LIVING WELL: NEW ERA HEALTHCARE START-UP
Living Well Assisted Living At Home combines a team of experts, the use of smart technology with exceptional customer service to deliver personalized, comprehensive care to seniors and adults with cognitive, behavioral, and movement disorders. Their approach to care at home enables those seniors and adults affected by Alzheimer’s Disease and other dementias, Parkinson’s, ALS, other neurological disorders, and mental illnesses, to live independent and meaningful lives.
Its mission is to substantially improve the quality of home based support for adults with chronic and debilitating conditions by providing outstanding care and quality service, thereby enhancing our members’ dignity and independence and bringing peace of mind to their friends and family.
I knew of Michael from another institution I worked with although not connected with IT at all. When I founded Living Well, I brought him on board to help us envisage what our IT would look like. We were starting from scratch and we had many ideas for the operations side of the business but very few about the systems side and what that would look like. Through many discussions with Michael, he learned what we were trying to do and we learned what kinds of infrastructure choices that meant. This was an iterative process with many revisions but when it was complete, we were miles ahead of what we first thought things would look like. We are still growing and evolving and our infrastructure is changing as well so what I appreciated was Michael’s ability to ‘vision’ our base systems so that we could build of this foundation step by step.
Doris Bersing, PhD – President, Founder
ITB – I liked working with Doris and her team. They had a good business plan and great timing for their entrance into the marketplace with what is occurring in healthcare and our population dynamics. What I most enjoyed was starting with a clean sheet of paper and working closely with the highly motivated and bright managers of the new venture and discussing how things would work.
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I remember talking about a developer meeting that they had and how excited they were about the new ‘system’ they talked about. I could picture the scene with a new startup and many complicated needs and the developer writing out feature after feature and each time this happened the price incremented by $10k (this happens in State Projects as well as we all read about grand designs and the developers are let loose and the system is too complicated and never finishes on time with major overruns and finally collapses on itself as the underlying processes have changed). We climbed back down from that mountain and started with a more basic system that would meet their needs for the next year.
The interviews assisted in understanding the players and their roles and the myriad of regulations in this particular industry and brought clarity to both sides as we both worked to discover how to meet these needs. With funding options not set and changing requirements for different operational components, it would make no sense to build a nice costly, untested system for which needs and focus changed often in this evolving concern. I felt it was my role to cost out and match the features, implementation, changing requirements and the myriad of other factors that impact the calculation for the ‘right’ solution.