Advice From Your Advocates
Advice From Your Advocates
Revolutionizing Care: How CareYaya is Tackling the Caregiver Shortage
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: Neil Shaw
Executive Producer: Savannah Meksto
Assistant Producer: Samantha Noah
Assistant Producer: Miranda Donaldson
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ABOUT US:
Mannor Law Group helps clients in all matters of estate planning and elder law including special needs planning, veterans’ benefits, Medicaid planning, estate administration, and more. We offer guidance through all stages of life.
We also help families dealing with dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and other illnesses that cause memory loss. We take a comprehensive, holistic approach, called Life Care Planning. LEARN MORE...
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 Careyaya, 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 Careyaya.
Speaker 2:Sure. So yeah, I'm the CEO and co-founder of Careyaya. We run a care marketplace connecting over 25,000 college students to care for older adults in their community. All the students are pre-health career aspirational doctors, nurses, 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.
Speaker 2:Many people around the country call us Care for America, 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 unmet need is there's a massive shortage of caregivers who are, you know, who are able to help people, and our population is only aging, so we need more help. So, yeah, that's kind of Keriaya in a nutshell.
Speaker 1:So the people that interact with this Keriaya platform are going to be the students and then also the public that needs to find caregivers, or how does that work?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the way the Kariaya 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, typically through a website, web app, anywhere you have internet access and you can go on set up a profile 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 our first Michigan market was University of Michigan, kind of broader Ann Arbor area, but 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. 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. We're completely angel funded and grant funded. And then you book and use everything through 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. So it's highly affordable.
Speaker 2: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 pre-medical student, you know, to kind of come help you at half the rate as traditional care. 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. This does it for them. So yeah, it's a very convenient solution.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really interesting and I want to get more into the process there because that sounded quite interesting. So a family that's looking for a caregiver and this could be an ongoing relationship, right, 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, 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 situation.
Speaker 2:Yes, 100%, in fact. Actually we prefer that. The students prefer that. You know, I think everybody benefits when it's ongoing.
Speaker 2:So 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, and 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 living in like Ann 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. You're worried about her remotely. Or let's say you're somebody living in Ann Arbor and your mother lives in Atlanta, you know, I think, by the way, we, you know we're all over the country, you know.
Speaker 2: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 it would find and match students that are available. So if you had a student at a nearby university who is available on Tuesdays and Thursdays and 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 termterm matching and relationship building. So we are able to offer care five days a week and seven days a week, but we also have people using it a couple of days a week, as needed, and some people are wanting different people to come by. 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's pretty flexible and people can use it, you know, however they want to.
Speaker 1:So tell me more about the payment process. So they're not paying through the consumer, the family is not paying through the website, they're paying the person directly. Is that what I heard? Yes, 100%.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we set it up that way, you know, in our early days. We've now been around for almost three 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 5% of that cut and we were just like, well, 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. And then people are also able to do cash or check or other methods, like Zelle, as they want. But we found person to person methods are, you know, you can get around a transaction fee. 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 convenient for everyone.
Speaker 1:I believe there's a lot of skeptical people in the world, so I'd like to get into the details. So you know the old saying follow the money. So when we follow the money, I heard, I think I heard and I want to kind of clarify this that Carriaya is funded by some angel investors. Right, yes? And is there profit being made by Carriaya? Where do they get figured into the financial arrangement?
Speaker 2:Yeah, great question. So currently 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 funding 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 thirties 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, well, 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.
Speaker 2:As that movement grew, we were attracted or actually 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 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 it 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. So we're like, okay, let's make it a technology startup, stay true to the social mission and not monetize off families or take money from caregivers pockets.
Speaker 2:So we did that and then after that got going, 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, given out to innovation companies that are making an impact on advancing care for the older adult population. So, pleased to say, we've won a grant from Johns Hopkins, one from National Institute on Aging and also a grant from Atrium Health, which is one of the largest hospital systems in the country. So through this combination of funding 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?
