Tech Talks Daily
00:15:59 · Neil C. Hughes
[00:15:59] S0: And if we do have anybody listening in... Maybe they're a care provider or work in the industry for, and they're looking for the ROI on this. What is the the business case for a care provider, and and what results show the tech and any technology is improving outcomes rather than just adding another dashboard that they need to monitor?
00:16:18 · Mike Link
[00:16:18] S1: Yeah. That's a great question. I think this has been one of the biggest challenges in growing the the business in the residential care setting because the sad truth is that people don't get paid more to provide better care. They get paid to fill the rooms. And you you come to realize this when there's a question of ROI with this type of technology because anybody who goes to a facility goes to a facility because they can't live at home independently. And if that's the case, they are a fall risk. I would say in an independent living setting where somebody's doing their own thing and maybe has, you know, a check every couple of days or doesn't have checks and just calls for assistance when needed. You know, maybe it's not super necessary in that kind of setting, but in an assisted living or in a dementia care setting, every resident really should have this because this is an insurance policy for the building. You know, imagine somebody falls and you don't get there till the morning as the facility. Right? You face huge scrutiny from the family that, oh, I pay you monthly. I don't know how much it is now in The UK, but in the in The US, it's anywhere between 4,000 and $10,000 a month. Mhmm. And families are paying this per month, and they go, well, you didn't have staff checking on my mom throughout the night. You know? So I think the the real ROI comes when someone has faced that scrutiny, when they've already experienced a family who's been really disgruntled or has had... Or they've had a fall in a facility where they haven't gotten there for a long time. I think that's when they start to realize the ROI. I think the other thing is that the less people have injury in a facility, the less likely they are to move out. And this is one of the things that we found is that, typically, like what I said, the falls aren't resulting in an injury at first. But when they can see the falls at first and can get ahead of them, they could prevent falls with injury, and that significantly decreases the the individual moving out. Because, also, what happens after a couple falls, the family would choose to move the the resident out into a new setting because they feel that the the facility or the care the care staff can't care for their mom. Because imagine you get a call at, you know, three, 4AM, say, hey. Your mom fell. We're taking you to the emergency room.
00:18:36 · Mike Link
We don't know what happened. You know? You're probably gonna get fed up on... You know? You're gonna be like, well, what do I do now? Right? Like, I've trusted this facility to care for my mom or dad, and they can't. So, yeah, I I would say that. The other thing is, like, a lot of people moving in or going to a care facility, they go there because of falls at home. Like, my grandfather, for example, went to a facility because he was having falls at home. And when facilities have something to say, hey. You know, we actually have this KamiCare system. When your mom or dad falls, you know, it notifies us within sixty to ninety seconds that they're on the ground. We can get there and care for them and see what happened and communicate this to you. It's a huge selling point. It's not like a... We guarantee every single time we're gonna get there in this amount of time, but the technology is a buffer so that when a care staff is walking around a 50 room building and it takes them two and a half, three hours to do their rounds, that if somebody's on the ground, they'll get notified. And they can prioritize that because they know this person needs help. So I think, you know, the challenge is there's kind of an intangible ROI to some extent because the ROI is preventing falls. Right? So if we're getting rid of all the falls, then what? You'd say, Yeah. Where's the ROI? Nothing's changed. There's no... Like, the goal is to prevent something bad from happening. So if the bad thing doesn't happen, there's no ROI. Right? So Yeah. The thing that we've been doing now is modifying the system to try to save staff time and save other things on on the way that that the business operates so that we could actually show the ROI. For example, helping to fill out reporting so that staff, when they actually do get a fall, they could do way less work. You know? Starting to take different... You know, we haven't deployed this to to facilities and communities, but the hypothesis is that we could take a lot of different medical data, you know, comorbidities and medication lists and vitals and maybe activities, and say, okay. Well, this person is becoming a fall risk. Right? And then we could say, well, we've actually detected x number of things that your staff might not have detected and been able to make a change that helped prevent something.
00:20:53 · Mike Link, Neil C. Hughes
And then we can document this in the system and say, hey, listen. This is actually a huge ROI. Right? Like, we caught this thing that would have happened because of this medication change and now prevented an ER visit, which is a huge ROI. You know? So, you know, that... That's kind of the the the ROI thing. I don't know if that makes sense or not. But... [00:21:14] S0: Yeah. It really does. And for... Also, for people listening, maybe considering something like this, are there any privacy consent or even staff training questions that typically come up an organization need to resolve or get in place before thinking about deployment? Any big conversations there or FAQs that you get a lot?
00:21:14 · Neil C. Hughes, Mike Link
[00:21:14] S0: Yeah. It really does. And for... Also, for people listening, maybe considering something like this, are there any privacy consent or even staff training questions that typically come up an organization need to resolve or get in place before thinking about deployment? Any big conversations there or FAQs that you get a lot? [00:21:35] S1: Yeah. We we have all the facilities get consents from the resident or the power of attorney. The other thing is that we stress that we we don't livestream. We don't... We're not looking into the room. We're not monitoring into the room. The visual the visual sensor is only meant to see the cause of the fall and exactly how it happened. For example, there's a lot of infrared or, you know, non video based sensors out there. But the problem is is you can't confirm whether somebody's hit their head or not hit their head. If it's a stick figure in the clip that you get or if it's a infrared sensor where you could just see a heat map or something like this, you can't see if they were reaching for something. You can't see objects in the room. So, really, like, the video is a huge value add, but it does cause concerns about, like, livestream or recording or or things like this, and this is why we get consents. But when the staff and the the family members know that the only thing captured is the fall and the cause of the fall, and the reason why and the benefits of this, usually, there's there's no type of pushback. But, yeah, the consent is definitely required.
00:21:35 · Mike Link, Neil C. Hughes
[00:21:35] S1: Yeah. We we have all the facilities get consents from the resident or the power of attorney. The other thing is that we stress that we we don't livestream. We don't... We're not looking into the room. We're not monitoring into the room. The visual the visual sensor is only meant to see the cause of the fall and exactly how it happened. For example, there's a lot of infrared or, you know, non video based sensors out there. But the problem is is you can't confirm whether somebody's hit their head or not hit their head. If it's a stick figure in the clip that you get or if it's a infrared sensor where you could just see a heat map or something like this, you can't see if they were reaching for something. You can't see objects in the room. So, really, like, the video is a huge value add, but it does cause concerns about, like, livestream or recording or or things like this, and this is why we get consents. But when the staff and the the family members know that the only thing captured is the fall and the cause of the fall, and the reason why and the benefits of this, usually, there's there's no type of pushback. But, yeah, the consent is definitely required. [00:22:45] S0: Well, for anybody listening would like to find out more information, as you said, you serve people around the world right now. If they wanna dig a little bit deeper, connect with you or your team or just have a a a browser, what it looks like, how it works, etcetera, where should they go?