Thrive Community

Shainoor Khoja is the founder and CEO of Thrive Community, an innovative, digital platform that keep seniors connected and engaged with their families and caregivers.

Shainoor has spent the past two decades driving social and economic development in critical fields, particularly healthcare and education in some of the world’s most challenging environments. She has led fundraising efforts for major international development organizations including the World Bank, Mercy Corps and the Aga Khan Foundation. She is the recipient of lifetime achievement awards from B Corporation and Babson College.

Shainoor is a current Governor of the International Development Research Center in Canada and a Board Member of Canada World Youth. She has addressed the World Forum for a Responsible Economy, B Corporation’s “Champions Retreat” and has authored articles on socioeconomic development in emerging markets.

Shainoor has a strong healthcare business background, having previously built and owned a successful chain of physiotherapy clinics.

The world is aging and senior care is becoming increasingly critical. Yet, caregiving is fragmented, siloed and difficult to coordinate. There is currently no single solution and going to multiple sources for caregiving needs is time-consuming, costly and for many, inaccessible. The result is a poor care experience for all. 

Senior caregiving needs a single platform that aggregates all of these different needs in one place, making it easier for all stakeholders to coordinate and collaborate; saving time and money; and reducing anxiety. 

Thrive is that single solution – an innovative, digital platform that matches senior and caregiver needs in one place. Thrive keeps seniors empowered, engaged and connected to their families, reducing isolation and loneliness. Thrive also supports caregivers by reducing financial concerns, emotional stress and healthcare costs.

The aging society confronts us with the realities of the human need. Thrive will help us address that need.

Society is living longer but not necessarily healthier, with the senior population set to double in the next 10 years, reaching 2.1 billion globally by 2050. By 2030, 1 in 5 people in the U.S. will be over the age of 65. Despite great advances in medicine, more than 50% of seniors have more than 3 co-morbidities – including obesity, hypertension, diabetes – and loneliness and isolation accelerates their deterioration. A US study to quantify the cost of loneliness found that among Americans 65 years or older, social isolation costs the Government nearly $7 billion in additional health care costs a year.

The majority of seniors need some form of care, but the costs of 24/7 professional care are prohibitive for many, so informal caregivers are essential. However, they are typically 25-60 years old and juggling responsibilities. The burden on them is both economic and emotional – generating stress and debt; impacting their work and their own health. 75% of US adult children worry about their parent’s ability to live independently & spend an average of $7-14k per year to support them. 

Put simply, there is a global long-term care crisis on the horizon and Thrive aims to fix it. 

Thrive is a digital platform that keeps seniors connected to their family and caregivers. Thrive gives seniors access to a trusted circle of care; alleviates the emotional burden on the caregiver; and reduces healthcare costs for the family. 

Thrive has been developed and designed with input from seniors, caregivers, care home owners and home care delivery companies. The senior-friendly interface is simple to use and utilizes a unique, “check-in” feature that enables seniors to communicate their mood to caregivers and provides caregivers with the ability to monitor the health of their seniors.

Thrive gives seniors the ability to message, call or video-chat with anybody in their circle of care. With just one click or tap, a private communications channel can be established where a senior can request help or just have a conversation with a caregiver. 

Thrive collects and summarizes seniors’ interactions on the platform via a simple dashboard that is accessible to caregivers, allowing them to track seniors’ health over a certain time period and establish patterns that can be utilized to improve caregiving. An interactive newsletter has also been developed that features curated content, regular news and healthcare advice for both seniors and caregivers.

Thrive aims to improve lives across the caregiving community – from seniors and their families to care home companies to principle caregivers. For the latter, this can range from informal family caregivers that are living away from their senior, working fulltime with multiple responsibilities, to middle-low income migrant workers with older parents in their home countries, to professionals in care / retirement homes.

Thrive has been developed with input from seniors, caregivers, care home operations and home care delivery companies, insurers and policy groups at every step. The problem definition and design phase has involved two years of focus groups; individual interviews; intergenerational listening and learning sessions; and multiple design iterations with feedback incorporated and integrated into the final design. Thrive is also currently available in Beta with a 60-day trial for further feedback.

As Thrive’s founder, I have drawn on my personal experience as a qualified Physical Therapist and responsibility as a caregiver for my elderly mother. Caregiving is a complex ecosystem that has been traditionally focused on reactive treatment and reimbursement. Thrive is changing this outdated model – moving care from reactive to preventive – to improve quality of life for everyone connected to the caregiving community.

Issues of aging and caregiving may not be considered particularly exciting to solve, but they are real, global problems. It might be that the confrontation with our own mortality makes the sector less attractive.