Speaker 2:I do believe 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 in our favor. Medicare is starting to do innovation programs, starting to pay for in-home care, and we're talking to a couple of large hospitals about partnering with them on the dementia guide program and 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 through this. There are 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.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 2: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 time somebody's 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 indefinitely through grant funding and through other partnerships with Medicare, you're able to keep the basic consumer care matching. And I believe 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, frankly, the negative attitude that people feel in the traditional care industry when they fork over 35 bucks and then the person you know the caregiver doing 99% of the work gets lots in half. Both sides are sour in that transaction.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, and I think that's an important conversation that you just had, because I think people want to have a good understanding of how this all works and is their caregiver getting paid enough, you know, to attract the right care, good caregivers, things like that. And the conversation that you really made it clear for everybody is this is bigger than just that transaction. This is a mission. This is a bigger picture and you're really looking through the length of it, 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, you know, a small option, or that. You're looking to really grow this and you've set everything up in the way this will be a long term solution no-transcript means the user experience in the care market sucks all around, you know, because of the structure of the industry.
Speaker 2: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 that results in very high prices and very little less than half being passed down to the underlying care worker. You have this break in the entire system, that tremendous amount of money that's wasted on sales and marketing, advertising buying Facebook ads, google ads, newspaper ads. I mean it's just a 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, 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 twenty five thousand new caregivers across America into the system. So talk about what caregiver shortage is. You know, I'm not seeing any. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. Well, and it is interesting, and even not just home caregiving, but care, you know, caregiving facilities, assisted living, nursing homes in particular, are arguing or saying that there's a shortage, that they can't fill the positions that they want. And you know, on one hand, I very much appreciate the revolutionary approach that you have, and this is a great way to start to look at solutions.
Speaker 1:Criticize so much the old way either because that's that is the way I mean most people if they're going to get into this business and run. You know we have a number of home giving companies 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 I can't criticize them for being part of the system that exists.
Speaker 1:I also like the idea of moving towards a better system and finding this innovation, and that's what you're providing. You're really rethinking the whole model that's around home caregiving.
Speaker 2:No, 100% agree and you're 100% right. I mean every individual that I met. I met a lot of home care agency owner operators and they are all kindhearted, mission-driven people, 95 plus percent 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.
Speaker 2:So I think most of the people I've met are like, very well-intentioned people and the ones that 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 user friendly. But I think the franchise part of the system constrains 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 that to me, that limits the innovation that should be happening on the ground.
Speaker 1: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've given up other work and this is really a mission for you. So what brought you to this and what is your background?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, sure, great question. So my background prior to this I'm in my early 40s right now and from my early 20s until my mid 30s I was living in New York City. I was working in the finance industry. I started my career in investment banking at a large bank, credit Suisse, and then I very quickly went into the hedge fund industry where I was managing investments across a series of sectors, including healthcare, technology and others. I rose up the ladder very quickly due to good investments and high returns and became a partner in my late 20s at a multi-billion dollar fund where I was running an entire portfolio. And then by my early 30s, one of those investors backed me to start my own fund. So when I was 31, I started my own investment fund with 10 million and by the time I was 35, I grew that to 250 million, had university endowments and large shareable foundations investing with me and I was investing in more like kind of like mid-stage and mature companies across, you know, kind of multiple industries.
Speaker 2:But healthcare was a decent focus. 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, I became a caregiver. 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 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 brunt of the direct care work, I navigated the entire kind of care ecosystem, including both healthcare, clinical care as well as like home-based, 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 healthcare system that the family ends up having to deal with, and that's the harder part where there aren't a lot of resources.
Speaker 2:So you know, in my mom's case at that time she was in her mid fifties 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, et cetera. And then she was never able to go back to the workforce and I kind of realized, like that to me was like an aha, that okay, if this industry cannot support families when they're going through this difficult time, you're gonna 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 gonna leave lasting damage. So at that time I was still running my fund and I became kind of like obsessed with like the care economy and why isn't there more innovation happening? And you know, then, unfortunately, at the peak of my fund, my wife became severely ill and went through years of serious illness, cancer, multiple hospitalizations and failed therapies and I became her primary caregiver 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. I ended up taking a bunch of sabbaticals 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 significantly, at Michigan Medicine.
