Interview with Jeff Hingher
Gary Barg: Jeff, tell me how Connected Caregiver came to be. Does this have to do with a personal story? Are you and have you been a family caregiver? Is that something you want to share with us?
Jeff Hingher: In 2004, I had just gotten married. My mom was 63 years old and diagnosed with early onset dementia. So, that’s really where caregiving first kind of impacted me personally. That experience lasted 10 years. She gradually worsened. I think probably everybody listening to this or reading this is familiar with that kind of story. My sister was local in New Jersey, and I lived halfway across the country in Minneapolis. So, she was the primary caregiver, and I was a secondary. We had the challenges of how to stay informed with what was going on with mom.
Two years ago I got involved with a company called Verustat that does remote patient monitoring. The team realized that remote monitoring might also be important for family caregivers, so we created Connected Caregiver (which is now a lot more than just remote vitals monitoring).
Gary Barg: Who is a typical Connected Caregiver client?
Jeff Hingher: It tends to be folks that are—if I had to pick an age range—45-to-55 years old, they’re probably still working and have kids at home. They notice mom or dad has started to slow down and they have to take on some caregiving responsibilities. That’s where we come in. If mom starts to have falls and you need an emergency button or fall detection, we offer that. If mom or dad has chronic heart failure and needs to monitor weight or blood pressure, we can monitor that and alert the family caregiver, as well.
Gary Barg: Let’s walk through it. I’m a Connected Caregiver client. What do I get? What do I see? How does being a Connected Caregiver client support my loved one?
Jeff Hingher: So, there’s three key aspects to Connected Caregiver: Care Essentials, Safety+ Monitoring and health/vitals monitoring. Care Essentials is the core of everything and is what you get when you download the Connected Caregiver App. Care Essentials is all about functionality that helps the family caregiver organize care and health details, as well as coordinate and communicate with the Care Circle. It pulls together a lot of caregiving details in one common place; something we heard when we talked to a number of family caregivers. For example, we heard a story from a local caregiver, with four sisters that lived out of state. She said, “I love taking care of mom, but I’m tired at the end of the week. I take her to a doctor’s appointment. I come home, and then I have to call each of my sisters and let them each know what’s going on.” So, we started listening to caregivers saying those things and said, “How can we help make organization of caregiving duties easier?” “How can we help communication and coordination of that care circle?” “How can we put commonly accessed things like insurance cards, medication lists all on one spot?” People have told us that they cobble together solutions as caregivers, such as “we’ve got an email chain for the family” or “We’ve got a text chain.” But some of the issues they have found with these solutions are things like important messages get lost or difficulty having to search for a specific medication or doctor.
What we saw was that we could build a chat functionality, so that those messages—if you’re within Connected Caregiver—are only about anything that has to do with caregiving. It becomes the one source of truth for everybody within the care circle. “Care circle” being defined as anybody involved in care of our loved one. It’s usually adult children. Maybe even a neighbor that lives nearby. We also have a calendar function which doesn’t get mixed up in your regular Outlook. You can enter in, for example, doctor’s appointments and put in the address and reminder notes. So, if somebody’s filling in for you as the primary caregiver, they can have everything needed to get to the appointment within Connected Caregiver. Your loved one’s medication lists can be added in, as well. We built a feature that references Drugs.com to pull in all the basic information about the medications and importantly, it also looks for potentially dangerous interactions.
Let’s say mom starts having falls or you’re concerned about where she is all the time. We are a licensed Personal Emergency Response System organization. Our device has an emergency button and is 4G enabled. It’s got 24/7 monitoring with fall detection included. If a fall is detected, somebody from the Monitoring Center will immediately call via that device and check in. If there’s no response or the person says, “Yes, I’ve fallen. I need help.” help will be dispatched. If the person says, “No, I just bumped into something" then no help will be dispatched. It's got GPS location with geofencing. For example, you can put a ring around mom’s house. If she comes or goes you can be notified of that. Everything that I’ve mentioned is designed to ease the burden on the family caregiver and it’s all included in one affordable bundle at just $45 per month. If they’re less stressed, they’re giving better care and potentially more care to their loved one.
The third component is Remote Vitals Management. This goes back to our original parent company where we help doctors remotely monitor patients through connected devices. Let’s say your mom has congestive heart failure, you want to track blood pressure daily and most likely you want to track weight. You do have to purchase the cell-enabled device and then it’s $5 a month where you can set limits, for example, for the connected weight scale. If a loved one gains x pounds in a certain number of days, it gives you an alert immediately through Connected Caregiver. Same thing with blood pressure monitoring. You can set upper and lower limits. You can set up frequency checks so if your loved one misses monitoring with regards to the schedule you set, it sends you an alert.
Gary Barg: Okay. I’m interested. How do I get started with Connected Caregiver?
Jeff Hingher: A couple of different ways. You can go to myconnectedcaregiver.com. You can sign up for Safety+, which is our pendant and Care Essentials, and the total is $45 a month. You can find Connected Caregiver on the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store on your phone. Care Essentials is $10 a month and currently, we’re giving away two months free! You can use the code “2MonthsFree” when you sign up. If you don’t like it, you can cancel with no charge to you.
Gary Barg: Tell me about any ancillary equipment I might need or want.
Jeff Hingher: It’s really designed to be something that can meet individual needs. If you want the emergency button fall detection—you would purchase the Safety+ package with the pendant. If you do want a connected device, we offer four different devices—blood pressure monitor, a connected weight scale, a glucometer, (if you’re tracking blood sugar) and a pulse oximeter (which tracks your blood oxygen level.) Those are all around $90 each and then $5 a month per monitoring per device. We find that people might need one or two. They don’t generally need all four.
Gary Barg: Jeff, what would be the one most important piece of advice you’d like to share with family caregivers?
Jeff Hingher: That I’d say it is manageable. It helps if you have a plan. My sister and I went through it and it took a long time to get organized back then, so hopefully Connected Caregiver can be something that can help caregivers now. Our hope is that we’re pulling together the best of solutions into one place, and that it can be helpful for family caregivers.