Sage addresses operational opportunities to modernize senior care. Raj Mehra, CEO and Co-founder of Sage, in partnership with Michael Pittore, Co-CEO of Agemark Senior Living, announce a new product line, Sage Detect. The AI-driven innovation addresses real challenges that operators face daily. 

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Hear more from Raj on Ep. 317.

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Produced by Solinity Marketing.

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Listen to more episodes here

Intro

Welcome to season eight of Bridge the Gap, a podcast dedicated to informing, educating, and influencing the future of housing and services for seniors. The BTG network is powered by sponsors, Aline, NIC MAP, Procare HR, Sage, Hamilton CapTel, ServiceMaster, The Bridge Group Construction, and Solinty and produced by Solinity Marketing. Bridge the Gap in three, two.

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00:45 - 01:13

Josh Crisp

Welcome to Bridge the Gap podcast, the Senior Living podcast I'm your host today. Josh and I have with me a couple of awesome guests that I can't wait for you to get to hear from. One is no stranger to the Bridge the Gap podcast platform. That's Raj, our partner and CEO from Sage. Thanks for joining us. And Michael Pittore, co-CEO of Agemark Senior Living. Thanks for joining us today, guys.

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01:13 - 01:14

Raj Mehra

Thanks for having us.

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01:15 - 02:57

Josh Crisp

It's an awesome privilege to have you guys on. So we have this really cool opportunity, and our listeners do hear, not only from a cutting edge technology provider that's helping the senior living industry, usher in some really, cool and innovative concepts and ideas and technology, but also to hear, from an awesome operating platform that is actually using, the program and software and the platform, and they've been a partner for years. And so what an awesome opportunity to have these partners talking about that. And I think in our industry, that's something that's rare. You know, a lot of times we talk to either or, but to hear you guys talking about it together

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You know, I want to just dive in, first of all, to say, you know, for our listeners that may not have heard previous episodes about Sage in general, you guys have been doing some cool things. I know, Raj, you've had your head down in the trenches building things, working on things, out talking with tons of industry professionals to find solutions to meet a lot of the challenges that we face and sort of reinvent vinted, the traditional nurse call concept. And you guys have had so much great adoption, not only from the industry, but from the professionals that use the software and the tools daily. That's the caregivers. Can you just give a kind of high-level insight into what experience you've had in implementing your platform into the industry over the last year or two?

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02:57 - 05:32

Raj Mehra

For us, when we first entered, we found that, you know, as many of you are familiar, the industry had a lot of old legacy systems. Right. And Nurse Call happened to be one of them. And our thesis was that we could start by building better systems for the industry. And nurse call happened to be one that we thought we were well equipped to build. And when we deployed our first, you know, cloud-based nurse call system, the opportunity we found was that was a good starting point, with the workflow of the caregiver being the big opportunity. Right. And so the nurse call system ended up connecting to our software. And we invested quite a bit in our software to make the workflow and operations of the caregiver better.

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And what I mean by that is, making it so that a caregiver now doesn't have a flashing red light at a nursing station or doesn't have people yelling out of the door, and has the ability to triage events through something that has strong stability, good UX, user experience, like apps like Instagram or Facebook, type experience, and enables them to do their workflow around triage and data collection. And so we started with that. And, you know, with partners like Michael, we realized actually the opportunity was even bigger than the initial workflow we started with. And, you know, we'll get into this later, but we started layering on other workflows like, changes and conditions of that person, other things around logging care proactively through our workflow, because we found that the EHR databases have had a challenge with proactive logging.

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And so we started layering and other functionality and other devices that we'll go into later around this. And our engagement rates across caregivers have been like 85- 90%. I mean, Michael can talk about his experience, our caregiver satisfaction, which we care about a ton. And it's kind of informs our product philosophy is about 93% across caregivers in 30 states today. And so we're really proud of those things because it's one thing to build a product and deploy. It's another thing to make sure that the caregivers, the users are happy and engaged. And that's really been a part of our philosophy. And the way we've been able to do that is by partnering with folks like Michael and their teams and embedding with them. That's always been our philosophy that if you don't deploy to the sites, then you're not going to know what to build.

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05:32 - 06:25

Josh Crisp

Raj, you broke that down well. And I think what you are sort of describing is what I've heard you referred to as sort of this idea of intelligent care, and this era that we are kind of ushering in, is being ushered in. And your partnership, here with Michael's team, is helping to sort of define that and lead the charge on that. So, Michael, thanks for taking the time. I understand you guys are so busy, there and you've got a lot going on. So thank you for taking the time to kind of share how this is how this all came about. So Raj gave us a little bit of a background on Big Picture. So, from your perspective as an operator, why was it so important to partner with someone like Sage to kind of tackle some of your challenges? And what have you hoped would come from this? And what have you seen?

