October 8, 2025 • 36 mins
Summary
In this episode of From Leads to Leases, host Jerry Vinci speaks with Ernie Ianace, CEO and founder of CareAlly, about the transformative role of AI in senior living. They discuss the challenges faced by caregivers, the importance of integrating technology to simplify operations, and how AI can enhance staff efficiency and retention. The conversation also explores the concept of value-based care and how AI can assist senior living communities in preparing for the influx of higher-acuity seniors. Ultimately, the discussion emphasizes the need for technology that not only automates tasks but also enhances the human touch in caregiving.
Learn More:
- Connect with Ernie Ianace on LinkedIn
- Learn more about CareAlly
Takeaways
- CareAlly aims to simplify operations in senior living communities.
- AI can reduce the complexity of managing multiple technologies.
- Natural language processing is essential for user-friendly AI systems.
- Retention of staff improves when technology reduces repetitive tasks.
- AI can provide real-time answers to frontline workers in emergencies.
- Integrating point solutions into a cohesive platform is crucial.
- Value-based care is essential for addressing the needs of higher acuity seniors.
- AI can help communities prepare for the future of senior care.
- Technology should enhance the human touch in caregiving.
- Collaboration among tech providers can lead to better solutions for operators.
Chapters
00:00 From Leads to Leases - A Senior Living Business Podcast
01:36 Welcome Ernie Ianace - CEO of CareAlly
02:20 Building CareAlly: Lessons from Experience
07:56 Transforming Workforce Management with AI
09:18 Empowering Staff with Technology
10:23 Addressing Overwhelm in Care Communities
13:56 Integrating Point Solutions for Better Care
16:05 Evaluating AI-Enabled Platforms
18:38 Ensuring Trustworthy AI Outputs - Not Hallucinations
22:38 Bridging the Gap to Value-Based Care
28:48 Personal Mission and Emotional Drivers
33:13 Designing Scalable and Human-Centric Platforms
Keywords
AI, senior living, CareAlly, technology, healthcare, value-based care, caregiver support, staff retention, automation, orchestration
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
And there's just so much that can be done with technology to
help deliver better care. There's such an acute shortage
of staff and I don't think it was because the places had bad
intent, it's just they didn't have enough staff.
They need help, and technology can help.
If you had to manage 27 different technologies on your
community floor today, how couldyour team even figure out who to
(00:22):
call when something breaks? Today's guest says it doesn't
have to be that complicated, andAI might be the key to making
care more human. Welcome to From Leads to Leases,
ACCR Growth podcast that helps senior living providers
transform their complex challenges into opportunities.
(00:42):
Listen in for stories from industry leaders, innovative
strategies and insights, and with our expertise, learn how to
increase occupancy faster, Guaranteed.
Welcome back to another episode from Leads to Leases, the
podcast that dives deep into thesenior living and senior care
industries, bringing you insights, strategies, and
(01:02):
stories from the experts of the forefront of innovation,
leadership, and care. I'm your host, Jerry Vincey, CEO
of CCR Growth. For those of you who don't know
about us, CCR Growth is a full service marketing and growth
agency that's exclusive to the senior living industry.
And through this podcast, I'm here to guide you through the
evolving landscape of senior care, exploring the innovations
(01:24):
and leadership insights that areshaping the future of the
industry. So whether you're a provider,
caregiver, or industry leader, this show is here to help you
make informed decisions and create meaningful impact.
All right, today's guest is Ernie Ionachi, the CEO and
founder of Care Ally, healthcareand senior living technology
company that uses AI to simplifyoperations and power care teams
(01:47):
and help communities unlock better outcomes.
A serial entrepreneur with five successful exits under his belt,
Ernie has spent his career building platforms that solve
complex problems at scale. Care Ally is his most personal
venture yet, fueled by the caregiving challenges he
experienced in his own family and shaped by a belief that the
(02:09):
right technology should give caregivers back what matters
most time. So, Ernie, welcome to the show.
I'm so glad to have you here. Jerry, thanks for having me
then. I'm excited to be here.
Yeah, absolutely, Absolutely. So I think first let's just talk
about care, Ally. Let's explain to our audience
what it what it does, and what problem you're solving.
(02:29):
Yeah. And Yep, you know, maybe a tiny
bit of history to sort of tell you how I got here, right?
So sure, we built a virtual careplatform called Vital Tech and
treated hundreds of thousands ofof seniors both in post acute
and long term care through Kovidright up until this year, right?
And we sold that. But while we were doing that
(02:51):
through multiple chronic conditions and, and different
environments, both in Medicaid and Medicare, FQHC, senior
living, all different environments, we saw a lot of
things, right, a lot of things that worked, a lot of things
that were broken. And you know, one of the things
with caregivers just do not haveenough time.
They're overwhelmed with paperwork and with
(03:12):
administrative functionality. They just don't have a good flow
of information across the care continuum.
And we were able to add some of that to our platform at Vital
Tech before we sold it, but it was also 7 year old technology.
So we're like, gosh, you know, if we could do it all over
again. And now in the, in the new
(03:32):
emerging world of AI first, whatwould we do different, you know,
from the ground up, we build it with AI, right?
And AP is and open and all that.So we set out to build that and
it needed to do a bunch of things.
One, it had to be completely open.
It had to talk to absolutely everything.
It had to be able to use naturallanguage to build any workflow
that the care provider needed, whether it be an administrative
(03:55):
workflow to solve a problem with.
Like, Hey, you know what? I need a schedule change over
here because I just found out mymy kids sick and I need off next
Tuesday and, and route that through the whole system, right?
Let my Co workers know so someone can pick up a shift, let
my boss know so they can approveit and then write it back to the
scheduling software so that it'sthere, right?
And that needs to be flawless. And oh, by the way, you can't
(04:18):
write code to do that. You just have to tell the system
go do build this workflow and itgoes and builds it to, you know,
fix my billing problems to orchestrate a care pathway, you
know, and make it a clinical workflow.
So we went out and built an AI orchestration platform that
could do just that. And it's built, it's live, it's
(04:39):
deployed, it's starting to get traction.
And it's really designed to be able to do all of that.
Because what we heard over and over again from whether it was a
big CCRC or senior living operator or a very, very large
health system, they don't want point solutions.
They're buried and drowning in point solutions.
They want a platform that they can build on top of.
(05:02):
They they don't necessarily wantto try to boil the ocean.
They might want one thing right now, but they certainly don't
want one more point solution. So that was kind of the genesis
of Kerala is we wanted to build the next thing that would solve
all the problems we experienced as we were building up vital
(05:26):
tech. And I think we we have done a
pretty good job and really was listening to the clinicians,
listening to the people on the ground and saying again, what do
you still need and what's still very broken and just watching
our customers and us struggle with that.
If we can only do this. So we went and did it.
I think that's really interesting too.
This industry has so much antiquated software and hardware
(05:49):
and most of the time it's obviously for budgetary
concerns, but also because this industry is not on the cutting
edge when it comes to most of the time, they're not early
adopters. So you see a lot of those legacy
platforms that can't be retrofitted.
And now that you're coming out with something that's completely
open, like you said, an AI driven, I mean, that completely
changes the landscape. So what were some of those key
(06:10):
lessons that shaped how you built Care Ally from the ground?
Up again, you know 1 of it was natural language right?
Like again because there is not a ton of tech resources
available inside of a senior living operator.
You can't ask their IT team to do a lot right there.
Just throw over work to begin with the render staffed.
So you don't want them to have to do any heavy lifting.
(06:33):
You want to just be able to walkin and plug in.
So that was a really, really bigone.
And if if you want someone to beable to be able to work flow,
let's say it's an HR workflow, for example, right, be able to
change the schedule. They got to be able to
articulate what they want, maybeon a word doc or on an Excel
spreadsheet and hit go and it loads it into our system And IT
never saw it, never touched it, never cared, right?
(06:54):
Because if you need IT to go build something, my gosh, you
could be like 33rd on the list. And they don't have time or
bandwidth to get there. And no knock on them, by the
way. It's like it's just there's too
much for them to do with limitedresources.
