Caregivers and Home Care with Seth Sternberg, CEO and Co-founder at Honor Technology

(00:16) Helping older adults age in place
(01:07) Understand care professionals perspective
(01:42) How Honor provides non-medical home care
(02:13) Partnering with hospital-at-home providers
(03:32) Technology to aggregate care pros and provide transparency
(05:28) Improving care pro performance
(07:59) Extensive data on care pros and clients in the home
(10:36) Integrating with health systems' EMRs
(12:48) Machine learning to reduce care pro call-offs
(15:09) Respect and schedule flexibility
(18:39) Improving predictive algorithms
(20:26) Lower turnover and higher satisfaction
(21:13) Care pro satisfaction is feeling respected
(22:01) Schedule flexibility 
(23:07) Honor's mission to honor care pros

Seth Sternberg and his team at Honor are committed to changing the aging experience. For them, that starts with caring for the people who provide care for older adults – the Care Pros. Listen as Seth explains how they use technology to respect and support home health caregivers. It’s a strategy that works -- Honor is consistently retaining employees for years in an industry with notoriously high turnover rates.

Jeff:
Hello and welcome. I'm Jeff Terry. Delighted to be joined today by Seth Sternberg, who's the CEO and co-founder of Honor Technology. Hi, Seth.

Seth Sternberg:
Hey, how are you doing, Jeff?

Jeff:
Wonderful. Great to be with you. I think a great place to open is where we were sort of just hit chatting offline, which is something that we have in common is between our firms and I think ourselves personally is a real appreciation and commitment to serving caregivers, which I think is what motivates you. So please talk about your mission as a company and caregivers in general.

Seth Sternberg:
Yeah, so we started a company to literally try to transform the way society cares for older adults. And as we unpacked that and kind of narrow that down, we said, "Well, let's really focus in on helping mom and dad stay in their homes as they age." It's too broad to transform everything up front. You have to pick a smaller slice to try to work on first.

And so then we looked at all the various ways to potentially do that. And we found this space called Home Care where what Bureau of Labor Statistic calls personal care aids, goes into homes of older adults and helps them with things like getting out of bed or getting food or getting dressed. And these are called Activities of Daily Living or ADLs. And so the way this service is delivered, it's a huge industry, it's an 85 billion dollar industry, is these personal cares get hired by local agencies. It's super fragmented, and they go into the homes of the adults and help them kind of individually one-to-one.

And so what we did is we went and interviewed about 50 of these folks at the Starbucks in Sacramento, California, and then at another Starbucks in Phoenix, Arizona. And a couple of things came out from those conversations, but the most poignant one was this person who said, "Look, I'm called unskilled to my face, treated like crap by the families, by the agencies, but I'm a professional, and I want to be treated like one. And that's how I act. That's how I see myself." And so that's actually where the term Care Pro or care professional came from. We said, "Okay, if these truly are professionals and let's call these caregivers what they see themselves as and what they really are, which is professionals. Call them care professionals." And then we coin the term really quickly thereafter, care for the Care Pros. And we've really built the company on that notion. And what it is if we do a good job caring for the Care Pros and put them in a better place into their own lives, then they can in turn do a better job caring for our customers, the older adults and then often their children.

Jeff:
This is great.