easy to use. Is it a nationwide platform at this time?
Ken Reinstein: It is available. We can work anywhere that a certified home care agency or home health agency exists. Our primary operations [00:05:00] right now, we have about 400 recipients of care on our platform right now. We've got about 15 or so communities across the east coast and in Arizona where I'm at.
But there is literally no boundaries to where we can go again. We just need to work with, and we do work with some national healthcare vendors, home care vendors right now. So we could set up and get started very quickly Anywhere that anyone would be interested to work with us.
Amber: Can you talk a little bit about the caregiver side?
How do you find your caregivers? How do you qualify them? How does all of that work?
Ken Reinstein: Absolutely. So we work with license agencies that are regulated by whatever state they may be in. And of course, it's all over the board on regulations in Arizona. There's really not much regulation, but Perhaps in New York or New Jersey, Florida, etc.
There's a lot more regulation, but we work with licensed agencies and those agencies of course conduct background checks on their caregivers and we ensure that they adhere to any of the state requirements that are needed. So what we do is we ourselves do not [00:06:00] hire caregivers, we partner with those national agencies or those local agencies that have those caregivers in place and
of course, with the requirements that they are background checked and certified so they're not just hiring someone right off the street who had nothing better to do but to need a job. So we really ensure that there's that quality there in that safety and security and peace of mind that we can provide through that partnership.
Amber: Can you tell me a little bit about the story behind the founding of CaringOnDemand? How did you come to be? What's the background of the founding members? What was the problem you were looking to solve?
Ken Reinstein: Absolutely. So our our founder, Stephen East has been in the home care and aging space for about 20 years.
And he kept hearing stories from seniors that were really, they wanted care. But the cost was really becoming prohibitive. Obviously, there's cost pressures going on more and more in our world these days. But one of the reasons behind the escalating costs was the inefficiencies and also that silo mentality that agencies could only provide [00:07:00] care in set increments that are.
Again, multiple hour minimums . That disruption opportunity that differentiate that we offer is that we create a network of providers. So our clients have access to a broad network without having to call a bunch of agencies.
And we have that concierge level service and that flexibility to use our service at a, Again, five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, one time weekly, or all the way up to whatever length of time they may need. The beauty really is in the cost savings is the ability to tailor and to cater to the needs of the client, not to force the client to meet the needs of the agency.
Amber: What is the app itself look like? Is it generally used by the HR team at the community? Can you talk a little bit about how that process works?
Ken Reinstein: It's typically, like I said, used by someone in the resident care team, resident services team. They can see who's coming in and out of the community when they're going to whom they're going to see. There's a lot of details that are provided.
There's [00:08:00] care plans that are individually developed for each user that depending on again the level of interest and desire. And of course, nothing is done in a vacuum. We wouldn't share this information without the client being fully aware, but the community end user has the opportunity to see the care plans to see when that visit happened and if perhaps, the caregiver noticed that Sally had a fall since I was last here or I noticed that the house looks a little more disheveled, things are out of place.
I've noticed something's going on. There was a deficiency or something. And so that information is shared with the Agencies, with the communities. We have communities that want very hands off. And then we have communities that really want us to be very fully involved and maintaining a full understanding of what we're doing with each and every resident.
Amber: Can you talk a little bit more about the pros of why a senior living community would wanna use CaringOnDemand?
Ken Reinstein: Absolutely. The average move in at a community is about 80 years old. Of course there's, depending if you're talking [00:09:00] about independent living or assisted, et cetera, typically someone's gonna have perhaps a couple deficiencies or limitations with ADLs.
But for the most part, these individuals can be independent and can remain in an independent living status. Just by receiving supportive services that we offer that's really what our vision is is that it's care when you want it and for as long as you need that meets the needs of the individual.
So again it's looking to help really extend the quality of life and the ability to have people who needs that little bit of extra care. For instance, we just received an inquiry yesterday about someone who wanted help for their father to take care of their cat and their cat litter there was some other things that they needed, but that was one of the first requests is do you guys help with pets and things like that.
So that was something that actually was giving peace of mind to a potential client's daughter who was getting ready to go on a vacation and wasn't going to be in town to really be there for her father. It's a peace of mind, both for the [00:10:00] residents recipients of care and also family members and the communities itself that would be a partner to help
their residents stay healthy and vibrant longer.
Amber: Ken, can you tell me a little bit about the ROI?
Can you talk about the cost for the platform and how that works? And do you take insurance?
Ken Reinstein: We do not directly take insurance, but we provide paperwork to allow recipients of care to, to bill insurance such as Medicare, Medicaid, et cetera. It's a very low cost.
We do not charge communities at this time. The cost for an individual recipient of care to have access to our app and our services is 5 a month.
And if we're talking about a community level integration, there's lots of flexibility there. There's opportunities of course to maybe have a discount or perhaps several months of. Access and things. And we've also worked with communities that have just built that 5 charge into the monthly service fees for a community.
Amber: Is there anything about [00:11:00] CaringOnDemand that we haven't talked about yet that you want to make sure our listeners know?
Ken Reinstein: We're a new technology. It's really the future. Everyone's about technology, about convenience and about flexibility. I think using To help a community grow its resident satisfaction. A community with our services really with our platform integrated in what they do.
It just gives an additional value to moving into that community again, because it's that peace of mind that we provide and we offer through the opportunity to work with certified home care agencies to take care of a resident or to take care of mom and dad to give them that extra extended peace of mind.
Through the platform that we offer.
Amber: Great. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Ken. And where can our listeners find out more about CaringOnDemand?
Ken Reinstein: Absolutely. We do have a basic website, caringondemand.com, if they want just to generally check it out. If they'd be interested if a community is interested or [00:12:00] it doesn't have to be a community, it can be an individual, a family member, et cetera.
They can go to caringondemand.com/raisingtech and there'll be a form there that they can fill out to have someone contact them. Everything is private. They're not going to get spammed by signing in that form.
Amber: Great. Thank you
so much for joining us today.
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