I was skeptical about whether "Virtual Care" would be a good service for home care agencies, but I was proven wrong.  In summary, this is a great way to differentiate your agency and to add a high-margin service. 

Our guest is Stephan Habermeyer who is the CEO at Calico.Care. 

Here are some highlights of what we learned:

• Virtual Care provides a way to monitor the well-being of home care clients throughout the day and night.
• Some agencies are using this for the classic scenario where the family wants home care for their mom, but the mom is not ready. They combine the virtual care with visits (live and/or virtual) from a care coordinator (at a high charge) and usually within a short time, the client agrees to add caregiver hours.
• The margins are high. As an example, some agencies are charging $1/hour for virtual care ($720 a month) and the cost is generally $200. Other agencies are charging $1,000/month or more.
• Another way that agencies are deploying the service is to add virtual care to a 30 or 40 hour a week client.
• The basic system comes with motion sensors and an Amazon Alexa. Plus the system comes with its own internet (no need to connect to wifi)
• Everything comes in a preconfigured kit and the devices are labeled, plus they walk the home care agency through it on facetime.  All they need to do is plug in two plugs and stick the sensors on the wall. Batteries will need to be replaced in around 2 years (but by that time, you'll have made $15,000.
• The family gets to monitor their own loved one with an app, but agencies are also providing a monitoring service by paying overnight caregivers an extra fee for monitoring.

Bottom line, this looks like a great way to add high-margin revenue and to differentiate your service from competitors.

To learn more about the solution, go to the website https://www.calico.care/ or email them at info@calico.care. 

Home Care Heroes and Day Service Stars is produced and sponsored by Ankota - If you provide services that enable older or disabled people to continue living at home , Ankota can provide you the software to successfully run your agency. Visit us at https://www.ankota.com. 

Please read below for a written transcript of this episode of the podcast:

I was skeptical about whether this virtual care thing would be a good fit for home care agencies but these guys really thought it through and the margins are incredible. Enjoy the podcast.

00:15

Welcome to the Home Care Heroes and Day Service Stars podcast. If you provide services to keep older or disabled people living at home, then this podcast is for you. Now, here's your host, Ken Accardi.

00:31

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the next installment of Home Care Heroes and Day Service Stars, the podcast. I'm really excited to be here. We have a great guest today. His name is Stephan Habermayer, and he is the CEO of a company called Calico Care. What they do is called virtual care and this is a new thing. And I guess a lot of home care agencies are adding it. So we're very, very excited. So first of all, welcome, Stephan. How are you today?

00:58

I'm well, thank you Ken for inviting me and for having me and talk a little bit about virtual care today. 

All right, fantastic. So let me start with something very simple. So I think I'm pronouncing your name right as Stefan, but is it Habermeyer or Habermeyer? 
It's Habermeyer. Habermeyer is the American version. Okay, so Stephan Habermeyer. Tell us about your accent. Where are you from originally? I'm originally from Munich, Germany. 

01:27

I came here 20 years ago, but didn't lose my accent. 

OK, that's great. And the company is called Calico.care. I like that. So the website is Calico.care. That's the whole thing, right? It's not like.com or anything? No, it's Calico.care. 

OK, I love that. Yeah, that's kind of what the cool kids do now with these new company names. Fantastic. All right, so let's start with just what is this virtual care? I mean, just describe what is virtual care.

01:58

Well, virtual care basically means that in contrast to in-person care, you take care or you monitor your seniors remotely with technology. So you use an Amazon Alexa to talk virtually, have a virtual meeting with a client or use

02:26

track activities of seniors at home. Or you use variable devices to get health insight into the well-being of seniors living at home. Okay, got it. So it sounds like there's a number of things here. So let me so there's kind of this motion sensing part, right? So you know, like in is that

02:49

know, like, is that like in different rooms of the house? So you know, like that they're like, you know, you know, when they're in the living room, you know, when they go in the kitchen, the bath, the bed, like, you know, is that how that works? Yeah, it's think of a home, you know, a, a home, a home protection system. Instead of, you know, protecting against burglary, you have sensors protecting seniors moving

03:19

in the home. So you basically know where they are, what they are doing, if they're sleeping, if they're moving, if there is a potential fall, if they're adhered to the medication. So you basically make sure that they are safe and well at home. Okay, got it. So great. So I guess, you know, so I know, like I could look and maybe even see like a timeline, I can see they were in the bedroom, they were in

03:47

they went to the bathroom, they went in the kitchen, you know, so I could kind of get a feeling for what's going on in their day and it's passive. So is this using cameras? We're using motion sensors. So we're not for privacy reasons, we are not recording anything, we are not taking video pictures and we use motion sensors who

04:17

are basically placed in throughout the home. And they detect activities or non activities. And we're not taking any video. Okay, got it. And then, so let's say that I'm the family member. So do I get like a mobile app and I can see or you know, it's like some mobile view, so I can kind of see my mom's activities. Yes, you see, like the caretaker, the family member.

