CG360 - An Unpaid Family Caregiver Support System

There are 53 million self-reported unpaid family caregivers in the US today. About 40 million care for older adults. With 10,000 people turning 65 everyday in this US, the number of unpaid family caregivers will rise. And, caregivers bear the brunt of the struggle.

In 2021, 59% of unpaid caregivers had to take two or more days off in a row from work and 52% lost income because they had to miss work. Unpaid family caregivers aren't given an orientation or a manual to help navigate the care of a loved one. Typically, individuals are thrown into the role of an unpaid caregiver. Or, some opt into a primary unpaid caregiver often with little or no knowledge of the intricacies of the health of their loved one. They painstakingly do their best to determine how to move forward. Add the complications of a nuanced healthcare system and insurance, and its easy to see why unpaid caregivers struggle. Last, but not least, caregivers must endure the hardship of balancing care of a loved one with work and other facets of life. Sadly, a quick Google search will not demystify caregiving, health conditions, insurance questions, or bring peace of mind.

CG360 is an online support platform for unpaid family caregivers of older adults. The platform democratizes information by vetting credible sources and surfacing valuable caregiving insights. CG360 has three core elements.

1) The QuickStart and Comprehensive Resources offer a range of caregiver resources, including state, local, veteran, healthcare education, illness education, and caregiver resources. We share credible websites with geographically relevant resources of all types that evolve as the caregiver's journey does.

2) Self-care is critical to unpaid family caregiver well-being. We steer caregivers to practical and actionable help. CG360 provides prompts and emotional, mental, and physical resources. We strive to remind unpaid caregivers that their care matters too.

3) CG360 contains a peer community to empower caregivers. Caregivers share their thoughts, challenges, and ideas at any time. An online community enables sharing, inspiration, and encouragement from those who understand caregiving challenges.

Also, our team creates content covering many areas. Our content helps caregivers navigate hard conversations by addressing topics such as advance care planning and behavioral changes. And we strive to help caregivers create healthy habits that lead to preventative care practices.

Our target population consists of unpaid family caregivers of older adults. These specific caregivers work full-time and may or may not have children to care for in addition to their spouses and careers.

Currently, this population is served by two categories of solutions.

• The first solution is comprehensive and usually involves a concierge-like service. Concierge services are often provided through an employer. These services help caregivers navigate clearly stated challenges such as selecting nursing homes. One popular service is staffed by former social workers.
• The second solution focuses on transactional tasks. Examples of transactional tasks include creating and sharing schedules, tracking medications, and other tasks. These apps are free or available at a nominal fee. Both types of solutions may offer a few articles or blog posts about caregiver issues. But, neither option offers a repository of self-service resources that evolve as the caregiver journey does.

CG360 enables unpaid caregivers to identify resources (state, local, veteran, and more) that might help with education, finances, or people resources. Suggested resources point caregivers to issues, challenges, and benefits that might not know exist. Our healthcare and illness education resources result in actionable options and increased confidence. Bolstered caregiver confidence and increased knowledge enable caregivers to make informed decisions. Confidence and dialogue built trust within deeper caregiver, patient, and clinician relationships. Better relationships can translate into increased compliance with prescribed healthcare treatment. Lower patient and caregiver re-admittance rates and increased patient satisfaction scores may also result.

Today, many unpaid family caregivers choose between their jobs and the care of their loved ones. We want to be there and help caregivers that might have to make that choice. Although we won't be able to make the choice for them, we can point them to resources that can help their decision making and point them to returnship organizations designed to welcome them back.

We want better informed, prepared unpaid family caregivers that thrive. CG360 is one tool that can help with this process.

My entire team knows we need to improve things because our country can’t sustain the status quo. We represent many cultures and professional backgrounds. And we're committed to creating a positive impact. 

• I met my Design Lead, Patrick Ibizugbe, during my tenure at American Express in 2007. We bonded over our work as unpaid caregivers.

• Patrick introduced me to our Operations Lead, Xue Peng. She’s part of the sandwich generation caring for her nephews and parents. 

• Junaid Siddiqui and I met at MIT’s DC Hacking Medicine Hackathon in 2019. He’s building our platform and caring for his sister suffering from cancer. 