Speaker 2:No-transcript. On the family caregiver, I think I learned things and experienced 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 in three family caregivers gets their own mental health issue. 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'd kind of like walked away for 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.
Speaker 2:So we have a happy, healthy three-year-old daughter, which you know they said was statistically impossible. 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 gained a new meaning of like, hey, there's something here that needs to be fixed. Um, I have like skills and background and like, um, a 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 of 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 robbing, 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.
Speaker 2:So yeah now I'm like all in.
Speaker 1:That's great. Now where were your first? So you kind of center around universities and then go where were your first entries into it? I know that you're in Ann Arbor and Detroit.
Speaker 2:Where did you start out? So I'm based in Raleigh Durham. North Carolina, and our first entries were in our backyard at Duke University and UNC Chapel.
Speaker 1:Hill, and so we started there, no-transcript.
Speaker 2:So we ended up at Harvard, tufts, northeastern Boston University there's like seven different universities in the Boston area. We ended up going all over Florida and 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's 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 pre-health career advising. 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 advisors love the Career AI 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.
Speaker 2:So we started really partnering with a lot of these departments and 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, ucla, a bunch of universities across California. So, yeah, now we have over 25,000 students on it and, yeah, it's growing very fast. An 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 a round number around 4 million, and Kariaya 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.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 1:you know these are people who are going to be future doctors and nurses. That would be just, I think, a home run for society, and so what a great opportunity to have these future, you know, doctors, nurses, physicians, assistants, that have that home caregiving experience which is the most personal, the most intimate type of care and that they probably wouldn 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.
Speaker 1:I think that's just amazing and really is encouraging of the idea that there's so many people, so many students, that are excited about this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, great point, bob. I mean thanks for highlighting that. We just had this wonderful young man, josh, who got into med school and he's on his way to becoming an orthopedic surgeon and he literally wrote his essays about the care that he provided for a family where the gentleman was living with Parkinson's. And it was interesting because the guy did everything. He did rounds at the hospital, he was a nurse aide and all that stuff.
Speaker 2:But 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 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.
Speaker 2: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 at the hospital. This is like the fun, positive thing where, like you know, one of the students at Tufts wrote an essay in her school paper about this that 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 Keriaya reminded her of like this is actually why I want to go become a doctor. You know, it's like I have five years ahead of me of all this stress, but ultimately I want to make an 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.
Speaker 1:So for the caregivers that use your platform? Do they have to be a student?
Speaker 2:They have to be associated with one of the schools that you work with. 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 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 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. 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.
Speaker 2:Because we find that that creates a second incentive of both a carrot and a stick in terms of your professor knows you're on it, your pre-health advisor 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 because we like strike relationships with these departments, and we get you like three credit hours for doing X amount of caregiving. Then, if you do a good job on this, we will give you an official download of your hours and a letter of recommendation. I personally have written so many letters of recommendation to people for physician assistant school, med school, nurse practitioner school, et cetera. 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.
Speaker 2:I think over time I could see openness to expanding to community colleges and potentially even expanding to other people in the community. But I think for now I want to go with quality first, and it just seems like a great way to have a very, very high quality. I would be confident enough to say right now now I've been running it for a while I would not only use this to get care for one of my loved ones, like if my family member is, 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 wouldn't say that about the traditional care industry. Yeah so, yeah, so I think it's a good way to keep a high quality product.
Speaker 1:Well, I definitely think that we'll be using this platform.
Speaker 1: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, maximize Medicare and Medicaid things like that. But what we found was that's really only a very small portion of what the family is dealing with, 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 Careio platform, because it just sounds fantastic and you are in our area, so we will be connecting our clients through that and through our Careio navigation program. I know one of the things that we had discussed 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 the platform uses some AI.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 2: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 backend of. We have so much data of. We've now had tens of thousands of care sessions. Each session has details on what happened in the session. The student uploads that and reviews from zero to five stars the family. The family reviews zero to five stars. The student Please just say we're actually averaging like 4.87 out of five stars, so it's like very high. But we get a lot of data on like which people were better fits, what was happening at the session who can do what.