04:44

has a gets a good picture with a timeline what happened during the day, you know, when the loved one got up, you know, when, when he or she dressed, you know, bathroom, left the bathroom in the kitchen, you know, in the living room, went outside. So you see the whole timeline over the entire day. And you see things like, I mean, we are looking at lifestyle changes.

05:14

you know, do they wander at night? Do they sleep well? Do they sleep enough? And we add information like the tracking information from the motion sensors, plus the variable information about the sleep quality. And we overlay that and analyze this data and provide this data to the family member as much as to the caretaker. Okay, no, that's great. And, right. And then...

05:43

It sounds like, for example, with the sleep, is that something with an Apple watch and the sleep cycle app or something like that? How is the sleep part dealt with? Yeah, so we basically take the data from the variable, be it a Fitbit, an Apple watch and import that data.

06:09

We are a interface from the Apple world or Fitbit world and import duration of sleep and the sleep phases and analyze this data. Actually that data, the analytics side already comes from the Fitbit and Apple side and we just imported and displayed. Okay, got it.

06:32

And, um, but it sounds like it's, you know, there's components and like, cause I was looking at your website and it talks about like the home care kit. Right. So you get the kit, I guess that you need. And so like in my, in my mom's case, my mom, um, you know, she might not be. Like, uh, a Fitbit person or something, you know, she might not want that aspect of it, but like, I guess you could, you could have, you know, whatever the components are, right, you know, so you could have the motion sensing. There's definitely the app for the, uh, home care agency and for the family.

07:02

and then you also mentioned that is that like an Alexa that their loved one and like the touch with them as well? any other Alexa Echo device. version

07:32

HIPAA compatible, meaning no personal data is leaving the room, so to say, and it's HIPAA compliant. And it's also for us as a provider of virtual care solutions, we are able to scale and build this for an agency for hundreds of clients. So you have a central dashboard

08:01

and we can basically roll out those Alexa devices and configure them with skills. And skills are very powerful tools to entertain the senior, to remind the senior for certain things, take your medication, or today we have a survey, would you like to answer this survey? So we did different skills and we can load the skills centrally for the agency.

08:28

so that that certain workflow can be automated. For example, a marketing satisfaction survey, which normally has been done over the phone, can be provided by Alexa. And Alexa is asking the client how satisfied he is or she is with the service of the agency.

08:50

Okay, got it. And then like you said, it's like a professional version of the Alexa, like, so let's say that mom wants to play music with the Alexa or like play a game. Is that something they could do or is it, they can't do that because it's special. They can do that too. They, they probably don't have the full set of the consumer Alexa, but they have a wide range of, of features like to watch TV, play a game, you know, Alexa is reading a book.

09:19

you know, things like that, or you can play games. And yeah, so it's, it's pretty, it's pretty powerful. And it also can be enhanced by skills, which you as an agency, you can provide to do certain things. For example, if the weather is nice out there outside, and you see that the client, the senior is not very active. Alexa could chime in and say, it's nice out there.

09:48

how about you go out in the garden and walk a little bit? Right. Okay. Yeah, that's okay. So I'm getting the picture. It sounds like there's so much to it. I mean, that's really, really great. But it also sounds like it's pretty simple. Okay. Well, thanks for describing that. I guess let's take a step back. So what inspired you to want to do this and provide the solution? Yeah. I mean, I had a very personal situation with my mom.

10:18

My aging mom, who my late mom, I have to say, she, like every other, you know, mother wants to age at home. I mean, this is, I think the big goal for most of us to age at home and don't go into assisted living. However, she developed Alzheimer's and she...