And they're already dealing withreally difficult antiquated
systems that they're trying to get reports out of and data out
(07:16):
of for their clinical or their operation and their finance
teams to do their job on systemsthat were never really designed
to give them what they wanted, right?
And it's almost like some of those older systems were almost
built with moats around them so that they don't give you the
information easily that you need.
So, you know, again, I don't want to put a knock on any of
(07:36):
the incumbents, but some of the incumbents have made it really
hard to get information out of them.
And they're not working really, really aggressively to to open
up, right? Unless I think the government
forces them open, I think they're going to stay as closed
as they can as long as they can,simply because it makes it hard
to displace any of them. An interesting data point I was
(07:57):
reading from our gentleman said that the senior living industry
is going to need at least 1.2 million new workers by 2040, but
turnovers, I think it's over 50%in most markets.
So one of the things that you had talked about last time was
was labor costs and the conversation around time.
So what happens when frontline workers have access to real time
(08:21):
answers in natural language? How does that shift the
landscape? You know, what we're seeing is
our system when it's implemented, even in its most
basic form, we have a module in HR kind of retention module.
It helps with on boarding, it helps with training and it helps
with the retention. And it really does a good job of
of all three of those things. And, and, and you know, yeah, it
(08:42):
can get someone on on board quicker and get them trained
quicker. But it, that retention piece is
really, really important. And let me tell you a couple of
reasons how retaining happens, right?
One is it gets rid of some of the noise and some of the
repetitive tests you don't need to do.
Let's say you've got an employeein the middle of night that
(09:02):
they're doing hourly room checksbecause you just don't know
what's going on inside that room.
So you have no choice. But if you can start looking
inside the room and saying, you know what, 99% of your residents
in your memory care unit, they're asleep, it's they're
peaceful, everything's good. Don't bother, right?
But Missus Smith in room 1O2 just got out of bed.
She's a high fall risk. Go help her and you help her and
(09:24):
all of a sudden in the 1st 30 days you start seeing your falls
dropped dramatically. The employees you want, you just
gave them more meaning in their job.
You just gave them a much higherimpact on what they're doing and
got rid of a lot of repetitive kind of, they're almost
worthless tasks. I would say they're not
worthless before you have the technology because you needed to
(09:47):
do it right. But if you give them technology
where you can get rid of those repetitive tasks and give them a
higher value task, gosh, I just stopped someone that fell three
times last month from falling atall this month.
The people you want to keep, thepeople that care that got into
this industry because they wanted to live or care, they
stay because you give them more meaning.
(10:07):
And that really, really matters.So you're retaining not only
more retaining the right people.So I think that's really, really
powerful by giving context and meaning to their job and and
giving them the information theyneed at the right time to make
it different. And not just retention, but I
think just the staff being overwhelmed.
(10:27):
How are you seeing communities use Care Ally?
You know that that's another really, really big one, right?
Just being able to, you know, I tell this story all the time,
right? Like you got a a staff member
and you know, I talk to community sometimes that they
can't even get CNA's right. Like they're trouble.
They're they're pulling people off again.
I might be being a little bit facetious, but they were in
(10:49):
McDonald's last week and now they're on the floor this week
of of a community, right? And all of a sudden it's 2:00 in
the morning and they're in someone's room and they're on
the floor that they've fallen and they're bleeding and they're
in panic mode. They don't remember anything
what to do, but they can ask Carol, hey, what do I do?
And not only will it tell them exactly what that operator wants
them to do, but also all the rules and regulations in that
(11:11):
particular jurisdiction. Because let me tell you,
California's a bit different than New York.
It's a bit different than Texas is a bit different than than
Virginia, right? So because again, the operator
doesn't want them just dialing 911 by reflex, right?
If they don't need to send the resident to the hospital, no one
wants the resident going to the hospital, including the
(11:31):
resident. You know, you run the risk of
infection, you run all kinds of problems could happen, right?
So it's really about just empowering your employee to have
the right information at their fingertips in whatever language,
by the way they may speak. Because let me tell you, that
employee that just started, theymay not even have English as
their first language, right? I mean, if you could be talking
(11:53):
about maybe a, a river spring inthe Bronx and they can be
speaking Ukrainian, for that matter, as their native
language, they might have been in a panic mode because they're
seeing someone on the floor in pain.
They asked the question in Ukrainian, not even realizing
they didn't speak English. The system's going to answer
them in Ukrainian, right? Or you get to have someone in
South Florida asking in Spanish and it's going to answer them in
Spanish. It's really, really important
(12:15):
because it filters out all the noise and gives them the
relevant factual information when they need it, where they
need it, and gets rid of all of the noise.
And I think that's just critically important when
they're doing their job. You know, something is as high
stakes as that to something as, you know, you're just walking
around the hallways and say, hey, what's my schedule on
Tuesday? Something just came up and I
(12:36):
don't remember what. I'm working right, and I've got
a personal thing with my kids. Do I need to worry about a
schedule change? So those types of things, you
know, across the spectrum of from personal to delivering
care, all that is inside of our system.
And you know, and I'm going to give you another example.
We're doing this project. It's about to go live at
Moorings Park. We took 27 different manuals
(12:58):
from they're, they're implementing a very, very new
super high tech building where they got 27 different tech
systems going in. Everybody from Nobi to gosh
cross the spectrum Rhythmos is all going in there.
And they're like, how do we get all these guides into one system
(13:21):
so that when the Staffs walk in the floor and they have a
question, they don't have to go look up a manual of 35 pages
from Nobi and figure out how do I do X?
How do I change the batteries onmy rhythmos?
All they do now is ask Carol, how do I do X?
And it tells them, and that's super, super powerful because
they don't have to go figure outwhere's the manual for Anobi,
(13:41):
Where's the manual for Rhythmos?Where's the manual for Safely
You or whatever. It just answers their question
and however they want to ask it in whatever setting they're in.
And again, it's things like thatthat just save them time,
frustration and money. Would you say that's the biggest
platform problem that's out there right now and why point
solutions are kind of failing operators because they do have
(14:04):
all of these different touch points, I think.
So, and don't get me wrong, you can't get rid of the point
solutions in a lot of aspects because they're just.
Some of the best point solutionsare needed because they're the
best at what they do, but you have to integrate them and, you
know, it's really hard. There's not a lot of ways to
integrate them seamlessly. You know, Sarah Thomas has been
(14:26):
driving that project at MooringsPark and she's brilliant and
she's been the one driving that integration, right?
But if you don't have a Sarah Thomas, you know, and the
resources of Moorings Park knitting all that together, my
gosh, I, you know, I feel terrible for you, right?
And that's kind of why we built Care Allies to solve that for
you. We can fix that for them, right,
(14:46):
by just plugging it all in and it does it for you.
But my gosh, I mean, you know, but even Sarah said, Ernie, can
you help us by at least distilling all the knowledge of
these 27 systems and giving an assistant to the staff so that
they can ask 8 questions when I walk away and they're doing
their job and they need help, right?
But it's, you know, she picked great systems for each of their
(15:10):
respective like the best thing for monitoring vitals and falls
the best thing for this. So you need point solution
still, unfortunately, right, butyou need a platform to pull the
point solutions together, I think.
And slowly I think you'll be able to do more and more things
on platforms, but they'll be certain things that the point
solutions will never go away, right?
(15:31):
I don't, I don't think you're ever going to say a platform is
going to be the best at fall prevention and detection, right?
Or, you know, RTLS or, you know,wander management or things like
that. I don't, I don't know if I'd
want to trust a platform vendor to be the best at those because
certain things that are just so mission critical, you want the
(15:52):
best of the best for that, whichis again, why you want an open
platform that you can take out three years from now when the
next best thing comes out. You want to unhook and rehook,
and it needs to really be a day or two, not six months.
And if someone doesn't have a Sarah Thomas, what's the first
step an operator should take when evaluating an AI enabled?
Platform, you know, I really think you need to know that it's
(16:13):
100% open. It doesn't hallucinate ever
because it doesn't actually go to the LMS for information.
It only looks inside your walledgarden and what it's, it's fed
and just really, you know, how user friendly is it, you know,
does it does it does it, is it easy to, to just build your
workflows right? Can you just talk to it, tell it
I need you to go do X and it goes and builds A workflow to go
(16:37):
do X. But there's not a ton of AI
platforms in senior living. There's a few and you know, we
were actually partnering with most of them.