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06:25 - 09:34

Michael Pittore

I think it started back in 2022 and 2023. We started really looking at different technology solutions out there around tracking devices. I mean, whether it was pendants, cameras. I know that was when Safely was kind of getting going. There were a number of things out there. And so we started reviewing them, and Sage was on that list.

I think at first it seemed low tech. We were like, well, it's just this button. What? What's that all about? These other guys have wristwatches and pendants and cameras, and we're going to spend all this money and put it up. What are we getting? And what we were trying to find is a way to keep track.

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Caregivers keep track of what is being provided to residents and are really able to get the data. I mean, it's really commonplace table stakes conversation now amongst operators these days. But back then, even not that long ago, this was kind of a new thing to get that much data, you know, point of care, and some of these other EHRs were starting to grab some of that data. I think at the time, it seemed like we were getting a lot. But looking back, you know, you weren't getting really it was only as good as the input that you were getting. And that's what's been coming up for us in me and my partners, a deep dive into our business is, you know, garbage in, garbage out.

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You're only going to get as good data as your frontline care staff are able to provide you. So, how do we make that as easy as possible? And that's what came out through the analysis of all these providers is that there's lots of cool tech, but how are we going to get them to use it? And, you know, I'm very involved in the day-to-day. And I visit communities a lot, and even more so in the last couple of years. And so I kind of had some knowledge of the realities of the situation. So what we saw with Sage is exactly what Raj said. And I sort of saw the vision earlier, which was, hey, this application is so much easier to use, and it's going to drive people to want to use it because there's user input and feedback, almost like a dopamine hit from an Instagram-type feed.

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And that's really going to drive people onto this system. And it's so simple. It's just a button. It's not, hey, I got to put this watch on. I got to log into the system and then I got to check, you know, which residents wear and see it on a screen because that's just people get busy, you know, I'm busy, but our teams in the field and even busier. Right. So, we saw that vision early, and I'm happy to say that it really worked. You know our care staff have picked it up very quickly. I mean, you know, with any rollout of a platform, technology, or software, you usually have some hiccups and some people that say, you know, just because they can, I don't want I don't like this.

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Right? I want to go back to the old system. We know that once, with these guys, and because they're so in the field. So that was really how it got going. I think we started with 10 or 12 properties. Then quickly rolled it out to 20, and now we're taking it everywhere. But I think only because our partners on that are a little cost-constrained, but it'll be everywhere. And it will be our standards sort of operating platform at this point, for caregiver input. And we can get more into that. But it's going even further where it's it's potentially going to be, the only input for caregivers, amongst other things.

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09:34 - 10:54

Josh Crisp

That's exciting. And gosh, what a great opportunity. And thanks for sharing that. And what a great testimonial. You know, from my first interaction, when Raj started putting together this awesome team that he has at Sage, it was obvious, even who he had picked, to be on his team that they were serious about, getting, very into the weeds of solving the problems and the challenges that all operators are facing, with a group that is highly, highly committed to our industry and been committed for a long time.

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So it's been impressive. So you guys, obviously, together ushering in this era of intelligent care, which I just love how that sounds, right? It really captures what is happening and what you guys are leading the charge on. But, Raj, I mean, I, I selfishly am excited that you know, bridged the gap. This cool platform that Lucas and I had the opportunity to launch years ago. You guys are actually making a kind of exciting announcement today, and we get the opportunity to help you launch this cool, new, innovative aspect to the platform that Sage already has. Can you are we at a point where we can let this out of the box now?

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10:54 - 13:16

Raj Mehra

Yeah. Happily. We're excited it’s out of the box. Yeah. I mean, Michael are excited to announce our new product line, Sage Detect. And it's something that, like a lot of our products, as folks know, we partner with folks like Michael on new products because we just want to build in isolation. Like, that's not how we're going to serve the industry. Well, we're going to we want to build things that operators need and want to use.

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And that's where the idea of Sage Detect came from. And, you know, I'll talk about it a little bit. We deployed it at Agemark, as the first enterprise, and it's early days. But, you know, for us, it's our first Sage AI engine. And really, what the AI engine is doing today is, our Sage device is in the field, and our software is good for active needs. So someone presses their Sage device or activates one of our devices, and we kind of get them help through our triage software. Right. And what Sage Detect is going to do or is doing at Agemark right now is, essentially passively monitoring a room and understanding distress or need passively. And, you know, I know that story.