10:45

we were not able to keep her safe home 24-7, and we had to move her into assisted living. And then during COVID, December 2021, she broke her hip, and even so, she was in the assisted living. They didn't find her in the bathroom for hours, and she was bleeding a lot, and she did not survive the hip operation.

11:13

So for us kids, this was very, very frustrating because we kind of deprived her living at home and taking away the independence. And then here she was in assisted living and she died because nobody could care 24-7. Right. And even like, I mean, you would think even in assisted living, you know, there's got to be somebody on top of these situations all the time. So, I mean, so first of all, I'm very sorry to hear that situation, but thank you for sharing that.

11:43

Okay, so

12:09

virtual and traditional care and that you work with home care agencies. So tell us about like how does that work and I guess you know and where we'll go from there is you know how do we you know and how does it benefit the home care agency because you know I know that there's a lot of home care agencies that are trying to adopt this now but let's just start with you know kind of how do you work with the home care agency so they can have the virtual care plus their hands-on caregivers in the home.

12:39

We have a real partnership with home care agencies, so we cannot do without them. And what we offer is a incremental new revenue stream for them to, to basically do two things. One, onboard more seniors, A and B, doing this with the existing personnel. And that sounds pretty awesome, but

13:07

does that work? And what is a typical use case? I guess you're asking me. So a typically use case is a let's say a baby boomer who thinks he or she doesn't need any help, but the kids think they need some help. So they're kind of they're kind of reluctant with taking on in-person care. And this is where we come in.

13:34

So a care agency can come in and say, what about if we start with virtual care? When we have weekly check-ins, virtual check-ins. So what you do, you place those sensors, you have an Alexa and you see what's going on. You have a fault prevention system. You prevent all the bad things.

14:02

and you take care that everybody is at ease and the senior at home is still independent and we have maybe once a week a virtual or in-person check-in and this has many advantages. One, it's a soft touch, you know, you're not barging in with in-person care and maybe you don't even have

14:27

the capacity to come in for a couple of hours because that's not really interesting. So you come in with a soft touch, you get the senior gets used to your agency and to your people and then over time they ramp up their hours. Yeah, for sure. I've spoken to a lot of agency owners who have said, you know, that they've been in that meeting, they're brought in, like the daughter has flown into town, they're

14:57

and the mom is not making eye contact and this kind of thing. And then like the, you know, they do their presentation, but then the daughter walks out with them and says, we know mom needs care, but she doesn't want it. And that's, you know, that's the problem. I mean, I, I, if it were me, you know, like I'm totally me, I would just say, you know, start sending caregivers. But what you're saying is that this is a way of bridging that, right? So you could say, okay, put the virtual care in the house now and what we can do is,

15:25

Like in our home care agency, we have care coordinators and I could have a care coordinator who is checking in with you on a weekly basis. So maybe one week they stop in the home, the second week they talk to you on the Alexa, something like that. So what if we do that where you won't have caregivers yet but you'll have a relationship, you'll have somebody in the community connected to us and that kind of thing. Okay, so that's kind of a way of breaking the ice.

15:55

and they get in and they get the virtual care to start. But then I guess the agency can, like they could charge for those care coordinator visits, right? And so they could charge a price for the service. So they have the virtual care and then they have a price for the kind of the check-ins from the care coordinators. Okay, I get that. All right, and how about like another, any other kind of scenarios that

16:23

home care agencies are. I mean, the other end of the spectrum is a client who is looking for 24-7 coverage. So they have already maybe 20, 30, 40 in-person hours, but they are looking for a around the clock at night solution. And this can be done with a virtual solution where during the day shifts you have in-person care and at night

16:53

you have the virtual protection umbrella for the night and you have in the agency somebody, I assume there are many agencies who have night shift workers who are there and they get a little bit of a one or $2 per hour more salary and they take care via the central hub of the solution, of the virtual care solution.

17:22

and can react to certain irregularities like falls, wandering, leaving the home, stuff like that. Okay, got it. Okay, so here, yeah, so I mean, you know, the jump from, let's say it is 40 hours a week of care and in, you know, like looking, obviously prices are different around the country, but maybe that's like, you know, for 40 hours a week, that might be $1,400 a week.