That's a nice thing about the senior living economy.
We, we compete and we collaborate all at the same
time. Tara Daily, who's at morning
Spark. Actually, David Moss and I have
agreed. You know what, we could, we
(16:57):
could probably step on each other a little bit, but you do
really cool stuff over here. David and I do all this stuff
over here. So instead of competing, why
don't we just collaborate? Between the two of us, we can do
everything. And I think that's more powerful
because our job is to solve the problems of the operator and to
take better care of seniors, right?
(17:20):
None of us, I think, are truly in this for the money anymore,
right? I think we've all been the ones
that are still here. Most of us have been successful
enough. It's a mission at this point,
right? At least I know it is for me.
And I know. It is for sure so.
We're just like, you know, what if we collaborate, we can solve
everything. So let's just not even try to
compete. Let's just hook together and,
(17:40):
and let's just go solve this, right?
So, you know, I, I just think that again, if you don't have a
Sarah Thomas, but I would recommend getting a Sarah Thomas
or Jill Sumner, who's another, you know, phenomenal resource
independent consultant or Janet Tameyer, right?
They're, they're all sort of outthere.
Janet was, I think VP of nursingfor Charter, you know, Jill,
(18:02):
just total expert in the space. But the point is, is that you
really just need something that's massively open and
connect to everything and really, really user friendly.
And I think that the executive team is willing to collaborate
with everybody else because that's the other thing.
There's there's players out there that are not bad, but
they're not terrible, willing tocollaborate.
(18:25):
And I think that in itself is bad because that locks you into
them. And if they're not willing to
entertain the next really cool new thing that you might want 2
years from now, why would you want that platform?
Yeah, yeah. That's a great question.
I mean, they're fighting for their own survival.
They're not concerned about what's best for for the
community or the operator. Exactly, Yeah.
(18:49):
Talking about AIA little deeper too, there was a study early
2025 that said ChatGPT had an average hallucination rate of 15
to 30%, which I think is probably pretty low depending on
the complexity of of what was being asked of it.
How do you prevent hallucinations and ensure
trustworthy outputs in a healthcare setting?
I got to think that the stakes are a lot higher in this
(19:12):
industry. Yes, yeah.
And unfortunately, that number is low.
It's gotten worse, not better. It's now above 30%
hallucinations. We don't ask ChatGPT any
healthcare questions. Our AI platform is trained only
on the data that we give it. So basically we'll pull it out
(19:36):
of your EMR, we'll pull it out of your claims date, we'll pull
it out of your policies and procedures, out of state regs
and and policies, out of federalstuff and say here is your
universe of stuff you're allowedto answer questions about.
This is it. You may not go to the LMS for
the answer because they're goingto lie convincingly 30 percent,
(19:56):
33% of the time, and in the complex question 35% of the
time, right? And they're going to do it with
a smile and and convince you they're right.
But unfortunately they just hallucinate and it's not getting
better. So you really have to make sure
that you put really serious guardrails around anything
(20:17):
you're deploying in healthcare. And and then we just simply do
not let our AI go outside the walled garden of the enterprise
senior living or the healthcare systems data set.
Now you can go to the LLMS and say, listen, I've got a question
that's been asked in Albania andthen I need you to translate.
But even that we don't trust is something that simple.
(20:38):
They'll still hallucinate five, 6% at a time, so we'll ask every
LLM at the same time and we'll ask them four times each and get
20 answers back. And then we have an agent
that'll grade that. So it'll be 18 agreed.
So that that's the right answer.Those two throw them out because
they were slightly wrong. So the accent's probably wrong.
So that's the only time we're going to do it as if we can
(21:01):
highly paralyze it and give themthe answer out of the data set.
It's OK, here's the answer. It's exactly this.
Don't change anything. We just really want you to
translate it to this language. But we're still not going to
really trust you. We're going to ask you and all
your peers a lot of times. And if a whole lot of you agree,
then we'll trust that. That's pretty.
(21:22):
That's a solid approach. So I mean, have you seen
pushback from operators at all because it's built using AIA
little? Bit until they test it and when
we put their data sets in there and they ask it 100 questions
and it comes back 100 times perfect.
Then they get very excited and they ask and they send can you
add these hundred more documentsand plug it into our EMR and you
know, can you look at our claimsdata?
(21:43):
And so it usually goes away really fast when they start, you
know, really pounded on it and it just, it doesn't, cuz it'll
tell you if it doesn't know the answer.
That's the other thing. It can customize how it tells
you no, right? But it'll say, hey, listen,
that's out of my scope or I wasn't trained on that data or
that's not something I'm allowedto answer or something like
(22:06):
that, right? How do you treat complex
cardiomyopathy or something? If we didn't say it's allowed to
answer that, it just won't answer that, right?
If we gave it the answer because, you know, the
cardiology department out of Emory says, here's the answer
set, give it to that, let it answer.
It'll answer that. But if we say you're not
allowed, if you don't have that answer, this is how you answer a
(22:28):
question that you're not fed thedata, it'll simply say can't do
it. And but again, you can customize
by user persona how it nicely tells you.
I don't have that answer. Talking about value based care
too, I know this is something that you're pretty passionate
about. I was doing a little bit of
research on this and you know, most senior living communities
aren't ready or haven't implemented value based care.
(22:49):
I think the data set said something like less than 20% of
providers are actually participating in value based
care. So how can AI help bridge that
gap? So I think, and I'm pretty
passionate about this, you know,there's this monster wave of
seniors that are crashing into our industry.
It's happening later than I think a lot of our industry
(23:11):
thinks, right, because they're going to show up older with
higher acuity. Yeah, everybody thinks, you
know, the, the, the silver tsunami, so to speak, you know,
it's happening in 2728. I've maintained it's probably
2030 on because they're going toshow up in their 80s and they're
going to be sicker. But the issue is, you know, if
you're building at the very, very high end, they can
(23:31):
certainly afford it. And at the very, very low end,
it'll be subsidized by Medicaid.But in the middle, that's which
is the biggest how the heck do you pay for that, right?
You can't charge enough to provide the care they're going
to need privately. And right now we have no public
mechanisms how to pay for that unless they spend off all their
assets and then they're droppinginto the Medicaid bucket.
(23:52):
Value based care, in my opinion,is the only way to get there
from here, right? But right now most of that money
lives in the ACL world and then the hospital systems and
stopping, it's the wrong place, right?
They don't see the patient between visits.
They can't affect social determinants.
They don't know how the senior lives or eats or do any of that
kind of stuff once they live inside our communities.
(24:15):
We know, right? We see them everyday.
We know how they're eating. We know if they're depressed, we
know how they're interacting. We can actually move the needle
at the most expensive time. So senior living communities
need to participate and get a chunk of that money.
Now if you're a member of an I snap or AD snap, you're, you're
already starting be right. It's a small percentage.
(24:36):
Here's the problem. To get part of that money, you
have to take risk. And most communities aren't
ready for that risk because if you miss, you also experience
the downside, right? So platforms like ours and AI
can get them ready by start collecting the data,
understanding how you affect outcomes.
And then once you're ready, you know, OK, I can avoid falls, I
(25:01):
can avoid hospitalizations, I can avoid emergency room visits
by X on my population. I can start moving towards the
value based world. And you don't have to dive off
the deep end. You don't have to say I'll sign
up for 100% risk contract, right.
You can take a 25% risk or a 50%risk and then move to the 100%
risk. You know, there's, there's ways
(25:23):
to do it. I, I helped a company called
Amba. My wife still is in charge of
their marketing and they actually have all these passive
sensors and they put them into senior living operators and they
use the RPMCPT codes and they bring in a clinical overlay team
to help bill. And they actually it's, it's
completely free to the operator because the CPT codes pay for
(25:48):
the equipment and the clinical oversight team.
And it also gives the operator all kinds of insight into what's
going on overnight on their population.
So it drives dramatically bettercare.
You get clinical oversight and you get all this data that says,
Oh my gosh, we're, we're changing all these outcomes and
the outcomes are extraordinary. Well, our platform does the same
(26:10):
thing across lots and lots of different modalities.
