Homethrive gives access to caregiving resource as an employee benefit
Steven Loeb and Bambi Francisco Roizen speak with Dave Jacobs, co-founder and co-CEO of Homethrive, a company that gives employees access to caregiving resources.
Homethrive’s platform, called Dari, is powered by its Care Guides, who are credentialed and experienced caregiving experts, which integrates with its digital assistant for coaching, navigation, and resources. If someone is caring for their aging parents, while also working and caring for their children, they’d be able to access the Dari Digital Platform as an employee benefit. That means they’d be able to get 24/7 on-demand access to resources on a variety of topics, such as how to safety proof the home, or what to do after a hospital discharge. All of Homethrive’s resources are curated by its Care Guides, and users are able to chat live with them in real-time if necessary.
In addition, users have the option to work one-on-one with their own Care Guide, who will learn about them, their family, and their needs to help them come up with an action plan. That means coordinating everything from transportation to home health services to medication delivery.
Homethrive recently raised a $20 million round, bringing its total funding to $43 million.
Our overall goal is to understand how technology is radically changing healthcare: the way we screentreat and measure progress and outcomes. How we’re empowering the consumer. Whether we’re creating productivity that drives economic costs down? And how tech advancements change the role of the doctor.
Highlights from the interview:
- Homethrive was born out of the co-founders’ own experience and need: Jacobs and co-founder David Greenberg were both senior executives at a large healthcare company and, despite knowing a fair amount about healthcare, they still struggled to navigate a lot of the challenges and issues that came with supporting their parents as they went through medical issues and wanting to live at home. Navigating the healthcare system was really challenging and they needed some help trying to sort through all of it.
- Caregivers are spending an average of 20 hours a week taking care of their family, whether it’s grocery shopping, doing research, or making phone calls, and almost all has to be done during the day, while they are working. There’s a number of factors that contribute to this, including people being more reluctant to put their family members in senior living, so they’re staying at home as they live longer. Even without the pandemic, there was a trend toward being able to stay at home and be independent as long as possible. Homethrive believes that will continue to grow at least 10% a year for the foreseeable future, because of the changing demographics, people’s desire to be at home, and more access to things that enable them to be at home.
- Homethrive’s users usually don’t know where to start, what’s available, and what makes the most sense. Homethrive’s job is not to tell them what to do, but to be a guide for them and give them informed, expert options, but also help them coordinate and execute these things. For example, most people don’t fully understand that senior living is more complex than just one thing: there’s independent living, assisted living, skilled nursing, and they’re very different in terms of their costs, what qualifies you to be in them, and what services they offer. So, Homethrive helps people understand what the differences are, what the pros and the cons are, and help them decide if something like that is the best option for them.
- Homethrive’s philosophy is that we need people who have great experience in working with families with older adults and special needs, and that have a wide range of experiences. Its care Guides all have experience working with those families with older adults and special needs and they are all certified and trained and educated and credentialed; they’re social workers who are credentialed in this area. And so they bring not only the clinical expertise, but an empathy and listening capability that makes them a tremendous asset to a family in this process.
- Homethrive sells its program to over 125 national employers who offer this as a benefit for their employees, who have four main goals: improving retention; improving mental health; improving diversity, equity, and inclusion; and improving productivity. The company also works with insurance companies who want to engage the family caregiver to make sure that the insured person is more healthy, is following their disease management program, is taking advantage of the transportation benefits or the meal benefits that are offered, and is going to their doctor appointments. By working with the family caregiver, you can see better results with the older adults themselves.
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