In addition to the core team, the following ladies and I serve as members of my health care consortium, Caregivers 4 Caregivers, Inc, and are advisors to CG360. We create content and support caregivers within our day jobs and the endeavor we've created. In summary, 

• Dr. Megan Thomas Hebdon is a family caregiver, clinician, and caregiving research scientist. 

• Erna Alfred Liousas, MBA and CXPA spent 20+ years as an unpaid family caregiver. She did this while working full-time across numerous industries. 

• Leslie Brooks, MS, PA-C, FAWM is a clinically practicing physician assistant. Currently, she works with older patients and their caregivers. 

• Rachel Cohen, MSW, MUP has a diverse background in community planning and social work. She has a specialization in gerontology and nonprofit management. 

We've all had experiences that are geographically and culturally disparate as caregivers. We reside in the communities serving unpaid family caregivers of all stripes. And those interactions guide our development of CG360 - a platform that supports the needs of today and tomorrow.

We want to build a social business. It's our desire to have our business focus on impact and financial viability. And to make that happen, we seek the following:

• Access like-minded thinkers motivated by impact. We want to share space with people who recognize the need to think big and holistically. People who thrive in environments where positive change lives.

• Mentorship regarding the refining of our business model and transforming it to a social business model

• Support and mentorship to improve the architecture of our technology. Machine learning is critical to the next phase of our platform. It will ensure our resources cover all 50 states and ultimately expand to specific geographies outside the US. Also, we have plans to add wearables data and electronic health records to our platform.

• Connections to strategic partners that can open up doors for us would be helpful. We can also support organizations by offering our solution via white label and increase our impact.

CG360's approach to solving the trusted information gap is to change the orientation we view the problem. In doing so, we aren't building a standalone solution. Rather, CG360 is a platform designed to work as part of a caregiver's existing routine and life. The platform supplements the caregiver's toolkit with an alternative to a Google search. Each resource we provide is vetted through the lens of the caregiver experience. The resources is paired with a summary detailing what the caregiver will see when they select a resource. We include our personal commentary if we have experience with the resource. And, we provide an online community for discussions among caregivers. Caregivers can discuss resources or challenges as they are comfortable. Our resources and community are available 24/7 for caregivers to learn, plan, share, and act. The CG team and our advisors also create content included within the platform. We strive to keep caregivers informed on new approaches and challenges that might await them.

The interwebs are filled with information. But, not all the information is accurate, helpful, or worthwhile. Caregivers are short on time and can’t always confirm the validity or authenticity of a source. CG360 cuts down leg work with a platform that evolves as information does. We remove resources that aren’t used or replace them with better options based on caregiver feedback and our own due diligence process. Once we complete our research and diligence, we include new resources on our platform after our due diligence and research.

CG360 will impact our country by democratizing information across all family caregiver scenarios. And, our proactive self-care resources and prompts help caregivers mind their health in the process. Meeting these aims will result in a new generation of effective and healthier unpaid family caregivers.

We have two key impact goals for the next year and next five years. They fall into the categories of caregiver economics and the societal narrative.

Caregiver economics:

Goal for next year: In 2021, 52% of surveyed caregivers shared they lost income because they had to miss work. Unpaid caregiving does not stick to a schedule. But, it is our goal to open access to resources that can help caregivers offset the need to miss work. We seek to reduce the number of caregivers that miss work by 2% next year. We plan on doing this by highlighting resources that offer many types of care to mitigate the flow of lost income.

Within five years:

We'll reset the employer mindset regarding caregivers within 5% of large, US based, global companies. CG360 is viewed as a top self service resource for companies and municipalities. CG360 will drive caregivers to personalized resources that support a balance between care responsibilities and caregiver health. As a result, employers socialize the challenges of caregiving and train management staff. Support plans that retain caregivers create job/role flexibility within organizations. Human resources and employee engagement establish policy changes and different categories of work

Societal narrative:

There are 53M unpaid, self-reported family caregivers in the US. The pandemic opened the nation’s eyes to the activities they do.

Goal for next year:

Five states agree to pilot CG360 within their Areas on Aging Agencies. With the pandemic, many organizations and entities moved resources online. . CG360 aggregates national and state specific resources within one platform. Caregivers regardless of location can access the most helpful resources and communicate as they wish.