And if you do that for a couple of years, one, you're going to
have dramatically better outcomes.
Your occupancies are going to get dramatically better.
You're going to see psychotropicdrug use drop, you're going to
see hospitalizations drop, you're going to see falls drop,
all kinds of stuff. And then after a couple of
years, you say, I can take some risk because you know what, I
(26:32):
know what my outcomes are. And now all of a sudden value
based carries a lot safer and you can start going after the
bigger piles of money that you frankly are going to have to
have to take care of those higher acuity seniors.
But they got to start because that wall of higher acuity
seniors is going to come crashing into our industry over
the next five to seven years. I think we've got a little more
(26:55):
time. You know, the operators that
just think it's, you know, next year again, I think they figured
out that that seniors are waiting a lot longer and they're
showing up a lot sicker. But but some of them I still
think think that they're going to be just totally full because
the demographics are so big. But again, how do you pay for it
when you not only got a take theresident in, you got to care for
(27:16):
that resident that's really safe.
Are they, are they waiting longer because they're they're
healthier for a longer period oftime and they're only coming in
at the higher acuity or is it, is there something else that's
holding them back, do you think?I think it's threefold.
Yeah, I think some are healthier, which is a good
thing. COVID are keeping a lot out just
(27:39):
because of the memories of how, you know, our, our, our industry
got scars, right? And some just just never want to
go. They, they're just like, we're
going to live here until, till we pass, right?
But then circumstances force them in.
So it's really, you know, I think our industry needs to
change our perception, right? We really need to highlight the
(28:04):
fact there's been some studies done that people live longer
that go to IO that, that then people that don't, right,
because of the community of the social aspects of it, right?
If you live alone at home, you tend to get sicker and don't
live as long. But we don't do a very good job
as an industry marketing the positive aspects of that, right?
(28:26):
So people still, I think associate, I'm not going to that
institution to die, right? We need a positive message.
No, you're coming here to stay independent longer and for the
community and the social aspectsof it.
And there's a lot of companies that are figuring that out.
But I think as an industry we have to just get louder and
(28:48):
better at. That that's great insight.
That makes sense to me for your personal mission.
I know we talked a lot about theplatform, but what what were the
emotional moments that pushed you to build the solution?
You know, again, I spent years treating seniors and the first
of it was stepfather getting liver cancer.
(29:11):
Going through our health system and the coordination of care was
a disaster. The whole family being spread
out, nobody knowing anything, nodoctors talking to each other.
This was about 8 years ago. That's what caused me to build
Vital Tech in the 1st place. And then just watching, you
know, that just mess of our medical system.
But then as we're kind of getting ready to sell vital tech
(29:34):
and starting to build this, another relative got dementia.
And watching that transition, you know, my mother had to care
for him and the emotional toll that had on her, the guilt of,
you know, she knew he needed to go into a facility, but it took
her almost two years to make thedecision.
(29:55):
And that wrecked her health too,right?
I mean, it killed her. And then just when he went in
the facility, and again, they were a fairly high end facility
in, in, you know, North Texas, very, very wealthy, high end
market, not an inexpensive place.
It still wasn't great, right? I mean, it's just that they're
just so many things they lack, right?
(30:17):
And it's good during the day, but at night they just don't
understand. They don't have eyes on the on
the patient. And we've moved him like two or
three Times Now. He's in an awesome place.
But the point is, is that that'snot abnormal.
And there's just so much that can be done with technology to
help deliver better care. There's such an acute shortage
of staff. And I don't think it was because
(30:38):
the places had bad intent. It's just they didn't have
enough staff. They need help.
And technology can help. And I think my mission is
building the right technology tohelp the people in this industry
that deeply care. And there's so many that deeply
care. Man.
I follow someone on, on LinkedIn, Bella in Groves, He
owns it and he is amazing. He has a memory care facility
(31:00):
and he posts every single day. And the way they treat their
memory care patients. I wish every facility did that.
But again, I think, you know, ashe scales, I wonder how he's
going to be able to keep that touch because finding the right
level of care to deliver, you know, and right level of people
to deliver that high touch care is going to be tough.
If he scales and the industry doesn't adopt his model, I'm
(31:23):
going to be really mad because man, it's amazing.
But I think technology is going to be so essential and it has to
be AI because you have to have something that somewhat acts
like a person and thinks a little bit for you and is
agentic that says here, caregiver, this is what you need
at this moment to help you, right?
It can't be them going to hunt through spreadsheets or
(31:45):
documents to figure out what I miss.
You know, it's too late at that point.
It's got to be at the point of care.
Why, you know, Mr. Smith needs Xor even before you're at the
point of care, go to room one O 2 because they just got out of
bed and they could fall and you're going to avoid a fall,
right? Those are the type of things
that are super important or you know, we're talking to an ISNAP
(32:08):
and they're like what we do thisrisk assessment.
But if you can just help us write the individual care plan,
you'll give every nurse 20 minutes back and we're not going
to write it and and file it. We're going to let them review
it. But the point is, is if we can
give every nurse 20 minutes per admit back so that they can now
have FaceTime with a patient, that's crazy valuable to them,
(32:28):
right? And, and our system would write
that ICP in literally 15 secondswhere it takes the nurse 20
minutes. So that's the kind of stuff that
fills me because I want to give those 20 minutes back to the
nurse, be able to sit in front of it, another resident, another
patient, So that that's really what my mission is.
And I think that's a really important point that you made
(32:48):
too, about staffing and, you know, the level of care being on
par with the level of staffing sometimes.
And that being, for lack of a better word, an excuse that a
lot of facilities will use rightwhen, when care is subpar,
they'll say, well, we don't haveenough staff.
Well, that's going to continue to be the case.
So the only thing you can scale is technology at this point to
(33:10):
help supplement that. And I think this is coming in at
the right time. My last question for you that
you kind of answered it already,but maybe maybe there's a little
bit more to it. How do you design A platform
that feels both scalable and human at the same time?
You know, it's got to be conversational.
I mean, that's the one thing that the natural language
(33:30):
processing in the yellow alarms have done, right?
And the only thing we use them for is that conversational
ability, right? You got to be able to just talk
to it in your tone. It's got to be persona based.
So that again, if it's ACNA thatwants to talk to it in
Ukrainian, talks to it in Ukrainian, it talks to them
right back that way, right? If it's a physician talking to
(33:51):
them and talks to them at their level in their language, it's
got to feel like you're talking to appear in whatever level
you're talking to the mat, or else they're going to just think
they're talking to a machine, right?
And whether that's text, like you're texting in a question and
answering back that way or they're speaking to it, it's got
to talk to them in the modality they want to engage as well.
(34:14):
Because some people want to talk, some people don't.
They just want to quickly text it quick question and get the
answer back right. So it it's got to have
multimodal engagement in their persona.
I think it's really, really important and it can't lie.
I think I'd rather hear. I don't have the answer to that.
(34:36):
If you want, I can escalate for you, right?
Then it makes something up and they find out it lied to them.
Because you do that once, a clinician never trusts you
again. Yeah, I think that's the
scariest piece of tech right now, like you were saying about
hallucinations. So awesome.
Well, Ernie, thank you so much for such a great conversation.
Where can our audience go to learn more about Care Ally or
(34:56):
connect with you? They can just go to
www.careally.ai is our website or shoot me an e-mail at Ernie
at Carly dot AI. Super easy.
I'm pretty approachable. I actually read all my e-mail
personally still and happy to answer any questions that
anybody wants to send. Awesome, awesome.
(35:17):
Thank you so much, Ernie. As we wrap up today's episode, I
want to thank Ernie Ionachi for sharing his journey and for
showing us what it looks like tobuild technology that truly
serves the people behind the systems.
From AI safeguards and staff relief to platform thinking and
value based care, Ernie's work reminds us that the future of
senior living isn't just about automation, it's about
(35:39):
orchestration. So if you want to connect with
Ernie or learn more about Care Ally, we've included his
LinkedIn as well as his e-mail and the Care Ally website in the
show notes. As always, we hope you found
this episode insightful and inspiring.