Our present model of care falls short. Seniors are anxious about their declining health & independence. Caregivers don’t express their concerns, colleagues cannot relate and society is quick to judge. 

The recent COVID-19 crisis has raised awareness and increased the adoption of technology. Now is the time to build on changing attitudes, improve intergeneration interaction and provide better support. Thrive will endeavor to do just that.

The day I found my mother laying on the bathroom floor, having been there for 8 hours was the day everything changed for me. It was also the genesis for Thrive Community. That same day, I became a caregiver in addition to a mother, daughter, wife and businesswoman. My mother’s fall was followed by a period of rapid deterioration that saw her go from an independent senior, living alone, driving and doing volunteer work to her being faced with a choice between a residential assisted-living facility or moving into my home. 

We chose the latter, my mother had to say goodbye to her friends and community, and my husband, children and I had a change in our responsibilities. As I explored options to reduce my mother’s feelings of loneliness while addressing her needs and coping with additional workload, I noticed I was not alone in facing this problem. The more research I did, the more I realized this was a common problem. With my healthcare background, I was fortunate enough to understand the right choices to make, and be able to share that knowledge with friends and colleagues in the same position. This is how Thrive Community was born.

My life has brought me full circle. Having trained as a Physical Therapist and operated my own healthcare businesses for more than a decade, I served and treated many seniors. During my training I visited and worked in a number of facilities that when I reflect, did not provide the compassion and appropriate level of senior care. I would not want to spend the last phase of my life in that kind of environment, nor would I wish my loved ones to. Having been a displaced child myself, I have spent more than 15 years giving back to the developing world, where I learned the power of technology to provide affordable access to quality services in critical fields and at scale to those less fortunate. 

Thrive allows me to combine all my personal and professional experience and use it to try and solve a pressing global problem. Professionally, I am motivated to leverage technology for social good, improve the quality of life for seniors and caregivers, and bring about a fundamental change in care delivery. Personally, I want to help preserve the loving bond between a parent and child for as long as possible. I developed Thrive to do both.

Having been a physio by profession and spent so many years treating the elderly, I have an acute understanding of their needs. No matter which part of the world I was practicing in, seniors all had universal feelings – of sadness, of loneliness, of isolation and of helplessness. Working in emerging markets helped me gain experience and expertise in using technology to solve complex, pressing problems in critical fields – from Telemedicine in healthcare, to E-learning in education and Mobile Money in financial inclusion. I learned how to scale innovative business models to make quality services affordable and accessible, while increasing social impact. 

Despite my professional experience, it is my own, personal experience with my mother that has given me a unique insight into the problems that Thrive is aiming to solve. My mother lived and worked independently before her fall and subsequent health incidents. Her recovery was slow but her hospital care was good – it was her care options after being discharged that presented problems. Long-term care facilities were expensive and not manageable long-term as insurers did not want to pay. The mix of quality, affordability and accessibility was simply not available. I was left with no choice but to bring my mother home and despite making a full recovery, she had lost her purpose. She was lonely and now dependent on me. Trying to juggle all these responsibilities led me to connect my professional and personal experiences and begin to explore what has now become Thrive Community. 

My life has provided me with many systemic barriers, and I have learned the best way to navigate them is to put myself in others’ shoes & find common purpose. When I was developing Afghanistan’s first Telemedicine program, I had to do just that. In a country where basic healthcare is an acute need, utilizing technology at scale is critical. The problem was I had no technology experience and I had to connect Afghanistan’s hospitals with a world-class hospital in Pakistan by working with leading software developer, Cisco and an Afghan telecom partner, Roshan. 

My lack of experience in the face of such a daunting task was an obstacle. So, I turned to others. I built a team of Afghanistan’s smartest, most passionate and committed young people and rallied them around a common purpose - helping their country’s vulnerable – they delivered. In 18 years, Telemedicine has now served more than 30,000 people, trained thousands of healthcare professionals, and conducted procedures that were previously impossible in Afghanistan, while saving time and money. Similarly, with Thrive, I have tackled a lack of software developing experience by building a team and finding common purpose to solve problems I could not fix alone.

I believe my six-month assignment in Syria for the Aga Khan Foundation was the biggest test of my leadership ability due to the critical nature of the project, the extremely difficult working and living conditions, and the high-pressure environment in which the project had to be delivered, due to the intensifying crisis in the country.

