Interview with Michael Jordan

Gary Barg: Can you tell me what brought you to create CircleOf and what it is designed to do to support family and professional caregivers?

Michael Jordan:  A friend of mine, Kate O’Keeffe was the head of Cisco’s Hyperinnovation Living Labs, which was a program that put together 50 to 60 high level executives from really big companies for a two-day design thinking event. She asked if I would participate as a distinguished entrepreneur on a team considering the future of healthcare with a focus on improving outcomes for cancer patients. My team was focused on care coordination and informed decision making. From this experience, CircleOf was born and sponsored by Cisco, Walgreens, Community Health Network and the University of California San Francisco. I guess the realization that we had really wasn’t about the patient, it was more about the primary family caregiver and being able to quickly assemble a team around them, as well as figuring out a way to make it easy for those caregivers to ask for help, receive help, and best organize the resources of their team.

Gary Barg: You’re hitting some of my sweet spots here. Care coordination, care partnership– making sure that the caregivers are not going it alone, and that they have this bubble of support around them.

Michael Jordan: With an acute onset condition or chronic condition, you, as a caregiver. usually just get a phone call that something has happened to that loved one, and all of a sudden, are thrust into the position of having to build this ad hoc non-clinical care team out of friends, family, loved ones, coworkers, and it’s not something you are generally ever prepared for.  Then usually, in order to express our love, we try to do everything, ourselves. We don’t put on our project management cap. We put on our, just do whatever it takes to support this person, cap. If you use the same analogy as having a new baby, then what you want to do is to make sure that you’re building a team around you of people who can own the things that they’re good at and perform well in those roles, and that they understand those roles. What CircleOf does, is to help you not only build out that care team, but put the right people in the right role, and upskill them so that they have the right information around what the role is and how best to perform that role.

Gary Barg: Every time I hear somebody develop a program, product, or service that is obviously of amazing importance to family caregivers who we call the CEO of  Caring for Our Loved Ones, I always know there’s a backstory. Can you share your personal story, how you got involved in this?

Michael Jordan: It really was almost by happenstance. At the time, both of my parents were healthy. I live in San Francisco, my parents live in Missouri. So I really hadn’t had much experience myself as a caregiver. Now, my mother, on the other hand, is a member of a large church and is the community caregiver. Whenever someone is sick or needs anything, she’s the person who rolls up her sleeves and gets to work on organizing care for people. So, I guess I was around it my entire life. But I think where I am particularly lucky, is that I have this amazing team of mostly women who were high-flying technologists, who found themselves in the role as the primary caregiver and had to step back from their careers to take care of their family members. So, classic sandwich generation folks. Whether it be Kerry Lange who stepped out of Yahoo and then went to Reimagine or Karen Purze, Head of Product, who had to care for both of her parents and was a senior project person for an Internet of Things company and wrote a book about the topic. When they saw what we were doing they asked “where do we sign up, because we know how to build this product, we know what the experience should be because we are your customers”. There’s no better way to embark on that journey than to have five or six people who have all had deep experiences as caregivers. 

Gary Barg: Talk to me about the features and benefits of CircleOf for family and professional caregivers.

Michael Jordan: When you suddenly find yourself as the primary caregiver, you’re not only struggling to organize your new life as a caregiver, but you don’t know what you need right out of the gate. The CircleOf app actually helps you build the right team, puts the right resources in front of you to get eh support you need. All of those things are very transactional, you can ask for that help, then individuals can then offer assistance and it schedules everything automatically. That’s what most people do when they download the app.

Gary Barg: You have to know what those bite-sized, easy, manageable tasks are that you can ask of people and then find a way to ask them. This makes that process a whole lot more manageable.

Michael Jordan: Absolutely. It reduces a lot of the awkwardness of asking for help because you’re being transparent about what you need, as you lay out a care plan and a care schedule for a loved one. Then the community can offer help. It also forces you to think about the right people for the right job. If you have a 24-year-old daughter or son and they’re physically strong with transportation, then you want to assign those tasks of driving your loved one to them. With CircleOf, you are able to assign appropriate tasks to people instead of everybody baking homemade cookies to where you have 20 tins of cookies. Then people know what their role is, and take responsibility for those tasks. CircleOf is a secure private care community and we don’t share your information with anyone. It’s like having your own private chat and collaboration layers with group video chat included. So, you have access to your community in the way that people are used to communicating.

Gary Barg: People feel good about helping in whatever way they can.

Michael Jordan: Absolutely. It is important to be able to get people to organize their efforts, communicate and collaborate in ways in which they’re familiar, so it’s not just tied to the app. You receive notifications and SMS’s about the status of different tasks and appointments. The roadmap is what we’re really excited about due to the opportunity to upskill a lot of those caregivers with resources that will help them do their jobs better. Ultimately, we would love for the caregivers who participate on care teams for loved ones to be able to provide those services to others, as well.

Gary Barg: How do people find CircleOf?

Michael Jordan: You can go to Circleof.com or go to your app store, type CircleOf and download the app. Invite your family, friends, and loved ones, then begin organizing your calendar and tasks. You can also create a really warm, safe place for people to express their love, affection, and support for loved ones. Alyssa Jaffe just wrote this great piece in MedCity about how 30% of professional caregivers will probably leave their roles as professional caregivers over the next decade. I think more and more, family caregivers are going to have to take up the slack in the future. At CircleOf, we’re trying to be at the center of this movement of upskilling family caregivers to provide the best possible care that they can for loved ones.

Gary Barg: Mike, what’s the one most important piece of advice you’d like to share with family caregivers?

Michael Jordan: Don’t wait for that day to happen to you. Get organized today. Build out a care team for your parents, if they’re elderly, build out a care team for your children, invite people to that care team, get your information together, whether it be the insurance cards or medications. Put it all in one place and so when that day does come, and it will come, you’ll be ready to roll.  By preparing now, when that day does come, you won’t even have to think. You’ll know who you can turn to and how you will facilitate and organize care.

Gary Barg: This is a time in caregiving I think, where technology has really caught up with the need of the family caregivers. You guys are on the forefront of that.

Michael Jordan: We appreciate everything that you do, and the information that you provide to your audience, it’s just an unbelievable resource. We’re just happy to be a part of your large community.