If we really want to be able to care for this aging population when we don’t have enough healthcare workers that are available to care for them, you have to then have a direct line into the unpaid caregiver and then you have to be able as an organization to, I think, support them, because if, like I said, if the caregivers are supported, those receiving care will live longer, safer, healthier lives at home. And so that’s what I would like to see happen and I think this is a unique and great opportunity for home care is to basically monitor these emergency alerts with the family caregivers, engaging them in and then creating resources and training modules. We were speaking to this company where they want to integrate all their training modules in to Avanlee Care, so you’re training up the unpaid caregivers to almost be like the paid caregivers when you can’t be there in the home.
Erin Vallier:
Welcome to another episode of the Home Health 360 podcast, where we speak to home-based care professionals from around the globe. I’m your host, rin Valliere, and today I am joined by Avanlee Christine, founder of Avanlee Care. Avanlee brings a unique blend of personal and professional experience to providing care to seniors and others in need. She has dedicated her career to building solutions that improve the lives of family, caregivers and aging seniors, and Avanlee has attracted prominent early stage investors, such as Esther Dyson, a notable tech investor who now serves as chair of Avanlee Care Incorporated. Avanlee experienced firsthand just how tech solutions were falling short and designed Avanlee Care app to pioneer an all-in-one resource to fill the gap in remote care, one that supports both the caregiver and the care recipient.
Erin Vallier:
She has written on topics related to technology, innovation and caregiving for publications such as Fortune Magazine and has been awarded Inc’s Best in Business Award in 2022 and was recently named to Inc’s 2024 Female Founders 250. Congratulations and welcome to the show, Avanlee. Thank you, it’s good to be here. I’m excited to talk to you today. Now it sounds like there might be a really good story why you decided to create this app. Can you share a little bit about Avanlee Care and the inspiration behind its creation?
Avanlee Christine:
I can do that. So the inspiration to do the business and to build a product came from personal experience which I think most people can relate to. I was 10 years old in 2000, and I watched my mom and my aunts all get on the bandwagon of having to care for my grandfather, who had Lewy bodies, care for my grandfather who had Lewy bodies, dementia and Parkinson’s, and for about eight years my grandparents had to live at one point with every single one of us of their adult children, and we all cared for my grandpa. My mother and aunts were the primary caregivers. I was the little kid watching this happen, and this was before Steve Jobs gave us the iPhone and iPad, so really before any technology, maybe life alert and I remember when he passed in 2008,. I was 18 years old. I just remember how challenging it was for my parents, the emotional burden, the financial impact it had on their personal savings, having to go eventually into full memory care for years, and how expensive that was. So at a very young age I got a crash course into the healthcare system without really knowing that would inspire what I would do in my professional life and in terms of starting a business. I used to work for a really great CEO His name’s Craig Mandeville at Forkura. He gave me one of my first jobs. I don’t know how great I was at the job, but I learned a lot from Craig and how to really focus on product development and build solutions for the kind of post-acute market.
Avanlee Christine:
And when I was living in New York City in my early 20s I was again faced getting the call from my mom hey, grandma’s gonna start to need more care. And I was in New York, they were in Montana and I just thought if Life Alert is really still the only option and it’s been almost 20 years since 2000. Somebody needs to come to market with an all-in-one, comprehensive solution that would bridge the gap between paid caregivers. So, whether that be through the plan, the home care agencies and the unpaid caregiver to truly keep a senior safe, healthy and happy at home. And that’s when I started to do a lot of research on the fractured communication by not engaging the family members into the plan of care.
Avanlee Christine:
So that’s where Avanlee Care was birthed from. I would say it was life experience, almost over 20 years, that when I got into the tech world and I got into and just my love for my grandparents and my love for seniors and those living with a disability. I thought, gosh, we’re sending people to orbit and we can see what celebrities are eating for lunch on Instagram. But we can’t all collectively, as a family, have a robust platform and it has to be technology to care for an individual at home. So it’s like, oh, I’ll just go build that.