Don't forget to subscribe to ourpodcast on your favorite
platform. And stay tuned for more episodes
where we continue to explore theevolving world of senior care,
(36:01):
covering everything from care models and leadership strategies
to family support, technology and the future of aging.
Also, remember that From Lease to Lease isn't just an audio
experience. We're also a video podcast, so
you can subscribe to our YouTubeor Spotify channels to watch the
full episodes. I'm Jerry Vincey, CEO of CCR
growth. Thank you for joining us on From
Leads to Leases. Please like, subscribe and share
(36:24):
this episode with anyone who might find it useful.
Until next time, lead with strategy and with heart.
Chat with you again soon. Thanks, Ernie.
Thanks. Talk to you.
Thanks for listening to From Leads to Leases.
Are you ready to fill your roomsfaster and increase occupancy?
Visit ccrgrowth.com to learn about our Senior Growth
Innovation Suite, a proven system to generate highly
(36:46):
qualified tour ready leads, accelerate sales and reduce
acquisition costs. Let's connect and turn your
challenges into opportunities. See you next time.
And there's just so much that can be done with technology to
help deliver better care. There's such an acute shortage
of staff and I don't think it was because the places had bad
intent, it's just they didn't have enough staff.
They need help, and technology can help.
If you had to manage 27 different technologies on your
community floor today, how couldyour team even figure out who to
(00:22):
call when something breaks? Today's guest says it doesn't
have to be that complicated, andAI might be the key to making
care more human. Welcome to From Leads to Leases,
ACCR Growth podcast that helps senior living providers
transform their complex challenges into opportunities.
(00:42):
Listen in for stories from industry leaders, innovative
strategies and insights, and with our expertise, learn how to
increase occupancy faster, Guaranteed.
Welcome back to another episode from Leads to Leases, the
podcast that dives deep into thesenior living and senior care
industries, bringing you insights, strategies, and
(01:02):
stories from the experts of the forefront of innovation,
leadership, and care. I'm your host, Jerry Vincey, CEO
of CCR Growth. For those of you who don't know
about us, CCR Growth is a full service marketing and growth
agency that's exclusive to the senior living industry.
And through this podcast, I'm here to guide you through the
evolving landscape of senior care, exploring the innovations
(01:24):
and leadership insights that areshaping the future of the
industry. So whether you're a provider,
caregiver, or industry leader, this show is here to help you
make informed decisions and create meaningful impact.
All right, today's guest is Ernie Ionachi, the CEO and
founder of Care Ally, healthcareand senior living technology
company that uses AI to simplifyoperations and power care teams
(01:47):
and help communities unlock better outcomes.
A serial entrepreneur with five successful exits under his belt,
Ernie has spent his career building platforms that solve
complex problems at scale. Care Ally is his most personal
venture yet, fueled by the caregiving challenges he
experienced in his own family and shaped by a belief that the
(02:09):
right technology should give caregivers back what matters
most time. So, Ernie, welcome to the show.
I'm so glad to have you here. Jerry, thanks for having me
then. I'm excited to be here.
Yeah, absolutely, Absolutely. So I think first let's just talk
about care, Ally. Let's explain to our audience
what it what it does, and what problem you're solving.
(02:29):
Yeah. And Yep, you know, maybe a tiny
bit of history to sort of tell you how I got here, right?
So sure, we built a virtual careplatform called Vital Tech and
treated hundreds of thousands ofof seniors both in post acute
and long term care through Kovidright up until this year, right?
And we sold that. But while we were doing that
(02:51):
through multiple chronic conditions and, and different
environments, both in Medicaid and Medicare, FQHC, senior
living, all different environments, we saw a lot of
things, right, a lot of things that worked, a lot of things
that were broken. And you know, one of the things
with caregivers just do not haveenough time.
They're overwhelmed with paperwork and with
(03:12):
administrative functionality. They just don't have a good flow
of information across the care continuum.
And we were able to add some of that to our platform at Vital
Tech before we sold it, but it was also 7 year old technology.
So we're like, gosh, you know, if we could do it all over
again. And now in the, in the new
(03:32):
emerging world of AI first, whatwould we do different, you know,
from the ground up, we build it with AI, right?
And AP is and open and all that.So we set out to build that and
it needed to do a bunch of things.
One, it had to be completely open.
It had to talk to absolutely everything.
It had to be able to use naturallanguage to build any workflow
that the care provider needed, whether it be an administrative
(03:55):
workflow to solve a problem with.
Like, Hey, you know what? I need a schedule change over
here because I just found out mymy kids sick and I need off next
Tuesday and, and route that through the whole system, right?
Let my Co workers know so someone can pick up a shift, let
my boss know so they can approveit and then write it back to the
scheduling software so that it'sthere, right?
And that needs to be flawless. And oh, by the way, you can't
(04:18):
write code to do that. You just have to tell the system
go do build this workflow and itgoes and builds it to, you know,
fix my billing problems to orchestrate a care pathway, you
know, and make it a clinical workflow.
So we went out and built an AI orchestration platform that
could do just that. And it's built, it's live, it's
(04:39):
deployed, it's starting to get traction.
And it's really designed to be able to do all of that.
Because what we heard over and over again from whether it was a
big CCRC or senior living operator or a very, very large
health system, they don't want point solutions.
They're buried and drowning in point solutions.
They want a platform that they can build on top of.
(05:02):
They they don't necessarily wantto try to boil the ocean.
They might want one thing right now, but they certainly don't
want one more point solution. So that was kind of the genesis
of Kerala is we wanted to build the next thing that would solve
all the problems we experienced as we were building up vital
(05:26):
tech. And I think we we have done a
pretty good job and really was listening to the clinicians,
listening to the people on the ground and saying again, what do
you still need and what's still very broken and just watching
our customers and us struggle with that.
If we can only do this. So we went and did it.
I think that's really interesting too.
This industry has so much antiquated software and hardware
(05:49):
and most of the time it's obviously for budgetary
concerns, but also because this industry is not on the cutting
edge when it comes to most of the time, they're not early
adopters. So you see a lot of those legacy
platforms that can't be retrofitted.
And now that you're coming out with something that's completely
open, like you said, an AI driven, I mean, that completely
changes the landscape. So what were some of those key
(06:10):
lessons that shaped how you built Care Ally from the ground?
Up again, you know 1 of it was natural language right?
Like again because there is not a ton of tech resources
available inside of a senior living operator.
You can't ask their IT team to do a lot right there.
Just throw over work to begin with the render staffed.
So you don't want them to have to do any heavy lifting.
(06:33):
You want to just be able to walkin and plug in.
So that was a really, really bigone.
And if if you want someone to beable to be able to work flow,
let's say it's an HR workflow, for example, right, be able to
change the schedule. They got to be able to
articulate what they want, maybeon a word doc or on an Excel
spreadsheet and hit go and it loads it into our system And IT
never saw it, never touched it, never cared, right?
(06:54):
Because if you need IT to go build something, my gosh, you
could be like 33rd on the list. And they don't have time or
bandwidth to get there. And no knock on them, by the
way. It's like it's just there's too
much for them to do with limitedresources.
And they're already dealing withreally difficult antiquated
systems that they're trying to get reports out of and data out
(07:16):
of for their clinical or their operation and their finance
teams to do their job on systemsthat were never really designed
to give them what they wanted, right?
And it's almost like some of those older systems were almost
built with moats around them so that they don't give you the
information easily that you need.
So, you know, again, I don't want to put a knock on any of
(07:36):
the incumbents, but some of the incumbents have made it really
hard to get information out of them.
And they're not working really, really aggressively to to open
up, right? Unless I think the government
forces them open, I think they're going to stay as closed
as they can as long as they can,simply because it makes it hard
to displace any of them. An interesting data point I was
(07:57):
reading from our gentleman said that the senior living industry
is going to need at least 1.2 million new workers by 2040, but
turnovers, I think it's over 50%in most markets.
So one of the things that you had talked about last time was
was labor costs and the conversation around time.
So what happens when frontline workers have access to real time
(08:21):
answers in natural language? How does that shift the
landscape? You know, what we're seeing is
our system when it's implemented, even in its most
basic form, we have a module in HR kind of retention module.
