Captivate Podcast: Amit Shrivastava on AI-Powered Caregiving and Go Instacare | EP041

I'm so glad you're here with us. Today. I'm going to have a wonderful conversation with Amit Shrivastava, whom I first met on LinkedIn when we had a mutual interest in caregiving, and I know he's going to tell us some really important things about his background and about his experiences in founding the agency go instacare, which is not just an agency, there's a whole lot more to it. So I'm looking forward to digging in. Hello, Amit, how are you today? I'm good. Deborah, how are you wonderful? Thanks. I wanted to ask you to tell our listeners about yourself a bit, and then if you could tell me the spark that got you interested in working in this industry?

such a great, great news. I know that a lot of my listeners who are family caregivers start off thinking they can do everything and be all things to the person they're caring for, and we know that's a good impulse to love the person and care for the person. On the other hand, I think some of us get in over our heads having a go to a go Insta care like an Uber would be a fast, fascinating, wonderful addition to the to the problem of family caregiving. Can you tell me a bit more? We can back up a little bit. I know that from what you said to me before there was a family experience of your own that reminded you of why caregiving is so important. What was that about?

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for touching upon that, Deborah. That's such a such a that's where actually the original spark to help people and bring a difference to the to the world came about. So why my grandmother was not in a in a good shape in the last five, seven years of her life. And my mother helped her. At that time, we didn't have enough money to hire a caregiver, so my mom used to help her. She was incontinent, and, you know, my mom had to clean her and do pretty much everything. And we were in India at that time, adult diapers were not as common, you know, 25 years ago, and we were all kids, right? We were all teenagers, so we did our part. We were annoyed a lot of times, but that, that, that was, you know, when we grew up and when you when we understood what it took to help somebody and why we are supposed to. Help somebody who, somebody who's helped us get this blessed life and and, you know, you know, after having kids, also, I kind of learned what parents do for a child, right? So that definitely changed us, and changed me, for sure. And my wife definitely, being in healthcare, has a passion to help people as well, so that all put together. We have chosen healthcare industry because we want to give back. We think our life is blessed. We have gotten an amazing, you know, education. Never had an issue, you know, financially or anything. So I want to make sure that we take make use of this life and and give back with the knowledge we have experienced, with the knowledge and experience we have gained. I used to work in a home in a financial services industry, and I didn't want to just sit in a cube and crunch numbers, so I gave up that job, and my wife and I started this home care company, and we loved it. We loved every part of it. We sat down with a lot of care caregivers, a lot of seniors, understood their stories, and kind of created a system that works for everyone, and that kind of separates us from from everybody else as well. But the whole idea of helping people came from my mother, and that's what I want to continue

such a good, spirited thing to do, and to be able to work with your spouse on a project that you both committed to must be a very exciting and wonderful to wake up every morning kind of feeling. Now, the way you've described it to me, it's kind of like a match, a cross between match.com and other types of computer matching services. I think I once heard you use the term personality mapping. Could you tell me a bit more about what that is?

How do you absolutely yeah, that's that's awesome. You you caught up on all the amazing points. Deborah, so kudos to you. So personality mapping is basically very similar to what you said, right match.com kind of thing. So we are trying to assess the personality of a caregiver. We ask a lot of questions to the caregivers, we ask some questions to the families, and we try to understand what their requirements are, and then we try to match up with the right caregiver. So think about it this way, that and with the inclusion of AI, this is going to improve. For sure, we are working on it already. So think about somebody has dementia, and as a family member, first time family caregiver, you don't know what kind of caregiver you need, so our system kind of thinks about, okay, you have said your parent has a dementia, so you need somebody who's very patient, not only just all the skill set and experience they have, but they should be patient, right? And they should have a soft voice, and they should have the capability of understanding what somebody is saying. Plus, think about from language perspective. If somebody has dementia and they are aggressive at times, you might want to find somebody who's, who's, you know, who doesn't have a language barrier with the senior. So we consider multiple factors. We have about 30 or 40 factors that we consider to say, hey, this might be a good, good person for you. But we don't stop with that. We give you a list of all of these people that kind of match with your seniors requirements and personality. And then we say, okay, you can talk to this person, this caregiver, right away. So you can make a call, you can do a video interview, and then you can say, Yep, I love this caregiver. I want to, you know, hire them. So the concept the one of the things that happens sometimes, sometimes that happens is you, you go on some of these platforms, and you try to enter some of this information, and they give you a, you know, they give you a list of caregivers. You don't know whether they're going to work out with you. They're not going to work out with you. And sometimes it takes a while for you to figure out what kind of category you're looking for, and we try to take care of all of that upfront. So that's where personality mapping comes into picture. We factor in all of the problems that you're facing, all of the issues and all of the requirements that you have, from time, budget and all those, you know, minor things we look at, but the major factor is we think the caregivers also go above and beyond only when they love the senior, when they can make that connection, when there's emotional connection, right? We've had those situations in the past, when we were running the home care company, we saw that we were having a lot of attrition rate of caregivers being from a process of engineering background in the financial industry. I looked at the entire process and we said, okay, what are we doing wrong? So when we realized that we need to send the right caregiver to the right client, that's when the magic happened. Our customer satisfaction rate went over 95% client satisfied the. Caregivers started staying with the company for 234, years, and we created a great team, and the concept became so successful that we were doubling our revenue every year. So, yeah, we wanted to create that on a on a much bigger scale, and with the inclusion of AI, we can actually, you know, take away a lot of, a lot of these gray areas for of personality mapping as well, and then we can, we can give you a better match.