Within five years:

CG360 becomes a platform of choice for employers and national area agencies on aging. All 50 states access the same online platform, thus increasing the number of available resources across states. At this point, we’ve rolled out nation-wide and geographically specific options for caregivers in case they need coverage due to work demands. This helps caregivers maintain the jobs they need to support their families.

Healthcare providers and state public policy organizations will also have access. And, our consulting efforts will demonstrate the benefit of flexibility for employers. Ongoing initiatives across the country de-stigmatize the unpaid caregiver role. And we start the process of building a national caregiver mandate adopted by each state and eventually corporations that want to attract talent.

We are measuring our impact through several UN Sustainable Development Goals. Our attention is on three goals. And, we are currently incubating a pilot of a subset of caregivers to monitor the indicators below.

• Goal 3: Healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.
  • Increase the use of supports such as caregiver support groups, therapists, online support communities, and personalized online resources among caregivers
  • Drive proactive conversation with PCP and caregivers regarding their own health needs.
  • Raise the level of compliance with healthcare provider medical protocols

• Goal 5: Gender Equality, Goal 8: Sustained, inclusive and Sustainable economic growth for all, and Goal 10: Reduce inequality within and among countries
  • Retain caregiver's employment
  • Support caregiver role progression throughout career
  • Advocate for new role types and flexibility options across job types to keep caregivers in the workforce

Our solution will have a positive impact on the problem because it recognizes caregiver challenges and seeks to empower them as they take action.

Our solution is a responsive website. We've made a deliberate decision to not build an app because the preferences of our caregiver segment range from those entirely comfortable with multiple apps to those who do not want to usage specific apps beyond what they currently use. Our platform is build on a Wix site powered by AWS. It is our goal to incorporate machine learning within our process to accelerate the time it takes to aggregate resources across all 50 states to start and ultimately within other countries. We will also use machine learning to drive relevant personalization to accelerate the speed of sharing insights and resources to our caregivers. We supplement the core site with video conferences that pull our caregivers together in monthly sessions to supplement their experience. As we pull in new information sources such as EHR, wearable data and more we will migrate to an enterprise grade infrastructure to preserve the user experience.

Unpaid family caregivers run the gamut of diversity. Our team is representative various experiences within the US and the globe. We are a combination of immigrant, first-generation, and second generation Americans. By understanding our differences, we learn how to build and maintain a democratized and inclusive platform.

We recognize and appreciate all backgrounds, gender identity, ethnic origin, race, color, and sex. It is fundamental to our goal of cultivating an inclusive and equal online and offline environment. Also, we incorporate accessibility guidelines into our platform to ensure everyone gains value.

Upon joining our platform and company, everyone is aware of our zero tolerance discrimination policy. Anyone who discriminates within our organization or platform.

We are stewards of open communication across mediums for a better tomorrow.

Today we are transitioning from a direct to consumer model to a business to business model. Unpaid family caregivers are our end users, but our buyers today include healthcare providers, payers, employee benefit programs, and corporations. These organizations are increasing their appetite for methods to support and provide outreach to caregivers. Our platform drives change on the provider and payer level, equipping these organizations with an option they can choose to private label and plug into their existing patient experience. And, our solution's licensing model allows employee benefit plans to purchase licenses to include as options in their offerings to corporations.

We're currently in our beta phase. Our outreach efforts to family caregivers seek to make an immediate impact. And since we are looking to democratize information, we are currently not charging caregivers. We are establishing pilots with healthcare providers and organizations. Once our pilots prove efficacy, CG360 will be available on a per user license basis.

In addition, if the corporation or healthcare provider has a need for consulting on its own employee caregiver policy, speaking engagements, or other custom work we provide those services for an additional fee.

Moving forward, we seek to ramp up CG360 and charge licensing fees to our core segments.

The consulting work that I do covers some expenses, and I'm looking to expand those efforts to create a steady pipeline of clients.

We will continue to apply for grants, and we are looking into angel investments as an option.

Currently, I am bootstrapping CG360. My team has volunteered their time. And, all of the costs I've incurred as the founder of CG360 have come out of my pocket. This year I received a grant from 1863 Ventures. 

In terms of consulting efforts, I've partnered with a client in the HR space to create a caregiver policy framework. We are partnering to deliver this framework and a potential workshop as another means of increasing visibility and revenue.