Taking the healthcare paperwork off families.
The problem
Over 50 million Americans are over 65, and many of them depend on their children to manage their healthcare.
There are insurance applications and renewals, appointment scheduling, medication refills, and the various paperwork involved in the back and forth with insurance companies and doctors. Families don’t really have anyone to turn to for help with this, so the adult children are left with the impossible task of handling it while working full-time and raising families of their own.
Five years ago my grandfather passed out on his living room floor. He was 90, he’d caught COVID, and my grandmother was away that weekend, so nobody found him for two days. He survived, but he never lived on his own again. He’s needed a home health aide ever since, and his children, including my father, take turns each day of the week. I want to spend my career taking this work off families.
Where we’re starting
We’re starting with Medicaid renewals for the elderly. Over 7 million Americans over 65 are on Medicaid. On patient home visits I saw almost every senior living alone, or with a spouse just as old, their kids hours away and visiting once a week if you were optimistic. One thing kept these people in their homes: a Medicaid-funded aide who showed up every day to cook, bathe, and help them move around.
Many of them spoke limited English. Many more had dementia. So when a letter came from the government saying to renew your Medicaid by this date, doing it themselves was out of the question. They depended entirely on a busy adult child, a thin nonprofit, or nobody at all. Every year, thousands lost coverage. Not because they stopped qualifying, but because the paperwork was too hard. When a senior loses Medicaid, they lose the aide. The person feeding and caring for them stops coming.
We started here for three reasons.
- It recurs every year, so it isn’t a one-time problem.
- There’s a clear buyer: health insurance plans. Plans lose revenue for every lost member, so the plan pays us and the family uses us for free.
- With Medicaid renewals, families hand over their elderly parent’s personal and financial documents, and that is the trust we need to help with healthcare services beyond Medicaid.
Where we actually are
We are still early. We’ve been having conversations with health plan executives. The Chief Growth Officer at a major NY health plan told us that Medicaid renewals are his top priority and asked us for a demo, which we’re building now. No signed customers yet.
Our team
I was Head of Partnerships at TEAM NY, one of the largest home care agencies in New York, and Chief of Staff there before that. Even prior, I spent four years at McKinsey in healthcare. My co-founder Ryan is a senior engineer at DoorDash, where he leads the Merchant AI agent team.