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There's a lot of solutions out there in the past. And, you know, Michael brought up some of them that, you know, minor things like falls, right? When we approach this problem and approach folks like Michael, we realize is that those are one type of problem. But really, what this AI engine has to do is has to be capable of detecting passively all of the challenge that might come up and build custom alerts using Sage's robust software, like we already talked about, that is already integrated in the workflow of a caregiver. Right? So like today, the caregivers triaging our alerts, they're triaging these alerts. And these things can pick up things like falls or stroke or sleep distress. And we really invested in the AI engine. And we were fortunate at the time that we're coming up with this. AI has made leaps and bounds, right? And even in the last six months, it is where our engine is capable of doing a lot of these things. And Michael and his team want to understand, have visibility on.

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13:16 - 13:37

Josh Crisp

So, Michael, I feel like I need to just hear from your perspective. So when I'm hearing Raj talk at a very high level, which, candidly, I'm a slow, slow thinker and processor, so you have to give me a minute when he's talking in the clouds here about these high-level technologies. But practically speaking, what does this look like for you, and how does this change things for your communities as you deploy this type of technology? What does it give you? The capability to do that you couldn't do before?

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13:48 - 17:33

Michael Pittore

The list is pretty long, and this could be a really long conversation. But I mean, it's as simple as, you know, an Agemark, what we've decided is, our caregivers' experience is like our customer to be. Yes, our residents are our customers, but our caregivers and our employees are our customers. So, how do we make their lives as easy as possible?

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And so that's where Sage has excelled for us, right? Is the caregiver workflow best in class? So, you know, we started saying to Raj, Hey, we really like your workflow. How do we get more into it? And that's where some integrations with electronic health record systems have come up, which is what we're working on. Another thing we're working on. And then secondarily, we said, hey, we have these legacy fall detection things that some residents really and families really like, but it doesn't tie into any system. It's either on a radio or it's in a separate, you know, web platform or, you know, it's not going into electronic healthcare. It's not going into the Sage app.

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And so that was something they picked up on really quickly. And so, obviously it's kind of the tech falls, but what's really powerful and I believe more powerful than the fall detection, which is why it was so important for us to wait until Raj had this ready as opposed to trying. One of the other solutions is that it's going to flow into our already working Sage caregiver app and workflow. So not just falls. But, hey, Mr. Stevens has been in his chair for the last four hours, and it's three in the morning. We need to go see what's going on. Or, you know, they've gone to the bathroom six times in the last two hours. Someone to check on them or in a memory care setting, you know, they can't push.

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A lot of them aren't having pendants because, you know, they were not sure essentially how they're going to use that effectively. Well, now we have eyes in the building, in the rooms to actually see, hey, this person may need assistance. So, you know, it's it's it's detecting actual needs. Verifying the caregiver's actual time. So, how long was, caregiver in the room? They, put into that, you know, someone hit their button and said that they need a transfer to the bathroom or toileting. Well, who did they come in? How long did it take for them to arrive? Verification of the button. Push. Did it get delivered? And, you know, was it as long as we thought so.

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All these things can be verified. So we take that same concept. I talked about the beginning of Garbage in, garbage out. We say, okay, Sage's buttons have already given us better data, and now we're refining it even further to make it super accurate to the point where we can actually, even then, potentially. And there's liability around how much we're going to use the data, the video, but look at the video and use it as training.

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Say, hey, caregiver, you know, Josh, let's look at this video to see how you could have done that with a little more compassion or, you know, slowed down or, or you needed another person to help you there. And that's going to, you know, be watched. And then we can go to the families, say, Hey, your dad is now a two-person assist because he's really having a hard time getting out of bed.

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So stuff like that that we're using now, just word of mouth feedback, which, you know, works. It's worked for 40 years. We're going to be able to take it to the next level. And I think what's cool about all this is, is that at the end of the day, what I want to see is our care teams having more time with residents, less time clicking buttons, less time pushing start paperwork, and more time actually creating relationships with the people in the building. Because that's that's what we do in this industry, right? That's what really makes the difference. And I really believe that where we're going here is going to be the future is going to allow that to happen.

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17:33 - 18:25

Josh Crisp

What a great illustration. So if I'm kind of just dumbing this down, so that I can understand it, we have essentially evolved as an industry and moved from, hey, let's check what our response time was to this really bad situation that maybe happened, and how we responded to it. So we can communicate to the, to the family how long it took us to respond, to this crisis, to potentially preventing but beyond that, actually improving life quality and wellness and engagement, not only for those residents that we're responsible to care for, but also our staff giving them a better job quality, better tools to be better at what they do and be more efficient operations in the process that I kind of capture where we've gone and where we're going. 