Erin Vallier:
Necessity is the mother of invention right.
Avanlee Christine:
Yeah, so here we are.
Erin Vallier:
And it does help when you have a passion about it and it shines through when you talk about your product. Can you share with the listeners just why you feel so strongly that the application you’ve developed is needed to facilitate care?
Avanlee Christine:
Yeah. So I was listening to a woman Susan, I’m drawing a blank on her last name she wrote Stage Not Age, and this was at a pivotal Magnify Venture conference just earlier last year, and she said that people being born after 2000 will live well into their hundreds. And we don’t, as most people who are listening to this podcast. We don’t have enough people being essentially born to take care of our aging population. We don’t have enough people going into the healthcare system to care for seniors. Third, an interesting thing that is happening in Montana.
Avanlee Christine:
I split my time between New York and Montana, two complete opposite ends of healthcare and how healthcare is delivered.
Avanlee Christine:
But in Montana, on the high line, what’s happening is nursing homes are shutting down because they can’t find people to work in them, and so what’s happening to adult children and families is you have these adult children who live in the towns, like Missoula and Bozeman and Billings, more towards the bottom of the state, and they don’t know what to do with their parents, and so I’ve watched this kind of play out over the last 10 years.
Avanlee Christine:
How do you use technology, even implement AIs, to keep a senior at home living longer and healthier, but trying to get a group of people, a generation of people who never grew up with technology, and how you get them to really adopt that and use that is by engaging the family, the adult child. I was speaking with a woman, she’s a physician, she’s on a book tour right now at Memorial Sloan Kettering and she said something very interesting that when a patient comes in, they also add in the family caregiver. They identify at that moment who the primary family caregiver is and the primary caregiver is interwoven into the system, interwoven into the care, and I thought that was just fantastic. I was like imagine a healthcare system where I’m going in with mom and there’s an EMR here, there’s a login for this, but I can’t get access to just who’s going into her home two days a month when she’s receiving home care. That’s what’s happening. But that’s what I’m hoping to change is by bridging this gap between the unpaid and the paid caregivers.
Erin Vallier:
It’s an interesting shift that you’re highlighting there, that the facilities the assisted living facilities, skilled nursing facilities are closing down. It’s going to highlight the need for this hospital at home model, or more care provided in the home, and if we don’t have enough people going into the healthcare industry to care for people, then we really do need to be able to step up and care for our own loved ones and do so in a way that is not completely intrusive into our own lives and it causes a lot of burnout. So I’m really excited for your product and we’ve probably paving the way for others to copy you, which is a really good compliment. What specific challenges within the home care industry for unpaid care workers does Avanlee Care aim to address?
Avanlee Christine:
So for the unpaid worker, so the family, the adult child. Let’s start there. We launched our first product, our real first product, not just what we coded and pieced together, but a real product after we raised some capital in 2022. What we learned very quickly was we went right into the consumer market because we wanted to get a substantial group of families using this. We got about 13,000 families that had downloaded the app and we averaged about two to three adult children per senior with the app which is actually pretty good coming right into the market. We also hit the market right. The timing was really good. It was in COVID when we started to raise capital for the company. But one thing that we learned on the customer support front was there was a number of adult children calling in and saying I have been thrown into this and I have no idea what I’m supposed to do. Can you please tell me where I should go for legal, where we should go for financial, where we should go for financial, where we should go for estate planning, the caregiver basics, what are activities of daily living. And what we learned very quickly was we heard over the phone caregiver burnout, the stress. We also understood that there’s not great resources for caregivers, and so our first product as a whole was a true application that families would use to monitor biometrics or integrate it in with Fitbit, apple Watch and HealthKit monitor mom or dad’s mood. Number one was medication adherence and management. And then fourth to that was we are one of the first companies to ever fully integrate with Walmart and we launched Walmart shopping, grocery, OTC, anything you’d see around a pharmacy in our app, and so we became this one-stop shop, all things of hey Erin, you and I are sisters, you’re at work, you get mom groceries through the app that would get mom groceries through the app that would get delivered to her by Walmart. It’s available in our app in all 50 states. I see she took her meds. She’s saying she’s feeling pretty down. We could do the real okay, mom’s okay, let’s get her what she needs. Let’s check up on her health, see her vitals.