It helps with on boarding, it helps with training and it helps
with the retention. And it really does a good job of
of all three of those things. And, and, and you know, yeah, it
(08:42):
can get someone on on board quicker and get them trained
quicker. But it, that retention piece is
really, really important. And let me tell you a couple of
reasons how retaining happens, right?
One is it gets rid of some of the noise and some of the
repetitive tests you don't need to do.
Let's say you've got an employeein the middle of night that
(09:02):
they're doing hourly room checksbecause you just don't know
what's going on inside that room.
So you have no choice. But if you can start looking
inside the room and saying, you know what, 99% of your residents
in your memory care unit, they're asleep, it's they're
peaceful, everything's good. Don't bother, right?
But Missus Smith in room 1O2 just got out of bed.
She's a high fall risk. Go help her and you help her and
(09:24):
all of a sudden in the 1st 30 days you start seeing your falls
dropped dramatically. The employees you want, you just
gave them more meaning in their job.
You just gave them a much higherimpact on what they're doing and
got rid of a lot of repetitive kind of, they're almost
worthless tasks. I would say they're not
worthless before you have the technology because you needed to
(09:47):
do it right. But if you give them technology
where you can get rid of those repetitive tasks and give them a
higher value task, gosh, I just stopped someone that fell three
times last month from falling atall this month.
The people you want to keep, thepeople that care that got into
this industry because they wanted to live or care, they
stay because you give them more meaning.
(10:07):
And that really, really matters.So you're retaining not only
more retaining the right people.So I think that's really, really
powerful by giving context and meaning to their job and and
giving them the information theyneed at the right time to make
it different. And not just retention, but I
think just the staff being overwhelmed.
(10:27):
How are you seeing communities use Care Ally?
You know that that's another really, really big one, right?
Just being able to, you know, I tell this story all the time,
right? Like you got a a staff member
and you know, I talk to community sometimes that they
can't even get CNA's right. Like they're trouble.
They're they're pulling people off again.
I might be being a little bit facetious, but they were in
(10:49):
McDonald's last week and now they're on the floor this week
of of a community, right? And all of a sudden it's 2:00 in
the morning and they're in someone's room and they're on
the floor that they've fallen and they're bleeding and they're
in panic mode. They don't remember anything
what to do, but they can ask Carol, hey, what do I do?
And not only will it tell them exactly what that operator wants
them to do, but also all the rules and regulations in that
(11:11):
particular jurisdiction. Because let me tell you,
California's a bit different than New York.
It's a bit different than Texas is a bit different than than
Virginia, right? So because again, the operator
doesn't want them just dialing 911 by reflex, right?
If they don't need to send the resident to the hospital, no one
wants the resident going to the hospital, including the
(11:31):
resident. You know, you run the risk of
infection, you run all kinds of problems could happen, right?
So it's really about just empowering your employee to have
the right information at their fingertips in whatever language,
by the way they may speak. Because let me tell you, that
employee that just started, theymay not even have English as
their first language, right? I mean, if you could be talking
(11:53):
about maybe a, a river spring inthe Bronx and they can be
speaking Ukrainian, for that matter, as their native
language, they might have been in a panic mode because they're
seeing someone on the floor in pain.
They asked the question in Ukrainian, not even realizing
they didn't speak English. The system's going to answer
them in Ukrainian, right? Or you get to have someone in
South Florida asking in Spanish and it's going to answer them in
Spanish. It's really, really important
(12:15):
because it filters out all the noise and gives them the
relevant factual information when they need it, where they
need it, and gets rid of all of the noise.
And I think that's just critically important when
they're doing their job. You know, something is as high
stakes as that to something as, you know, you're just walking
around the hallways and say, hey, what's my schedule on
Tuesday? Something just came up and I
(12:36):
don't remember what. I'm working right, and I've got
a personal thing with my kids. Do I need to worry about a
schedule change? So those types of things, you
know, across the spectrum of from personal to delivering
care, all that is inside of our system.
And you know, and I'm going to give you another example.
We're doing this project. It's about to go live at
Moorings Park. We took 27 different manuals
(12:58):
from they're, they're implementing a very, very new
super high tech building where they got 27 different tech
systems going in. Everybody from Nobi to gosh
cross the spectrum Rhythmos is all going in there.
And they're like, how do we get all these guides into one system
(13:21):
so that when the Staffs walk in the floor and they have a
question, they don't have to go look up a manual of 35 pages
from Nobi and figure out how do I do X?
How do I change the batteries onmy rhythmos?
All they do now is ask Carol, how do I do X?
And it tells them, and that's super, super powerful because
they don't have to go figure outwhere's the manual for Anobi,
(13:41):
Where's the manual for Rhythmos?Where's the manual for Safely
You or whatever. It just answers their question
and however they want to ask it in whatever setting they're in.
And again, it's things like thatthat just save them time,
frustration and money. Would you say that's the biggest
platform problem that's out there right now and why point
solutions are kind of failing operators because they do have
(14:04):
all of these different touch points, I think.
So, and don't get me wrong, you can't get rid of the point
solutions in a lot of aspects because they're just.
Some of the best point solutionsare needed because they're the
best at what they do, but you have to integrate them and, you
know, it's really hard. There's not a lot of ways to
integrate them seamlessly. You know, Sarah Thomas has been
(14:26):
driving that project at MooringsPark and she's brilliant and
she's been the one driving that integration, right?
But if you don't have a Sarah Thomas, you know, and the
resources of Moorings Park knitting all that together, my
gosh, I, you know, I feel terrible for you, right?
And that's kind of why we built Care Allies to solve that for
you. We can fix that for them, right,
(14:46):
by just plugging it all in and it does it for you.
But my gosh, I mean, you know, but even Sarah said, Ernie, can
you help us by at least distilling all the knowledge of
these 27 systems and giving an assistant to the staff so that
they can ask 8 questions when I walk away and they're doing
their job and they need help, right?
But it's, you know, she picked great systems for each of their
(15:10):
respective like the best thing for monitoring vitals and falls
the best thing for this. So you need point solution
still, unfortunately, right, butyou need a platform to pull the
point solutions together, I think.
And slowly I think you'll be able to do more and more things
on platforms, but they'll be certain things that the point
solutions will never go away, right?
(15:31):
I don't, I don't think you're ever going to say a platform is
going to be the best at fall prevention and detection, right?
Or, you know, RTLS or, you know,wander management or things like
that. I don't, I don't know if I'd
want to trust a platform vendor to be the best at those because
certain things that are just so mission critical, you want the
(15:52):
best of the best for that, whichis again, why you want an open
platform that you can take out three years from now when the
next best thing comes out. You want to unhook and rehook,
and it needs to really be a day or two, not six months.
And if someone doesn't have a Sarah Thomas, what's the first
step an operator should take when evaluating an AI enabled?
Platform, you know, I really think you need to know that it's
(16:13):
100% open. It doesn't hallucinate ever
because it doesn't actually go to the LMS for information.
It only looks inside your walledgarden and what it's, it's fed
and just really, you know, how user friendly is it, you know,
does it does it does it, is it easy to, to just build your
workflows right? Can you just talk to it, tell it
I need you to go do X and it goes and builds A workflow to go
(16:37):
do X. But there's not a ton of AI
platforms in senior living. There's a few and you know, we
were actually partnering with most of them.
That's a nice thing about the senior living economy.
We, we compete and we collaborate all at the same
time. Tara Daily, who's at morning
Spark. Actually, David Moss and I have
agreed. You know what, we could, we
(16:57):
could probably step on each other a little bit, but you do
really cool stuff over here. David and I do all this stuff
over here. So instead of competing, why
don't we just collaborate? Between the two of us, we can do
everything. And I think that's more powerful
because our job is to solve the problems of the operator and to
take better care of seniors, right?
(17:20):
None of us, I think, are truly in this for the money anymore,
right? I think we've all been the ones
that are still here. Most of us have been successful
enough. It's a mission at this point,
right? At least I know it is for me.
And I know. It is for sure so.
We're just like, you know, what if we collaborate, we can solve
everything. So let's just not even try to
compete. Let's just hook together and,
(17:40):
and let's just go solve this, right?