Speaker 2:So as that develops, we're basically training the AI 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 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 onboarded but how they've subsequently 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. 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, so that's pretty cool and also that just kind of keeps costs like very streamlined and keeps quality improved. So I think that's awesome.
Speaker 2: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 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 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.
Speaker 2:We've launched a bunch of health innovation projects that we're like right now waiting for approval from National Institute on 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 fascinating.
Speaker 2:We grant funded a project that we launched to help with loneliness and isolation, which 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 noticed, for example, there's an older lady in Ohio whose husband passed away a year ago and her son and daughter are booking care for her a couple of 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 a conversation. You know she's like very talkative person, so you know they started having you know Frank, the person that we set up call her and just like check in on her and have full conversation with her no-transcript, but that can make like a huge impact.
Speaker 2:We launched this one sorry last thing I'll say, this was the most fun thing.
Speaker 2:We launched a art AI tool that people with Parkinson's and more advanced dementia who you know can't fully draw but who like creating art, it's like very relaxing. So we had this 89 year old lady with Parkinson's and full tremors trying to draw her golden retriever that you know, was her dog a long time ago in a bass and, of course, like it wouldn't come out well, but between her drawing and then the student kind of like telling the what she was trying to do, they went backfilled, you know, using generative art AI, 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 AI did most of it. So it's like a little. You know, we call 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 that can just make like a huge positive impact on people and like and older adults love interacting with this new technology.
Speaker 1:We know from research that, especially with dementia, part of the brain where memory is and sometimes ability for 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.
Speaker 1: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 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 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.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I agree. 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 one or two in the morning working out the kinks and, you know, just working hard to like launch this 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.
Speaker 1: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 it's very difficult to do.
Speaker 1: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 loved one with some form of dementia or Alzheimer's, 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 see how this particular caregiver, or 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 when you can match people that are more patient or that that can talk about what we had one of the clients that I often will talk about that he was showing some agitative behaviors and the things that we eventually figured out and was able to really make that go away was he'd liked to watch and talk about old Western movies old cowboy.
Speaker 2:That's something that you know.
Speaker 1:AI can figure that kind of stuff out a lot faster, yes. The right people to the right people. I think that's an amazing use of the technology and could be very helpful in really helping people on a very personal level if we can match the right caregivers to the right people who need care.
Speaker 2:No, thanks, bob, and that's actually a 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 view it as like it's data science, you know, like 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'm in my forties, you know, so I don't want to 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 home-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.
Speaker 2:You know that just so much would be suited towards your own care needs and personalized that I think it would just take individual people, from a staffing perspective, forever to figure out stuff.
Speaker 1:Well, neil, I appreciate everything you do. I'm really excited about the future that you described and the expansion of this. I would recommend everybody check out their website, careyayaorg, or instagramcom at wearecareyaya, and any other thoughts that you want to leave 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 and you want to leave our listeners.
Speaker 2:Thanks, bob. And last last thing I'll say is follow me on LinkedIn. I share a lot of health tips, caregiving tips, a lot of stuff about coming up with policy federally as well as statewide and legislation. So, yeah, feel free to follow me or connect with me on LinkedIn. It's Neil N-E-A-L, middle initial K and then last name S-H-A-H. Or also just follow our company, careyaya C-A-R-E-Y-A-Y-A, but yeah, between that and Instagram and all 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 and there needs to be more resources to support caregivers.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Thanks for the opportunity, bob Really appreciate it. Or you can find us on YouTube, but any place that you can get podcasts, don't forget to subscribe and know when we get other guests that are so interesting. So thanks, neil, and we'll see everybody next time.
Speaker 2:Thanks, Bob.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening. To learn more, visit manorlawgroupcom.