17:51

And that would, I guess, whatever that is. So call it around the south of 6,000 for the month and that kind of thing. But then of course, if they go from 40 hours of care to around the clock care, that's like going from 6,000 a month to 18,000 a month and not so many people are gonna be able to afford that. So what you're saying is that you can kind of get there part of the way by having

18:19

the virtual care, so they have the motion sensing. And then, yeah, and then probably the objection that I was thinking agencies would have is like, well, how do we monitor that, right? So first of all, so I guess one thing is the family has access to it, but then the second thing is, every agency has overnight caregivers that are supposed to be awake providing care, and you can say, okay, you're the virtual care person, so you have to kind of just have the app here, and then you're monitoring, and then if you see that

18:48

one of our seniors left the home in the middle of the night or any of those kinds of situations, then you could react and then the agency can have a protocol for how they take care of that. Okay, got it. So first of all, did I get that pretty much right? I think so. Yeah. I mean, one thing to add is maybe an example of how it works money-wise. I mean, great.

19:15

I mean, think about it, if you charge $30 per care hour, and you charge $1, $1.50 for a virtual care hour, this is exponentially.

19:33

more affordable than to $1, $1.50. So that is a real deal for the client because he has an option, he doesn't get in-person care obviously but he gets a lot of monitoring service making sure that the client is safe and for the agency if you provide

20:01

let's say at a $1.40 this service, this is an additional $1,000 per month incremental sales. And if you deduct our service, our kit, which is 200, you have a margin, a raw margin of $800, which is pretty significant. Yeah. Well, you know, we've all seen like the Homecare Pulse

20:30

you know, most of our home care agencies sadly are, you know, their profit margins are usually single digits in most of what we see across the thousands of agencies that take that survey. So, you know, and obviously there's gross margins. So the caregiver salaries are usually 55, you know, percentage of the cost. But then when you have the office overhead, that comes down. But yeah, so it sounds like here with the virtual care, it sounds like the typical home care kit is 200 a month.

20:59

And, but then, uh, I just kind of did the math. So if I, you know, if I was charging like a dollar, um, you know, like a dollar an hour for virtual care, then that's like a caught, like, uh, you know, like a revenue income from the client for around 600, you know, a little over 600, and then like, I think you said the dollar 60 or something like that, then it's like a thousand dollars of revenue for the virtual care and they're paying around 200 for the kit and, uh,

21:27

Yeah. So that margin is, yeah, I can't imagine any home care agencies that would not like to have, um, you know, an 80% margin. And, you know, to start with, I mean, they, they still have the overhead and they have to, um, you know, do some things. And like you said, I think you said that the overnight caregiver that's monitoring the system might like, instead of getting their, let's say 15 an hour for, for doing their shift, maybe they're getting 17 an hour because, you know, they're monitoring. And, uh,

21:57

Okay, no, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, so the money, I mean, really does seem to make a lot of sense, but what I like and what I think the agencies will really like is that they could, again, they could get those clients sooner, right? So it's like, all right, mom's not ready for care, but we have a solution for you. And that's like a differentiator. So a big thing in every home care agency is, once people speak to three or four agencies, they all sound the same, right? Oh, it's like, oh yeah, we take care of mom, we help her with nutrition, we help her with hygiene.

22:26

But if you say, well, we have something, we have virtual care, so even when the caregiver is not in the house, you have visibility, we have visibility, what's going on? So there's a differentiator right there, which makes their agency better. And then the margin sounds like really, really good, right? And I think the price sounds really good too. I mean, if you're paying $30 an hour for care and you're paying a dollar, $1.50 for the virtual care, it sounds like the money's there across the board.

22:54

All right. Yeah.

23:21

Yeah, that is a very good question. And we are well aware that, you know, home care worker are not IT specialists. So it has to be a solution which is totally user friendly and comes as a kit pre-assembled and it's plug and play. So think of the solution as a hardware kit which comes pre-assembled including

23:47

the Wi-Fi and the internet. You don't have to know any Wi-Fi password of your client. It comes with a dedicated router. You just have to plug in the hubs, the Alexa and the other hub have to place the sensors. The sensors are pre-labeled where they have to be, where they go. And that's it.

24:17

service installation service, we basically go with the staff through the process that they see what's coming and that they are not unprepared and after a few installs it's really very easy. And also we provide FaceTime so if somebody has a problem for whatever reason they can call us, we set up a FaceTime and we

24:46

guide them through the process. But again, it's block and play. It should work out of the box and it should just work. Yeah, I was looking like so on the website, which again is calico.care. If you look, they have you have these pictures of what's called like the home care kit, right? And then you have and you explain what's in the kit and then it looks like it comes in like a nicely packaged thing. And then in there you have the Alexa and that plugs in and you have the internet.