Sounds like the folks [email protected] could use some of your wisdom on this. I remember being on a dating website, and I think the questions were nowhere near as sophisticated. And certainly there were a lot of mismatches going on on one of those. So So I think it this probably works a whole lot better, but still, it's still possible that there is a mismatch. Do you actually do background checks on your caregivers to make sure that things are okay?

Absolutely, great question. Absolutely. We want to create a very safe community. We run a background check on everybody, and in fact, we run back and anybody that we find an issue with. We don't show those caregivers to the families, so they won't even be considered for matchmaking or personality mapping until, unless they have passed our background check, and very soon, we're coming up with caregiver training on the platform as well, where caregivers can actually be trained as well. So you will see a tick mark there that this caregiver is trained. So not only are they background check, but they're also trained.

That that's an especially wonderful part of your system, from what you've told me, and I know from being a very harried caregiver myself at one time a family care well three times that, because I was looking at the last minute, I was always at risk of not finding the right match for my person. So I think it's wonderful that you do so much research before you actually bring people together. So at this time, well, I live in New Jersey. Is it possible for me to use go instacare in New Jersey? Where are you?

caregivers. Well, I really love the personal touch, and I appreciate that you're not telling me you have zillions of caregivers everywhere yet, because that's something our listeners need to know, but they'll be looking for you, I'm sure. So all of this wonderful service must be really expensive. Amit, how much does it cost?

So, Deborah, I'll give you a kicker here. It's all free. It's all free for families. We are trying to so the way this this, if you think about it, right? So our goal is to save money for families. And one of the things that we have running a home care company, we have realized, is home care companies charge you roughly about $30 an hour on average, right? And just giving you an insider insight on the home care industry, right? So about, and it's not for a bad reason. Obviously, they are in the business to make money as well, right? So about 15 or $16 goes to the caregiver. About eight or $9 goes into running the company for overheads, insurance and whatnot, and then about five or $6 goes in the profits for the home care company. So every hour you are using the service, you are spending $15 for caregiver and plus taxes, let's say 17 or $18 per caregiver. So you hire, if you are, if you had the same exact caregiver available to you to be hired directly, without going through the agency, you would, you would not incur all those overheads and profit portion of the of the cost of $30 so you could hire the same caregiver for maybe by spending 15 or $18 an hour. So when you calculate this over a period of five years, generally, that's the timeline. You know, we assume as an average for a person needing this type of care, in six hours a day, you could save roughly about $100,000 that's a lot of money for.

Families, you said it,

yeah, so we want that money either to be used by the same senior if they obviously needed service for longer, or that money can be used for their kids or grandkids and stuff. So we and and on the other hand, caregivers could also charge a couple dollars higher or lower if they're working with the senior directly. So with all of that said, it's a win win for both caregivers, professional caregivers, as well as family members. The the beauty about of all of this is, as a family caregiver, if you are not feeling well one day, if you have doctor's appointment, because you have to take care of yourself as well, right? And finding a caregiver last minute is almost impossible, and especially finding a reliable caregiver that has been background check that is available to work with you right away is next impossible and and when you call these home care companies, you might find that you know they have a minimum of four hours and you need to go to a doctor's appointment for maybe a couple hours. How do you find a caregiver? So if you had a caregiver in your neighborhood who's been background checked, who's got training, and they're available to work with you $20 an hour, I would say you would go for it, right? So that's the whole concept that we're working on. We want to create a safe community, a trained community, a skilled community, and a community that can help right away.

That's extraordinary. Now, could I ask you, since I've been a caregiver at all ends of the of the life continuum, as a parent and also as a parent, taking care of elders as well as my own children. Do you have services that provide for child care as well?

Absolutely, absolutely. That's a great question. So we do have four services on the platform. We have senior care, child care, pet care and house care. So if you need house cleaning or Pet Pet Care, right? If you're going on a vacation, you need somebody to come in, check out, check up on your dog, or you want them to walk the dog, or whatever. You can hire pet caregiver, pet sitter, on on the platform as well. And all of those people are also background checked again. You can talk to them through a video call. You can do a chat, and you can, you know, figure out what, whether you you know they're available during the times you need them or not, and then you can hire them. And it's a very simple process.

Yeah, I didn't realize the services were so extensive that is so great to know. Could I ask you if you happen to know what is the wildest animal, and by wild you can read it that any way you want to. What is the wildest animal one of your caregivers had to take care of?