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Well, Raj, I imagine this is kind of like giving birth to a baby. You've got to be a proud papa over there. So, like, Sage detect. It's out there now. Now everybody's going to know about it. This is just another mark in Sage's evolution of the platform, providing operational insight and abilities to operators. Can you give us a teaser of what this looks like in your mind? Because I have a feeling, you know, this is not the only thing that is out there on your charts that you're plotting. So give us some insight.

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19:07 - 21:47

Raj Mehra

Yeah. In terms of like, you know, how we're envisioning this evolving. And so, you know, as Michael pointed out today, you know, the way that we wanted to go to market with this is to make sure that I was so powerful they could detect all types of activities. Michael and his team, especially on the clinical side, cared about. And so you know, one of the things that we're doing right now is, like we did with our core products, we always partner our products and our data with strong teams on our end to actually drive the value. So, for example, in our core products, they're all ushered in by our Client Success team, right? Client SAS is embedded with each of Michael's executive directors and communities to make sure the care adjustments, the level of care changes, and the staffing efficiencies those things actually get followed through on.

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And we're supporting Michael's team. So clearly, here we're putting a lot of focus on the clinical application. So we have a head of clinical and a clinical team who are designing around this product, where a lot of the takeaways and Michael's talking about. So even things like, hey, someone actually was lifting someone off the floor, but the way they lifted it could cause an injury.

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Those types of insights is what we're analyzing and providing summaries to Michael's team. So that way this product, like our core products, isn't just here's a bunch of data, here's a bunch of information, Michael and team. But no, actually, here's the stuff that's happened in the last 30 days. Here are the areas that we think we can improve. These are the things that we kind of take away. And residents that might need more proactive care or more, you know, you know, more, more effort in their care plan, for example. And that's really how we're thinking about this product in terms of like our future ambitions and roadmap. A lot of our software features are being released right now, and we're going to have more announcements in the next few months.

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There are two-fold. One is around putting more into the software for changing conditions. So we just released some of this in the past few weeks. But you know, before, when you were responding to an alert or an issue, you could put in a bunch of ADL issues in the Sage. Now you can start putting in things like skin tissue, rash, blood, and urine, things like that that are really quick, and then get escalated to the nurse workflow. So now a nurse, within seconds, has visibility and insight into what might be an emergent event way before anything is even happening.

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21:47 - 22:43

Josh Crisp

Practically speaking, is this a situation, or a system where, you know, I think, Michael, you may have touched on this. I think one of the challenges for operators, really for the caregivers, the people in the community, they're actually providing care, is having to be, sort of intelligent themselves in understanding how to use, properly.

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A lot of different data points, data centers, software, apps, opening different usernames and logins and passwords, and all that, and then trying to figure out how it all cohesively goes together to interpret what's really going on. So with this platform, is this something, practically speaking, that the caregiver team, this is the vision, is that one stop where your portal of care is right there at their fingertips. Is that where we are right now?

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22:43 - 25:43

Michael Pittore

That's what I think, where it's going. This has been evolving over the last couple of years because, you know, it's funny, it's good to see what's been going on recently because there's, I feel like tech in our space is finally meeting the need and is trying to. And it's getting close, and there's a lot of momentum, and it's really actually showing up.

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But it's evolving month to month, day to day, week to week, even sometimes. But you know, as I started engaging with the system a year ago heavily in our summer building, it's like took a bit of a campaign to be like in properties, doing caregiver tasks almost. And alongside them, using the app quickly realized that what we had on the electronic health record side from gathering, point of care stuff wasn't up to all.

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Well, this is saying it wasn't where Sage was. And then you have an option, a proper problem, where you have dual entry. And to your point, we already have so many different systems. And, you know, the dream is to get it all into one. And, some people, some providers have had that, even some of those aren't working. So it's, it's just never never-ending loop. And we've taken that. We want the best in class. And we want them to talk to each other. And that's why this proactive relationship between my partner, you know, Raj, and our other partners is so important because I want someone that's going to I can call Raj or text him and he'll respond and and we'll we'll work through problems.