I had six months to deliver a $12.5m crisis alleviation program to address key gaps for Syria’s most vulnerable communities. I had a large support team of 180, but the project could have quickly become disjointed and overwhelming. The way I tackled it was to break down the big, overarching project into smaller, workable components – livelihood, education, food, water security – then drawing a clear, phased roadmap for each component and rallying team members around each phase. By doing this, the project became more easily digestible for the team and we were able to establish clear success metrics for each stage. I am very proud of what we achieved under such intense daily pressures – we directly assisted many thousands of people in dire need and we left behind a program architecture that is now better-equipped to respond to the ongoing crisis in Syria.

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To date investment in the senior space has focused around technology to help manage the business side of care – accounting, recruitment, location and taxation support. Little has been invested in keeping people healthier, in their homes, engaged and supported because the current payment models are not designed to compensate such products and services. Over the last few years investment is slowly making its way into these preventive services but they are still far too expensive and require the purchase of costly monitoring hardware that can also be intrusive for the senior. 

Thrive is one of a new breed of companies now looking to change this. The starting premise was to put the senior and the caregiver at the center of a simple, effective and accessible solution that can be integrated into the caregiver’s day. Thrive's design brings people together around the needs of the senior and caregiver, utilizing existing technologies in a senior-friendly manner for the target audience. The business model and the functionality reinforce engagement from all stakeholders - subscription would be for the senior, with up to 8 members in the circle of care added for free. We want to drive a sustainable connection at a competitive cost through an accessible medium.

Our theory of change is detailed in the tables above. Interviews with seniors, family caregivers, care home staff, home care delivery companies & insurers have confirmed the problem sets highlighted. Research conducted by AARP, Massachusetts Caregiver's Association, Aging 2.0, World Economic Forum, various wealth management and retirement planning agencies speak to the issues that Thrive is addressing.

At the present time, many apps exist to help seniors and or caregivers however they require both the senior and caregiver to go to multiple locations to seek the services and solutions they need. Thrive is focused not only on delivering meaningful solution to the key issues of loneliness, isolation and stress but is also aggregating things that seniors, their caregivers and professional service providers need as part of one quality, affordable and accessible solution. 

Our model works around a senior and caregiver. This combination is one user. Each senior and caregiver may have up to 8 circle members within their circle of care. We however only count users/numbers around the number of seniors & principle caregivers.

1. Number of seniors currently being served = 33 seniors and 61 caregivers in our Beta.
2. Number of seniors served in one year = 1000 seniors minimum, up to 8000 caregivers*.
3. Number of seniors served in five years = 7500 seniors minimum, up to 60,000 caregivers*.

* Assuming every senior has 8 members in their circle of care.

1. Complete the product roadmap.
2. Raise funds to build out the team, product and business.
3. Scale the business in the U.S in terms of subscribers and then expand - initially into Canada, Europe and the UK; then the Middle East and Africa.
4. Submit a patent application on aspects of the application that can be patented.

1. Market barrier - need to establish trials with large healthcare providers. In discussions with a potential client.
2. Financial barrier - we require advertising and marketing budget to recruit B2C and B2B(2C) users; and a small salesforce.

1. Trials barrier - continue organic beta-user reach to B2C users including my healthcare network and B2B(2C) users including care providers, insurers and residential homes. We have pulled together a target list of all facilities across major cities in the USA that we will be targeting.

2. Financial barrier - apply to grants and competitions to secure funding, and being targeted fundraising campaign once COVID-19 restrictions begin to lift.

We are currently in very early conversations about potential support with Kaiser Permanente, American Association of Chiropractors, Elder Affairs Massachusetts, Elder Affairs at Rhode Island, Care Academy & Arch Angels.

Our business model is a subscription model with the senior at the center – payment is for the senior and primary caregiver with up to 8 members in the circle of care that can be added for free. A B2B option that incorporates a discounted subscription per senior per month has also been developed.This is available as a group purchase and as a whitelabelled option.

With the required funding, we will reach profitability within 2 years. A full business plan is available by request.

Self-Funded to date.

We are seeking to raise up to $3 million in SAFE's (convertible notes).

Estimated expenses for 2020 are $400,000 that will be self-funded.

The funding and exposure from the Elevate Prize would help us to expand our trials and enable us to scale the business more quickly. This in turn will help us deliver the positive impact to seniors, caregivers and the stakeholders that we are targeting.

Securing large numbers of seniors in different residential settings to use Thrive with their residential facilities and their families.

1. Residential senior homes
2. Assisted care facilities 
3. Home care delivery companies 
4. Senior care providers of care to seniors
5. Insurers, Medicaid and Medicare Advantage providers/payers 
6. Faith-based volunteer organizations
7. Caregiver associations and academies