Q&A With Leaders in Technology and Aging

We recently had the opportunity to talk with David Inns, CEO of GreatCall. We’re sharing highlights from our conversation in this edition of our blog series on innovators in the Technology and Aging industry.

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Q: Hi David. Thanks for talking with us today. Can you briefly explain who you are and what you do?  

A: My name is David Inns. I’m the CEO of GreatCall. GreatCall is leader in “active aging” technology and services that help older individuals stay independent longer.

Q: Can you tell me how you got started in this industry?greatcall

A: It was in 2006. I met an older couple, Marty Cooper and his wife, Arlene Harris. He’s the inventor of the original cell phone, a really interesting guy. They had an idea for a company to develop technology for older consumers. I’d just been going through a caregiving experience with my own parents and I thought it was a great idea, so I joined the company. We launched in 2006 with zero revenue, and now here we are today with over 1,000 employees and hundreds of millions in revenue.

Q: Wow, that’s awesome! So what was the idea for the first product?

A: Our original product was the Jitterbug cell phone. That was all about helping older consumers adopt cell phone technology. Our thinking has evolved over time, and now it’s about how we can help older consumers get connected in ways that help their overall wellbeing, for example by providing health and safety services, or like medication adherence, or telehealth services to help them stay healthy between doctor visits, or emergency concierge services. All these services and more can happen once you have the connectivity established.

Now, we have a whole portfolio of products we can put in the hands of older consumers, to get them reliably connected. So, if your mom isn’t ready for the latest smartphone, if it doesn’t make sense for her or she isn’t comfortable with it, then that’s not a reliable method of connection for her. Maybe a medical alert is more appropriate for her, or in-home sensors for passive monitoring. We want to help people find what they feel comfortable with, because that’s the best way to make it reliable for them. It’s not reliable unless they’re willing to adopt it, and want to continue to use it. That’s what we’ve become expert at.

Q: You’ve been in this industry for ten years now. Do you have some advice you could offer a new entrepreneur?

A: I’d tell them that the most common mistake is designing technology backwards: starting from the healthcare system, or from doctors, or from family caregivers, designing from their needs instead of from the needs of the seniors. You have to design for them. Companies try to put solutions that benefit these other stakeholders into the hands of seniors, without providing benefits to the older consumer, but there has to be benefit to them if you want them to adopt it, something that makes them interested and excited about engaging with it. And that’s the key. Once you have that, then you go from there to see how to get information that can help the other constituents.
[pullquote align=”right” cite=”David Inns, CEO GreatCall” link=”” color=”#69AE22″]”…the most common mistake is designing technology backwards: starting from the healthcare system, or from doctors, or from family caregivers, designing from their needs instead of from the needs of the seniors.”[/pullquote]
Q: If you could change one thing in our industry, what would it be?

A:  I would eliminate a lot of the questionable players with unreliable product quality and nefarious marketing tactics, because they do harm to seniors. They cast a pall, generate a negative reputation across the whole industry, when this should be a positive, feel good industry. We get up in the morning and help seniors be healthy and live longer, which is a great mission.

Q: And what do you think the industry is doing right?

A: We’re innovating quickly. We’re attracting venture capital, developing new companies, new startups. In the past, I think companies sometimes tried to customize technology too much, when in fact seniors are increasingly adopting mainstream technology. But most mainstream technologies don’t offer much customer service to back it up, because millennials don’t want it. They’d rather get the product at discount. But older consumers want customer service. They need help getting the device setup. When they first run into a barrier, they need to be able to call someone, or else guess what? They stop using it. With older consumers, it’s critical to bring customer service back into the equation.

Q: So, what’s coming up next for Great Call?

A: We’re expanding constantly and rapidly in vertical services, which is what we can offer once you’ve been connected. So, for example we’ve added a caregiver app that can take information from the devices, analyze it, and provide it in summarized form back to the family on how Mom is doing. There’s an unlimited amount of services we can provide vertically that can help improve the overall well-being of seniors.102 rX02

And we’re expanding horizontally into new product areas. Just recently we launched the Lively Wearable, a Bluetooth wearable device. Instead of a mass wearable designed for the average 20-year-old fitness buff, it offers daily challenges focused on activity recommendations for seniors. For example, we know that travel is a passion of our target market, so based on a travel theme, you can select a challenge you want to do. If you choose to tour the Roman Coliseum, that’s a 5,000 step challenge. It shows you pictures as you go. When you meet the challenge, it congratulates you, awards points, and notifies family caregivers. It does motion sensing and has fall detection. And if there’s a crisis, it includes a discreet button that you can press that’s connected to 5Star agents, who know who you are, where you are, your medical condition, and can contact your family or friends, or dispatch emergency services, if that’s what you need.

