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Gary Barg: Hi, Mike. Walk me through CircleOf.com
Michael Jordan: Executives from Sysco, Walgreens, Apple, Community Health Network out of Indianapolis and the University of San Francisco got together to talk about a variety of different solutions that can not only help caregivers but also help patents and CircleOf was born out of that process. As a result, we really did initially design the tool for employers to give to their employees as a benefit.
But what we realized during COVID-19 is that a lot of caregivers lost their jobs and insurance or they couldn’t afford a monthly subscription fee. What we thought at that point was why are we just giving this to people who work for large corporations? So, we went back to our investors and told them that we want to make a much larger impact, so let’s just make CircleOf free for anybody who needs it. Let’s put it out into the world and see what happens and in October of 2021, we made it available free on the internet for anybody who really needs it.
Gary Barg: What have you learned from this year plus of talking to your 70,000 plus member base?
Michael Jordan: We put in a telehealth type of video chat that works regardless of what phone you're on. Now suddenly anybody has access to that feature as well as all the other collaboration tools within the app.
Gary Barg: What I like about the interactivity of CircleOf is that it helps with isolation that a lot of our senior loved ones feel.
Michael Jordan: The big thing is that we wanted to create a private secure place. It’s not Facebook. There’s nothing wrong with Facebook but when you want to invite your family into a closed group and share not only photos, images, videos, but also calendars and have private conversations around someone’s health and caregiving, you want more. You are also able create care collaborations where people can volunteer for certain tasks to support the person for whom you are caring. No one plans to be an adult caregiver. It’s not like having a child or even a pet. With a child, you spend nine months planning to take care of another person for 18 to 25 years. Even when you have a dog, you figure out how it’s going to affect your life and you make some changes.
But when Dad falls and breaks his hip, it catches everybody off guard. And no matter if you're a skilled professional caregiver or you're just a normal family member, everybody gets caught flatfooted. So, in that moment, you try to use the tools you have such as emails and chats, but not everybody uses the same tools. I use Slack and that’s my tool of communication. But neither my parents nor my sister use Slack. So, we needed to develop the right tool for the job instead of trying to force everybody to use the tools that they use for work. We built a tool for caregiving by caregivers that provides just the unique experience that everybody can lock onto quickly to become quickly productive.
Gary Barg: You're talking about the primary caregiver having the management tools that everybody who’s the CEO of an organization needs at their fingertips.
Michael Jordan: As a caregiver, you're trying to deal with the matters at hand and at the same time, the rest of the world wants to know what’s going on. What you do at that moment is to huddle up on CircleOf. Now all of a sudden instead of getting 50 chats and phone calls where everybody wants an update, you post an update once a day or once a week and show the progress of your mutual loved one. As the point-person for care coordination, you take all of this inbound communication off your plate and have a tool where you can dictate the amount and the cadence of updates on the patient. It’s a collaboration tool first and foremost.
As you start to get into the nitty-gritty of care when your loved one needs to go into skilled nursing or when comes home, you can create a schedule not only with your family but also with the unskilled and the home care providers, as well. You have a shared calendar with everybody. CircleOf backs up to Google and Outlook calendars. At the same time, you need things done, so you can arrange for the practical tactical things that keep your family running while you're trying to keep up with your loved one’s health.
Things like childcare and meals or other practical items can be coordinated with the app. You can say “can someone pick my kids up at 3:30 because I’m going to be here at the hospital all day. Can someone feed the dog? Can someone provide a ride to and from an appointment?” All which you can coordinate on a shared calendar and assign specific people to those tasks. For example, if I want my sister to drive Dad to the hospital rather than my brother, because he’s an awful driver. And if that person can’t do it, CircleOf tries to find someone to do it. So if something comes up, and they can't give him a ride today, I get alerted and so does the team and then I can either reassign it to someone else or somebody else will offer to pick up the task. There will be a website relaunch in the next eight weeks with a marketplace with recommendations for products and services that actual caregivers have suggested.
These are services that we know are useful. As you're going through your care journey, we want to provide tips, articles and tips that can answer the most immediate questions you have a caregiver. We also guide you to solutions that your fellow caregivers have found to work for them. Now you're not Googling for everything. You're in this close-knit community where you can ask people questions about products and services.
If you need to send someone a meal, we can make a recommendation for a service that delivers. Or if Dad has broken his hip and you know that he’s going to need to be in a skilled nursing facility, you can find good local skilled nursing facilities that have been reviewed by caregivers.
The ultimate horizon for is making this all very local. As adult caregivers, we tend to show up online in very weird ways and by the strange questions we ask because we’re trying to get Dad from his bed to the bathroom. We want to make sure that when you read our content, it not only answers your question, but it lets you do four or five other things you're going to need, as well.
Gary Barg: We have always found the best advice, support, and wisdom coming from our fellow caregivers. If you want to learn something about caregiving, ask a caregiver.