Avanlee Christine:
But the second piece of that, which is what inspired our second product launch as we went B2B, was how do you support the unpaid caregiver? Because if the caregivers go down, the one receiving care also fails. And so we actually launched a caregiver strain index in our app, in our app, and it’s a 13-question self-assessment where us, as a tech company and a data company, we get to understand and learn on a weekly basis what are the strains and the stresses of caregiving. For example, maybe we learned that Erin is a single mom. She’s two states away from her aging mother. She literally cannot financially afford to take time off to care for her. So here are the real resources she’s going to need Maybe an introduction into a home care agency, maybe support around better benefits with her employer to be able to go care for her aging mother.
Avanlee Christine:
So that from the preventing burnout, creating resources, what we’re also seeing too and this might be a new line of business, but my investors and my board just yesterday told me I have to stay focused for the next nine months. Try hard. I know this new line of business is I’m seeing an opportunity through our company for almost a boutique services of how to support caregivers and bringing them into a community, of how to support caregivers and bringing them into a community. I spoke to Ann Tomlinson. She’s the CEO of ATI Advisory. She founded Daughterhood. It’s almost kind of like that because so many of us will be thrown into this position and it’s pretty remarkable how little people know I am now a family caregiver. What do I do? What does that mean?
Erin Vallier:
caregiver. What do I do? What does that mean? That’s fantastic, I think, to have an app that can pretty much tell me what I need to do. It’s an entryway to help people be successful in that caregiving role, and that’s super important. Do you have any statistics or data that you could share regarding how Heavenly Care contributes to keeping individuals in their homes for longer or avoiding burnout, as you were just describing to us?
Avanlee Christine:
Essentially people using our product. They are staying on it and they’re using it daily with their families. That was one of the biggest concerns in going into building an app or any technology for seniors is are they going to use it? We in the early days had to spend a lot of time with families. Okay, if this feature wasn’t working, we got rid of it. If a barrier to entry and this is one thing I would tell anyone starting a technology company really need to understand product development If the barrier of entry was the signup process was too long, senior wouldn’t go through it, we got rid of it and we just said okay, start using the product with your family.
Avanlee Christine:
We put the signup process and the registering of the account on the adult child and so when we launched our first product into the market, we saw some really interesting stats that kind of surprised me. Amongst the most active daily users, which was about 5,000 individuals, the most used feature was medication adherence and management Delivered over 125,000 medication adherence reminders to a senior, to their adult children. So basically it said mom was putting in her medication reminders, updating her med list, or the adult child was. That was interesting to us because we got an introduction into Mark Cuban. And Mark Cuban was really interested because he just spoke at the White House on this. He is trying really hard to ensure lower costs of care for older adults but ensure that American consumers get access to cheaper medications. And in our business, when you are in the world of dealing with family caregivers and then just the astronomical costs of care as you age, having the ability to lower the out-of-pocket expense for caregivers was a no-brainer for us. So we actually took that data. We approached him. We said this is what we’re seeing. We’re a relatively new company but we’re getting some great data. And we approached him we said this is what we’re seeing. We’re a relatively new company but we’re getting some great data and we have a very active user base. We would like to go in, bring our second product into the kind of health plan home care agency space, because essentially what we’re learning is, yes, while the caregivers are there helping or nearby, we are learning that home care is needed and we could be recommending some of these seniors living at home to start receiving home care. But also by lowering the out-of-pocket costs and expenses, it’s a win for everyone. And so we integrated Cost Plus Drugs into our app, plus drugs, into our app.