GreatCall is always innovating and looking at new methods of researching, developing, and selling services, and the Lively Wearable is an interesting example of that. Crowdfunding is obviously really popular right now, and so we felt it was important to get involved, to experiment and learn. We launched the Lively Wearable using an Indiegogo campaign, because we wanted to test and get feedback during the final development stages of the product and service, so that when we are ready for mass marketing, the product has the best chance of success. It’s one of the ways we’re continuing to look at things in different ways, continuing to expand technology for connecting older consumers.

Laura Mitchell Consulting is a strike team of marketing and growth strategy experts in the aging and technology industry. Know someone that we should feature in our “Meet the Innovators” blog series? Contact us at info@lmcllc.us and let us know!

Q&A With Leaders in Technology and Aging

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Welcome to the first edition of our new blog series called “Meet the Innovators: Q&A With Leaders in Technology and Aging.” Each week or so we’ll talking with the most interesting people in the industry. This week we sat down with Myron Kowal, founder and CEO of RCare Inc. Below is an excerpt of our conversation on 3 February 2016.RCare with shadow

Q: Thanks for sitting down with us, Myron. Can you briefly explain who you are and what you do?  

A: I’m Myron Kowal and I’m the CEO of RCare.  We’re a wireless nurse call system manufacturer based in Rochester, New York. But RCare is way more than just a nurse call system.

Q: Definitely, but how would you describe it? What’s different about what you’re doing?

A: Well, back in the 80s I recognized a problem in the nurse call space. Most of these guys were alarm companies whose main business was burglar and fire alarms. Most of them knew very little about senior care and the industry they were selling to. In many ways RCare exists to address this problem in the industry. We know the aging industry, and our products are designed specifically for it. At the time that made us unique and it’s the reason we’re still so far ahead of everyone else. We had a head start, and nobody’s caught up with us. Yet. (Laughs)

Q: Fantastic! So have things changed a lot since then?

A: Pretty much everything has changed. I’ll give you an example. Back then, if a resident pulled a cord or pressed a button, the alert would ding at the nurses’ station. Today with how busy nursing staff is, there might not be anyone at the station. At RCare, we recognized this, and we built our solutions to deal with it. Like RCare Mobile. Caregivers and nurses don’t have to be anywhere in particular to be fully informed and ready to respond.

Q: Ok, so you’ve made the nurses mobile. Is that ever a problem? People running around the facility without a central location to work from?

A: No, I don’t think so. In fact, technologies like ours makes nursing staff even more efficient than before. Features like the “I Got It” button eliminate duplication of effort. If someone presses it, all the other staff know that they don’t have to respond to that particular call. That’s efficiency. And it’s excellent for enforcing accountability. If everyone is responsible, no one is accountable. It’s a whole new approach to caregiving and it’s fueled by technology, enabled by this kind of technology.

Q: You’ve been in this industry for a while. What would you change about it?

A: Tons! It’s why I go to work every morning. We’ve been at this a long time, but there’s always more to be done. For example, it’s my belief that communication is still too segmented and disconnected by care facility type. We pigeonhole different levels of care in communication, each level of care has an individual agenda. At RCare, we think everyone should be working together and we make our tools in a way that facilitates that. By unifying facilities on different parts of the care continuum, RCare is taking actionable steps to break down the communication barriers faced by caregivers today.

Q: Exciting. Anything else going on with you guys these days?

A: Well, we did just win an award from the Rochester Business Journal for healthcare innovation. We were surprised because usually it’s someone over at the Medical Center, the University of Rochester Medical Center, that wins. They’re probably over there going “who’s this guy?” (Laughs)

Q: Awesome. So what’s next for RCare? What’s the future look like?

A: In the future, I see RCare reaching out to make this technology open source. We’re about communication in the eldercare environment. There are many ways in which we can build bridges. Environmental systems and diagnostics will come together into a single hub to integrate into a total wellness system. Wearables, sensors, and other new technologies are going to help facilities provide much more comprehensive and personalized care.

Laura Mitchell Consulting is a strike team of experts in the aging and technology industry. Know someone that we should feature in our “Meet the Innovators” blog series? Contact us at info@lmcllc.us and let us know!

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At LMC, it’s our privilege to meet and work with a lot of interesting technology leaders. We thought you’d enjoy meeting some of them, too. That’s why we’re announcing a new #LMCTECHTUESDAY blog series called “Meet the Innovators: Q&A With Leaders in Connected Health, Technology and Aging.”

We will be targeting inspirational technology pioneers who are making a difference in the aging, connected health, and long term care industries. We’ll be featuring these interviews every Tuesday right here on the LMC blog. Follow our blog and make sure you don’t miss this cool new series.

If you know someone that we should feature in “Meet the Innovators,” contact us at info@lmcllc.us and let us know!