So, you know, I, I just think that again, if you don't have a
Sarah Thomas, but I would recommend getting a Sarah Thomas
or Jill Sumner, who's another, you know, phenomenal resource
independent consultant or Janet Tameyer, right?
They're, they're all sort of outthere.
Janet was, I think VP of nursingfor Charter, you know, Jill,
(18:02):
just total expert in the space. But the point is, is that you
really just need something that's massively open and
connect to everything and really, really user friendly.
And I think that the executive team is willing to collaborate
with everybody else because that's the other thing.
There's there's players out there that are not bad, but
they're not terrible, willing tocollaborate.
(18:25):
And I think that in itself is bad because that locks you into
them. And if they're not willing to
entertain the next really cool new thing that you might want 2
years from now, why would you want that platform?
Yeah, yeah. That's a great question.
I mean, they're fighting for their own survival.
They're not concerned about what's best for for the
community or the operator. Exactly, Yeah.
(18:49):
Talking about AIA little deeper too, there was a study early
2025 that said ChatGPT had an average hallucination rate of 15
to 30%, which I think is probably pretty low depending on
the complexity of of what was being asked of it.
How do you prevent hallucinations and ensure
trustworthy outputs in a healthcare setting?
I got to think that the stakes are a lot higher in this
(19:12):
industry. Yes, yeah.
And unfortunately, that number is low.
It's gotten worse, not better. It's now above 30%
hallucinations. We don't ask ChatGPT any
healthcare questions. Our AI platform is trained only
on the data that we give it. So basically we'll pull it out
(19:36):
of your EMR, we'll pull it out of your claims date, we'll pull
it out of your policies and procedures, out of state regs
and and policies, out of federalstuff and say here is your
universe of stuff you're allowedto answer questions about.
This is it. You may not go to the LMS for
the answer because they're goingto lie convincingly 30 percent,
(19:56):
33% of the time, and in the complex question 35% of the
time, right? And they're going to do it with
a smile and and convince you they're right.
But unfortunately they just hallucinate and it's not getting
better. So you really have to make sure
that you put really serious guardrails around anything
(20:17):
you're deploying in healthcare. And and then we just simply do
not let our AI go outside the walled garden of the enterprise
senior living or the healthcare systems data set.
Now you can go to the LLMS and say, listen, I've got a question
that's been asked in Albania andthen I need you to translate.
But even that we don't trust is something that simple.
(20:38):
They'll still hallucinate five, 6% at a time, so we'll ask every
LLM at the same time and we'll ask them four times each and get
20 answers back. And then we have an agent
that'll grade that. So it'll be 18 agreed.
So that that's the right answer.Those two throw them out because
they were slightly wrong. So the accent's probably wrong.
So that's the only time we're going to do it as if we can
(21:01):
highly paralyze it and give themthe answer out of the data set.
It's OK, here's the answer. It's exactly this.
Don't change anything. We just really want you to
translate it to this language. But we're still not going to
really trust you. We're going to ask you and all
your peers a lot of times. And if a whole lot of you agree,
then we'll trust that. That's pretty.
(21:22):
That's a solid approach. So I mean, have you seen
pushback from operators at all because it's built using AIA
little? Bit until they test it and when
we put their data sets in there and they ask it 100 questions
and it comes back 100 times perfect.
Then they get very excited and they ask and they send can you
add these hundred more documentsand plug it into our EMR and you
know, can you look at our claimsdata?
(21:43):
And so it usually goes away really fast when they start, you
know, really pounded on it and it just, it doesn't, cuz it'll
tell you if it doesn't know the answer.
That's the other thing. It can customize how it tells
you no, right? But it'll say, hey, listen,
that's out of my scope or I wasn't trained on that data or
that's not something I'm allowedto answer or something like
(22:06):
that, right? How do you treat complex
cardiomyopathy or something? If we didn't say it's allowed to
answer that, it just won't answer that, right?
If we gave it the answer because, you know, the
cardiology department out of Emory says, here's the answer
set, give it to that, let it answer.
It'll answer that. But if we say you're not
allowed, if you don't have that answer, this is how you answer a
(22:28):
question that you're not fed thedata, it'll simply say can't do
it. And but again, you can customize
by user persona how it nicely tells you.
I don't have that answer. Talking about value based care
too, I know this is something that you're pretty passionate
about. I was doing a little bit of
research on this and you know, most senior living communities
aren't ready or haven't implemented value based care.
(22:49):
I think the data set said something like less than 20% of
providers are actually participating in value based
care. So how can AI help bridge that
gap? So I think, and I'm pretty
passionate about this, you know,there's this monster wave of
seniors that are crashing into our industry.
It's happening later than I think a lot of our industry
(23:11):
thinks, right, because they're going to show up older with
higher acuity. Yeah, everybody thinks, you
know, the, the, the silver tsunami, so to speak, you know,
it's happening in 2728. I've maintained it's probably
2030 on because they're going toshow up in their 80s and they're
going to be sicker. But the issue is, you know, if
you're building at the very, very high end, they can
(23:31):
certainly afford it. And at the very, very low end,
it'll be subsidized by Medicaid.But in the middle, that's which
is the biggest how the heck do you pay for that, right?
You can't charge enough to provide the care they're going
to need privately. And right now we have no public
mechanisms how to pay for that unless they spend off all their
assets and then they're droppinginto the Medicaid bucket.
(23:52):
Value based care, in my opinion,is the only way to get there
from here, right? But right now most of that money
lives in the ACL world and then the hospital systems and
stopping, it's the wrong place, right?
They don't see the patient between visits.
They can't affect social determinants.
They don't know how the senior lives or eats or do any of that
kind of stuff once they live inside our communities.
(24:15):
We know, right? We see them everyday.
We know how they're eating. We know if they're depressed, we
know how they're interacting. We can actually move the needle
at the most expensive time. So senior living communities
need to participate and get a chunk of that money.
Now if you're a member of an I snap or AD snap, you're, you're
already starting be right. It's a small percentage.
(24:36):
Here's the problem. To get part of that money, you
have to take risk. And most communities aren't
ready for that risk because if you miss, you also experience
the downside, right? So platforms like ours and AI
can get them ready by start collecting the data,
understanding how you affect outcomes.
And then once you're ready, you know, OK, I can avoid falls, I
(25:01):
can avoid hospitalizations, I can avoid emergency room visits
by X on my population. I can start moving towards the
value based world. And you don't have to dive off
the deep end. You don't have to say I'll sign
up for 100% risk contract, right.
You can take a 25% risk or a 50%risk and then move to the 100%
risk. You know, there's, there's ways
(25:23):
to do it. I, I helped a company called
Amba. My wife still is in charge of
their marketing and they actually have all these passive
sensors and they put them into senior living operators and they
use the RPMCPT codes and they bring in a clinical overlay team
to help bill. And they actually it's, it's
completely free to the operator because the CPT codes pay for
(25:48):
the equipment and the clinical oversight team.
And it also gives the operator all kinds of insight into what's
going on overnight on their population.
So it drives dramatically bettercare.
You get clinical oversight and you get all this data that says,
Oh my gosh, we're, we're changing all these outcomes and
the outcomes are extraordinary. Well, our platform does the same
(26:10):
thing across lots and lots of different modalities.
And if you do that for a couple of years, one, you're going to
have dramatically better outcomes.
Your occupancies are going to get dramatically better.
You're going to see psychotropicdrug use drop, you're going to
see hospitalizations drop, you're going to see falls drop,
all kinds of stuff. And then after a couple of
years, you say, I can take some risk because you know what, I
(26:32):
know what my outcomes are. And now all of a sudden value
based carries a lot safer and you can start going after the
bigger piles of money that you frankly are going to have to
have to take care of those higher acuity seniors.
But they got to start because that wall of higher acuity
seniors is going to come crashing into our industry over
the next five to seven years. I think we've got a little more
(26:55):
time. You know, the operators that
just think it's, you know, next year again, I think they figured
out that that seniors are waiting a lot longer and they're
showing up a lot sicker. But but some of them I still
think think that they're going to be just totally full because
the demographics are so big. But again, how do you pay for it
when you not only got a take theresident in, you got to care for
(27:16):
that resident that's really safe.