Avanlee Christine:
Second to that, we had almost 86,000 hours of logged health information between the senior using Care Receiver and the caregivers the adult children. So what that told us was the app is being used on a daily basis. Information around vitals doctor’s appointments, medication and mood were being communicated on. We were also able to track essentially, how is a senior doing every day? Are they feeling sad? Are they depressed? Being able to notify the adult child mom has said she is sad every day for five days Something might happen, running like predictive analytics and then taking that data using AI to alert families on things you can do with them. Ai to alert families on things you can do with them. So A, b and C doesn’t happen.
Avanlee Christine:
And I think the last point I’ll make on that, which was really probably the most powerful data point we gathered, was we integrated in with Fitbit and it was really funny because I reached out to the, I think, chief growth officer of Fitbit when we were very young. I hadn’t raised any capital. I think my mom and grandma were the only one using the app and I just wrote to him. I said one day I hope that this is a household brand or name or solution for families in this country who have an aging parent. And I said so, if 54 million people are going to be using this, one day, we have to be integrated into Fitbit. And he wrote back and he was like, how many people? When we were a staff, I said less than a hundred, but we’re growing and we have every intention. This was like way back in 2019. And so Good for you. Just put it out there. You really have to when you start a company. And he said okay, we’ll integrate Fitbit in. And what we learned five years later One of the most important things because I remember this with my grandpa was being able to see his vitals my aunt in Boise being able to see vitals, my mom in Billings, montana, being able to see vitals regardless of where grandma was.
Avanlee Christine:
And we’ve sent 15,000 notifications to adult children that their parents’ vitals went out of an expected range, which means they called, they went over and did something. And that was the key piece to this information. If we’re this 24-7 digital window into the home, this information should be available to the home care provider and it should be available to the health plans. It’s that missing piece of getting the paid and the unpaid all together on the same page. That will truly keep somebody home longer and safer.
Erin Vallier:
Yeah, this is excellent. I’m getting excited over here myself going okay, I’m going to use this when I need to use this, because it’s going to help me monitor what’s going on with my loved one. It’s going to help me get affordable drugs into the home and it’s going to help me make sure they take them at the right time, which is a huge deal in home care. We all know how important it is to manage the medications correctly, because that could cause an easy death in the home and avoidable comorbidities. I had. My experience was with my grandmother. One doctor prescribed this, one doctor prescribed that they didn’t know, they didn’t reconcile and, lo and behold, heart failure. So it’s helping avoid things like that and that’s really exciting. And you mentioned something that leads me to my next question that we need to have this technology into the hands of home care agencies and health plans. How can Avonlink here integrate into the offerings of home care agencies and what kind of benefits do you expect that this integration is going to bring to both the agency and their clients?
Avanlee Christine:
Great question. So I would just say, first off, the benefit to the agency is improved communication, coordinate the chaos and support family caregivers Very high level, I think communication having access as the home care agency to each, if you want to call patient in the home and their family having a direct line of communication, so everyone is communicating around the same person, is really important. Being able to, like I said, having that notification hey, mom was wearing a Fitbit, heart rate went out of an expected range Home care agency is alerted and so are the unpaid caregivers. This is not new. Most, I think, platforms are trying to do this schedule medications, schedule doctor’s appointments but we took it a step further in getting cheaper medications via our app to those living at home to truly lower the costs of care. And then, like I said at the beginning of this call, we’re moving into a world that I truly believe that in 10 years I will probably be on my mother’s health record in a more integrated way.
Avanlee Christine:
I don’t know exactly what that looks like quite yet, but with everything, with the White House signing an executive orders, we have to have a national strategy for the unpaid family caregiver and if we really want to be able to care for this aging population when we don’t have enough healthcare workers that are available to care for them.
Avanlee Christine:
You have to then have a direct line into the unpaid caregiver and then you have to be able, as an organization, to for them. You have to then have a direct line into the unpaid caregiver and then you have to be able, as an organization to, I think, support them, Because if, like I said, if the caregivers are supported, those receiving care will live longer, safer, healthier lives at home. And so that’s what I would like to see happen and I think this is a unique and great opportunity for home care is to basically monitor these emergency alerts with the family caregivers, engaging them in and then creating resources and training modules. We were speaking to this company, where they want to integrate all their training modules in to Avanlee Care, so you’re training up the unpaid caregivers to almost be like the paid caregivers when you can’t be there in the home. That’s what I would say.