You know, I don't have that story inside, because I don't see that that type of information. But we do have in, I think, in our, in our one of the selection criterias, I think you can even select pythons. If you have one you want someone to take care of it. If they're there, they're Daredevil, they can take care of it. Sure. Go ahead and hire them, right? So, okay,

I'm not signing up for that job. I've cared enough, I think so that's that's good news, though, that there's so much flexibility in the system. Are you working on any other features that you can add for your users at this point?

Yeah, like I said, I yeah, thank you for asking that. So, like, one of the things that we're working on is caregiver training to become available on the platform. The other thing that we're working on is, is this client training as well. So as a family caregiver, you have a lot of times where you don't know how to communicate with someone who's got dementia. You don't know what. You don't know, right? You don't know how to handle finances. You don't know if it's legal for you to take money away from your mom, right? You don't know if there's siblings involved. And, you know, one person thinks one way and the other person thinks the other way. How do you make decisions on those there are ton of stuff that you have to learn, and I'm sure there are a lot of resources, but I want to bring all of those resources into one place so that you can just go on the website, on the platform, on the mobile app, and then you can just say, okay, yes, I want to do this training, and that training is going to be available to you for a very small cost.

Well, it sounds like you have a degree in conflict resolution because you have really thought it through. So I'm sure people will be looking You're welcome. People will be looking forward to that feature. I'm sure. Are there any other or any videos that people get a sneak peek into how your app works?

Absolutely. So we can, we can, you know, I'll share some, some video you know, you you have YouTube videos, you have links for links to under. 10 how the platform works. It's a very simple process. You just have to provide your email address, phone number, and a zip code, and then you sign up, and then, you know, you can just search for caregivers. It's a very simple, very follow the process. Now you ask one question, how you know? What else are we working on? We're going to give you an exclusive information that I have not shared with any any other part on any other podcast yet, because we were still in the process of figuring that out. Very soon, we are coming up with a verbal communication because of the AI and the technology grown so much now you can talk to the app and find a caregiver. So instead of you know, if you are not sure what to do what to enter. Why is this giving me an error this and that you can click a button and initiate a call, and you can say, Yes, I want you know. And then the agent is going to ask, Hey, Deborah, today, what kind of service are you looking for? You can say, I want Senior Care. Then you can say, I want a caregiver for my mom, Monday to Friday, 8am to 5pm in Chicago and couple other things. It's more, more or less like having a conversation with a customer support representative, and it'll take all of your information, and then it'll give you all the caregivers that that match your criteria. Again,

another kind of magic coming out here. So so you really are thinking it through, and I'm sure that so many people and caregivers are going to benefit from this mutually beneficial service that you have. So where is the best place for people to find you? We'll put everything in the show notes. But would you like to tell us the best place to start to connect with? Go instacare? Yeah,

yeah, the best place is to go to our website. That's the That's a very good starting point. Our website is goinstacare.com go instacare.com and you know, once you get there, you have three sections, families, caregivers or companies. Let's not talk about companies right now. But for family, you would go to family section, you will see how it all works. There's an app link. You can download the app, or you can sign up through the website, and then you can start. Once you downloaded the app, you will be able to see all of those caregivers within the within that app.

That is fantastic. This has been such a wonderful interview. I've really learned a lot about you, your company and possibilities for family caregiving in the future, and how we can assist each other with this wonderful service. So I'm going to ask you, is there anything else we could tell our listeners today that would be helpful to them to know how to approach instacare? Go instacare and you

Yeah, so they can definitely reach out to me at support, at goings, to care.com, and, you know, they can, you know, I do get those emails as well. The team forwards me anything that I've given them clear instructions where you know any problem somebody is having those emails need to come to me so we can resolve those problems. But you asked, what are what else are we doing? So caregiver training is one, client training is another one, and then client, client, meaning family, caregiver training is also coming up. Another thing that we're working on is called Power partners. So I mentioned that I want everything to be in one place, so you can go to go instacare.com and get everything in one one go in those power partner list. We're going to list out the businesses within your local area that can help you, for example, movers. So for example, somebody who can modify the bathroom for your senior. You know, places where you can find wheelchairs or medical equipment and things like that. And then it could also have some nonprofits that could help you where you want. You know information about, hey, does Medicare cover this? Does Medicaid cover this? How do I apply for this and all that stuff? So those nonprofits might also be available, something like Catholic Charities, something like Meals on Wheels might also be there. So we're trying to create a community that these family family caregivers can definitely take advantage of. And all of this for free.

This is so fantastic to have a one place to go to. I remember all of that frantic searching, and the first time I did it, I didn't even have the internet, so calling and calling and looking and telephone books, which don't even exist anymore, but to have all of this in one place would be such a lifesaver for so many caregivers. So I want to thank you for being my guest today. Amit, it was so good to be able to connect with you again, and I'm looking forward to the future of go instacare. I hope you'll stop by again and let us know how things are evolving. Thank you

absolutely, absolutely. Thank you so much for inviting me on your amazing podcast. Deborah, it's always been, it's always a pleasure when I talk to you. You're you've got such a calm and control.