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And they've proven that over and over again. And their teams are, to his point, embedded with ours, where they're answering all the time. They're on site all the time, you know, they, they you know, I think it helps that I'm very involved. But still, you know, they're very much there. And that makes a big difference because, to your point, it is a lot of systems. And if they don't have that kind of support, it makes it hard to engage in. Again, back to what I said, the beginning. If they're not engaging and they're not putting in the time and they're not using it properly, this is all for not. So I do think that your question it is going towards what I'd like to see is Sage being the only point of contact. You know, we want to get to number one and the Great Place to Work survey. We want to have our employees, you know, we'd call our home office the Agemark Resource Center. You know, that's what we're moving towards. Like, how do we support the field? Well, having them use one app, not two.

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I got to click between a remember to put it in both places. That's part of that. Right. And it all comes back to what I said earlier, which is we want them to have more time actually building relationships and creating the feelings that make this industry special. So yeah, I do think that's where it's going. I think there may be other operating technology platforms out there that can do some of this stuff, but for us, Sage is the one, and it's got the best ability to make those caregivers' lives as easy as possible. And all these things that Raj is talking about are right along those lines, and we're very aligned on trying to make that happen. And you're starting to see it amongst some of the other providers, ancillary providers as well.

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25:43 - 26:45

Josh Crisp

Well, so, Raj, you know, as you guys continue to lead an intelligent care, roll out solutions, like Sage Detect, obviously you've got a great partnership, speaking very highly about how this has been for years and how it continues to evolve. I can only imagine, as a technology provider, the uphill battle you've had in building trust in an industry that over the last several years, with everyone talking about the booming aging population and then this technology boom of, you know, age-related type technology that's sort of inundated providers.

And many, many times, unfortunately, providers have gotten burned by great promises that maybe don't deliver as we thought they would. What has it been like for you, and what has been your strategy to earn the trust of the people that you're working so hard to provide great technology for?

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26:45 - 29:22

Raj Mehra

Yeah, George. I mean, you're right. I think a lot of times when we were first starting in our first few years, I think we saw that we saw, like a lot of folks use technologies in the past and didn't have great results and were shy, right, to embrace new solutions. And, you know, you had folks like Michael and some of our other early adopters that said, no, like, you know, we had some bad experiences, but we have a bigger vision, right?

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And we need to push. I mean, in a world where we have Waymo cars in every major city, it's like like there's so much available technology and we have to start doing better. And so, you know, we partnered early with folks who had that vision. And what we did internally was we made sure we had the best talent. Right? I mean, these are folks our engineers come from organizations like Palantir and Google and, you know, some of the best places to build for the industry. And that was like the foundational piece. If you don't have the right talent, if you don't have the right people, you're not going to build. And Michael and his team and other operators are on the cutting edge.

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Is vision like you're not going to build for it? So you have to start there, and then you have to start, you know, building on teams. And we did this because we have industry expertise. Right. So a lot of our sales folks, a lot of our growth teams come from industry. They have experience on the front lines. They have operator experiences. So when they're talking to Michael's team, they can also talk about our product in the footsteps that they experience. Right. Like they were in these roles in the past, whether it's a caregiver or a nurses. And we thought that was also important because a lot of times there's there's been good tech companies that have good, you know, talent from these major companies like Google, but they don't meet the operator where they are because they don't understand the operator's perspective.

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So that's the second thing we did. And then the third thing we did was we made sure that every operator that we had from the early days was successful, right? We put a ton of effort into that, like, I'm proud to say that since our founding, we've never churned a client. And that's because we cared so much to deploy. And, you know, I'm not saying everything was perfect, right? Like early days, we had stuff we had to solve for, but we made sure, like with Sag,e to tech, right now we have a team embedded in Michael's community right now right there catching the edge cases, caching any issues or problems. Because with any new product release, you're going to have that. But you have to have the people and resources to back it up.

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29:22 - 30:18

Josh Crisp

Well, thank you, Raj, for your commitment year over year to helping make all of us better, which ultimately helps our population that we serve to higher quality of care, better outcomes. That's what our industry needs to be able to face the challenges of caring for an aging population. Thanks for taking the time today, Michael. In the middle of a move, doing, moving, and shaking. So much going on. Thank you for leading the way in innovation, picking a great partner, and taking time for our listeners today. We appreciate you both joining. We will be connecting our audience, our listeners, to both of you in the Bridge the Gap show notes, as our listeners know, we will have all that information. You will probably both get inundated and your teams with curiosity. Thank you for your transparency and willingness to share your experiences. I know that’s going to add great value and insights to our listeners at a variety of levels. I want to thank all of you for listening to another great episode of Bridge the Gap. We'll talk to you soon. 

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Outro

Thanks for listening to Bridge the Gap podcast with Josh and Lucas. Connect with the BTG network team and use your voice to influence the industry by connecting with us at BTG voice.com.

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