Erin Vallier:
Our primary offering to the home care agency right now is that’s awesome, and you mentioned Something as well you were speaking with a company that wants to integrate some training materials, so I’m curious what other partnerships or collaborations does Avanlee Care have or you’re engaging with within the home care space to further enhance your impact and your?
Avanlee Christine:
reach. We did a pilot with Walmart last year in Florida and I learned a lot. I could write a book about that. We were in Florida in 10 or 15 Walmart super centers and in South Florida, and what we learned? It was really interesting. The majority of people in their 40s, 50s and 60s walking in when they spoke to us. If we asked them if they were a family caregiver, they had no idea what that meant. And then you’d say, hey, are you here picking up groceries for your mom or dad, or do you ever do that, pick up their meds or anything Like. Oh yeah, all the time. That’s why I’m here right now. We’re like, oh, we actually have an app that you can manage and coordinate all this in one app and Walmart will deliver it for you. And we had to bring awareness to these people of, actually, you are a family caregiver. And so what we learned in that pilot was really interesting One.
Avanlee Christine:
There’s a massive opportunity for groceries, OTC, health and wellness products. Mom has diabetes, mom has just had her hip replaced. Having these curated shopping lists that allow you to do this in one place and not have to leave work, go and do all of these and take things, take two hours out of your day. That’s a massive time saver the 361 billion dollar time gap between women and men from the time women have to take off work, compared to men, to go and care for an aging parent. And when we integrated in with Walmart for that one feature, I really wanted to do that for my mom, because my mom I watched her leave work for years and not come home for two, two and a half hours because she was doing all of these things related to caregiving and then by the time she got home she was exhausted and it was late and that was one of the simple solutions. And then we had to build an integration with Walmart. That was not simple, but we did it and I would say, on a tech roadmap, there are more integrations, I think, coming out in terms of what we would like to do with cost plus drugs.
Avanlee Christine:
We have discussed transportation as well. That’s a tricky one. Just Uber and Lyft and the policy that they want the smaller companies to carry. I don’t know how realistic Uber and Lyft are going to be able to really make an impact in this market, but we’ll see how time goes on. I am interested more on how we can partner with larger organizations. If it was a larger home care agency, a larger health plan who has resources that are built out that are specific to their patient population, that’s really interesting to me, instead of us having to build it on our own. We are great on the tech front, but if there are organizations that have resources, they know that maybe, like in downtown Louisville, that population of people could benefit from. We would be interested more in those integrations. And then we just started really to do a lot of stuff with adding an AI button in the app, using AI in the platform around care care plans, communicating, using AI to communicate amongst adult children. So that is interesting to me. More to come on that.
Erin Vallier:
I do like the idea of integrating with health plans, because that’d be a great benefit to offer the consumer. For sure, it sounds like the app does a ton of things. Like a ton of things. Name your top three features, your favorite three features.
Avanlee Christine:
That’s funny. Well, it’s funny because the first product did do way too many things. Well, it’s funny because the first product did do way too many things. And my co-founder and our development team politely sat me down one day and said you can’t feature, spam someone to death. People are not going to use all these features, and that’s right. Again, when building technology, you just have to become sticky enough to solve a problem. Our chairman said this isn’t rocket science, it’s almost like glue or grease. It just makes everything work better and flow better amongst the family and the senior living at home. And so I would say our top features. I have a son and he’s almost two. I started using the caregiver strain index on a weekly basis just because I was like, wow, talk about timing.
Erin Vallier:
Yeah, and I imagine growing this kind of a business with a small child would cause a little bit of strain in a multitude of ways.