Are they, are they waiting longer because they're they're
healthier for a longer period oftime and they're only coming in
at the higher acuity or is it, is there something else that's
holding them back, do you think?I think it's threefold.
Yeah, I think some are healthier, which is a good
thing. COVID are keeping a lot out just
(27:39):
because of the memories of how, you know, our, our, our industry
got scars, right? And some just just never want to
go. They, they're just like, we're
going to live here until, till we pass, right?
But then circumstances force them in.
So it's really, you know, I think our industry needs to
change our perception, right? We really need to highlight the
(28:04):
fact there's been some studies done that people live longer
that go to IO that, that then people that don't, right,
because of the community of the social aspects of it, right?
If you live alone at home, you tend to get sicker and don't
live as long. But we don't do a very good job
as an industry marketing the positive aspects of that, right?
(28:26):
So people still, I think associate, I'm not going to that
institution to die, right? We need a positive message.
No, you're coming here to stay independent longer and for the
community and the social aspectsof it.
And there's a lot of companies that are figuring that out.
But I think as an industry we have to just get louder and
(28:48):
better at. That that's great insight.
That makes sense to me for your personal mission.
I know we talked a lot about theplatform, but what what were the
emotional moments that pushed you to build the solution?
You know, again, I spent years treating seniors and the first
of it was stepfather getting liver cancer.
(29:11):
Going through our health system and the coordination of care was
a disaster. The whole family being spread
out, nobody knowing anything, nodoctors talking to each other.
This was about 8 years ago. That's what caused me to build
Vital Tech in the 1st place. And then just watching, you
know, that just mess of our medical system.
But then as we're kind of getting ready to sell vital tech
(29:34):
and starting to build this, another relative got dementia.
And watching that transition, you know, my mother had to care
for him and the emotional toll that had on her, the guilt of,
you know, she knew he needed to go into a facility, but it took
her almost two years to make thedecision.
(29:55):
And that wrecked her health too,right?
I mean, it killed her. And then just when he went in
the facility, and again, they were a fairly high end facility
in, in, you know, North Texas, very, very wealthy, high end
market, not an inexpensive place.
It still wasn't great, right? I mean, it's just that they're
just so many things they lack, right?
(30:17):
And it's good during the day, but at night they just don't
understand. They don't have eyes on the on
the patient. And we've moved him like two or
three Times Now. He's in an awesome place.
But the point is, is that that'snot abnormal.
And there's just so much that can be done with technology to
help deliver better care. There's such an acute shortage
of staff. And I don't think it was because
(30:38):
the places had bad intent. It's just they didn't have
enough staff. They need help.
And technology can help. And I think my mission is
building the right technology tohelp the people in this industry
that deeply care. And there's so many that deeply
care. Man.
I follow someone on, on LinkedIn, Bella in Groves, He
owns it and he is amazing. He has a memory care facility
(31:00):
and he posts every single day. And the way they treat their
memory care patients. I wish every facility did that.
But again, I think, you know, ashe scales, I wonder how he's
going to be able to keep that touch because finding the right
level of care to deliver, you know, and right level of people
to deliver that high touch care is going to be tough.
If he scales and the industry doesn't adopt his model, I'm
(31:23):
going to be really mad because man, it's amazing.
But I think technology is going to be so essential and it has to
be AI because you have to have something that somewhat acts
like a person and thinks a little bit for you and is
agentic that says here, caregiver, this is what you need
at this moment to help you, right?
It can't be them going to hunt through spreadsheets or
(31:45):
documents to figure out what I miss.
You know, it's too late at that point.
It's got to be at the point of care.
Why, you know, Mr. Smith needs Xor even before you're at the
point of care, go to room one O 2 because they just got out of
bed and they could fall and you're going to avoid a fall,
right? Those are the type of things
that are super important or you know, we're talking to an ISNAP
(32:08):
and they're like what we do thisrisk assessment.
But if you can just help us write the individual care plan,
you'll give every nurse 20 minutes back and we're not going
to write it and and file it. We're going to let them review
it. But the point is, is if we can
give every nurse 20 minutes per admit back so that they can now
have FaceTime with a patient, that's crazy valuable to them,
(32:28):
right? And, and our system would write
that ICP in literally 15 secondswhere it takes the nurse 20
minutes. So that's the kind of stuff that
fills me because I want to give those 20 minutes back to the
nurse, be able to sit in front of it, another resident, another
patient, So that that's really what my mission is.
And I think that's a really important point that you made
(32:48):
too, about staffing and, you know, the level of care being on
par with the level of staffing sometimes.
And that being, for lack of a better word, an excuse that a
lot of facilities will use rightwhen, when care is subpar,
they'll say, well, we don't haveenough staff.
Well, that's going to continue to be the case.
So the only thing you can scale is technology at this point to
(33:10):
help supplement that. And I think this is coming in at
the right time. My last question for you that
you kind of answered it already,but maybe maybe there's a little
bit more to it. How do you design A platform
that feels both scalable and human at the same time?
You know, it's got to be conversational.
I mean, that's the one thing that the natural language
(33:30):
processing in the yellow alarms have done, right?
And the only thing we use them for is that conversational
ability, right? You got to be able to just talk
to it in your tone. It's got to be persona based.
So that again, if it's ACNA thatwants to talk to it in
Ukrainian, talks to it in Ukrainian, it talks to them
right back that way, right? If it's a physician talking to
(33:51):
them and talks to them at their level in their language, it's
got to feel like you're talking to appear in whatever level
you're talking to the mat, or else they're going to just think
they're talking to a machine, right?
And whether that's text, like you're texting in a question and
answering back that way or they're speaking to it, it's got
to talk to them in the modality they want to engage as well.
(34:14):
Because some people want to talk, some people don't.
They just want to quickly text it quick question and get the
answer back right. So it it's got to have
multimodal engagement in their persona.
I think it's really, really important and it can't lie.
I think I'd rather hear. I don't have the answer to that.
(34:36):
If you want, I can escalate for you, right?
Then it makes something up and they find out it lied to them.
Because you do that once, a clinician never trusts you
again. Yeah, I think that's the
scariest piece of tech right now, like you were saying about
hallucinations. So awesome.
Well, Ernie, thank you so much for such a great conversation.
Where can our audience go to learn more about Care Ally or
(34:56):
connect with you? They can just go to
www.careally.ai is our website or shoot me an e-mail at Ernie
at Carly dot AI. Super easy.
I'm pretty approachable. I actually read all my e-mail
personally still and happy to answer any questions that
anybody wants to send. Awesome, awesome.
(35:17):
Thank you so much, Ernie. As we wrap up today's episode, I
want to thank Ernie Ionachi for sharing his journey and for
showing us what it looks like tobuild technology that truly
serves the people behind the systems.
From AI safeguards and staff relief to platform thinking and
value based care, Ernie's work reminds us that the future of
senior living isn't just about automation, it's about
(35:39):
orchestration. So if you want to connect with
Ernie or learn more about Care Ally, we've included his
LinkedIn as well as his e-mail and the Care Ally website in the
show notes. As always, we hope you found
this episode insightful and inspiring.
Don't forget to subscribe to ourpodcast on your favorite
platform. And stay tuned for more episodes
where we continue to explore theevolving world of senior care,
(36:01):
covering everything from care models and leadership strategies
to family support, technology and the future of aging.
Also, remember that From Lease to Lease isn't just an audio
experience. We're also a video podcast, so
you can subscribe to our YouTubeor Spotify channels to watch the
full episodes. I'm Jerry Vincey, CEO of CCR
growth. Thank you for joining us on From
Leads to Leases. Please like, subscribe and share
(36:24):
this episode with anyone who might find it useful.
Until next time, lead with strategy and with heart.
Chat with you again soon. Thanks, Ernie.
Thanks. Talk to you.
Thanks for listening to From Leads to Leases.
Are you ready to fill your roomsfaster and increase occupancy?
Visit ccrgrowth.com to learn about our Senior Growth
Innovation Suite, a proven system to generate highly
(36:46):
qualified tour ready leads, accelerate sales and reduce
acquisition costs. Let's connect and turn your
challenges into opportunities. See you next time.
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