Avanlee Christine:
Yeah, I was looking at my caregiver strain index and I was like holy cow, I am not doing well. This is hard, but we have been getting an astronomical amount of usage around the caregiver strain index. I don’t even know if some people downloading the app are even caring for an aging parent. They may have children, but they’re using the caregiver strain index. Second to that is I really like what we’ve done with Mark Cuban’s cost plus drugs? I am learning to, I think, as I’ve watched kind of the tech billionaires everyone come from that era. Some went out and bought super yachts and bought big houses and did that during COVID and then some went and said how do we better humanity? And I like that Mark has done that and that he has a vested interest in those living at home and their families. He gave us an amazing press release or we did a press release with him and he gave us an amazing quote. I think he genuinely cares I’m excited over as they have some stuff that are pretty early not at a prototype yet to integrate more fully come end of this year with Mark Cuban’s cost plus drugs. I think there will be a lot of interesting things that will come out of this relationship with cost plus drugs, learnings and findings in terms of prescriptions and how to support the Medicare Advantage plans in this.
Avanlee Christine:
Obviously, my third favorite feature is I should get this picture out when we integrated with Walmart, the first ever Walmart order I placed and my mom did for my grandmother, who lives actually now in an independent living facility in Montana, and we all went to the independent living facility. We were standing out front, we placed the order via the Avanlee app and Walmart dropped it off. We scheduled it for 1 pm and we all stood out there and we waited for this poor girl from Walmart comes out with all the groceries. Did it work? And I was crying because we worked so hard for this integration for a year and she’s like is everything okay? She handed us the groceries. I was like, no, this is just a big deal. It’s the first. You thought it was just coming from Walmart, but it actually was delivered and placed through our app. She was like, oh, that is just so cool. So that feature was really for my mom and my grandma, because I know so many adult children are in that boat every single day.
Erin Vallier:
Saves a lot of time and stress, so I love it. Final question for you I’m an agency, curious about integrating this into some of my home care offerings, or I am just a caregiver myself? How do?
Avanlee Christine:
I learn more. So you can reach out to Avanlee at Avanlee Care. Our team will get back to you. If you are just an adult child listening to this podcast, go to the app store and you can download it and there’s a free version and there’s premium. With a home care agency, we’d be happy to talk. We have a really great friend and supporter in Bob Roth, so I want to do something more with Bob Roth on this. I love Bob. He’s an awesome guy.
Erin Vallier:
Yeah.
Avanlee Christine:
Happy to talk more about how we’re working with home care agencies, how we can hopefully help change the landscape of home care. That’s what I’d like to see. I’d like to see real change in the next couple of years.
Erin Vallier:
And you will. You’ve accomplished so much in such a short period of time with very little resources, which is you. Maybe that’s why the caregiver index is not favorable, but I just believe in your ability to make a real big difference. Thank you, it’s been so lovely to talk to you on the show today. Thanks for sharing all about Avanlee and your vision. Thanks for having me Absolutely Welcome. Home Health 360 is presented by AlayaCare and hosted by Erin Vallier. First, we want to thank our amazing guests and listeners. Second, new episodes air every month, so be sure to subscribe today so you don’t miss an episode. And last but not least, if you like this episode and want to learn more about all things home-based care, you can explore all of our episodes at alayacare. com/ homehelp360 or visit us on your favorite podcast platform.
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Episode Description
In this episode, Avanlee Christine, founder of Avanlee Care, shares the inspiring story behind her mission to support unpaid and informal family caregivers. Motivated by personal experience caring for her grandfather, Avanlee developed a groundbreaking app that empowers family members providing care to loved ones with the tools they need to ensure quality care delivery at home while also providing resources to support the wellbeing of the caregivers themselves.
Avanlee highlights the critical role of technology in supporting the often-overlooked unpaid caregivers, who are essential to caring for seniors at home, and discusses how innovations like medication management and health monitoring are reshaping senior care. She also reveals how partnerships with tech leaders like Fitbit and her collaboration with Mark Cuban are driving down costs, enhancing care, and connecting family caregivers to broader healthcare systems, plus she discusses her pilot program with Walmart that is helping family caregivers navigate daily tasks, like ordering groceries, with ease.