25:15

So you're providing your own internet, like you don't even need their internet that just plugs in and then the sensors, I guess they don't have wires, right? So the sensors themselves, like you just stick it on the wall and then so I guess they have batteries. So like what happens if the batteries, how do they deal with that? So the batteries usually last around two years and

25:41

In the dashboard, you also see the status of the charging of each sensor. So if a sensor is going low on the battery, you get a notification that we have to exchange a battery. So again, it's like it's two years in and maybe I know like, well, we used to have the protocol in our family where

26:09

you know, when the light bulbs would go, we would like replace all the light bulbs. Now we have all these CFL light bulbs that last forever. So hopefully we don't have to change the light bulbs again, but it's almost like, you know, it's two years at this point, if you use what you said, you know, they're charging a thousand a month for care, they're making 800. And then, you know, then when, when the batteries go out, you know, maybe just somebody goes around, you know, once, and they just, you know, replace those batteries. And maybe when they're in the house, they just, you know,

26:36

place the battery and all the sensors in the house. So it's not, yeah. So, so yeah, I'm trying to think because, you know, like we work with home care, you know, home care software and agency managers and, you know, like I said, I mean, they, they're not the kind of people who are gonna, you know, feel like excited about, you know, kind of adding technology in somebody's home, but it sounds like you've made it, you really thought this through, you've made it really simple. They just get the kit, plug it in, stick the sensors on the wall.

27:03

and then they start getting the money and the care. And then you had like that really good, I was wondering, like, did they have to kind of hire overnight staff just for this, but they could make it as an incentive for the caregivers who are working overnight. So, yeah, I don't know. I thought I was gonna stump you on those things, but you got those really well covered. So congratulations on all of that.

27:30

OK, so I'm trying to think through. I have just a list of questions after I read your website. And let me just flip through and see if I missed any. Yeah, I mean, I think they're really going to like the margins. So yeah, perfect. And yeah, and I guess one thing, I guess when you first said that it does health monitoring as well, so I would just the audience of.

27:58

kind of the home care heroes, day service stars, is mostly folks who provide non-medical care and your disability services or day care centers and that kind of thing. And some have medical models, but a lot of them are non-medical. So it sounds like you have ways that you could track things like vital signs, but if they're non-medical, they don't really have to, they don't have that medical skill to do this is the bottom line.

28:26

So we have two kids, we have a home care kit and we have a home health kit. So the home kit allows you to attach variables. And I think in any case, it's good to know what the activity level of a senior is. Are they getting out of bed? When are they up? How much do they walk? You know, what is the activity level? And

28:53

I think this is kind of what is their sleep quality. I think this is something to know for any senior. I think that is really good basic understanding of the wellbeing of a senior at home. But then for home health applications, we can cater to any population health, COPD, CHF, hypertension. So we can add a blood pressure monitor, a digital scale.

29:22

a blood oximeter device. So we can add this and then also Alexa is basically providing care instructions like, okay, we see that your weight went up, maybe reduce your diet, you know, take less salt intake, stuff like that, drink more, move more, you know, don't forget to take your medication.

29:50

And this is all stuff which normally the caretaker has to do, which Alexa takes over and streamlines the workflow for you. Okay. Yeah. So this is interesting. So I, you know, like, so virtual care, when I, you know, heard about you guys and we talked about doing the podcast, you know, like this virtual care was a new thing, but it also sounds like there's been a discipline around for a while called remote patient monitoring. And it sounds like you could do that stuff too, right? You could. So if somebody wanted to measure, like you said, if they

30:19

They could have an internet scale in their house. They could have an internet connected blood pressure cuff, pulse, oximeter, you know, those kinds of things. So, yeah, so that's kind of how they would, you know, deal with like more your home health agency, you know, that has their long-term, you know, frequent flyer chronic folks that they are dealing with is that, okay, so there's the home care version and the home health version, and that's amazing. But the home care guys, like, you know, again, they're gonna be a little scared of the medical stuff. So they don't have to worry about that.

30:49

too much, but I like the idea. So I guess at this point, we're kind of coming up to our time. Time flies when you're having fun. But yeah, so let me summarize. I mean, so virtual care, lots of home care agencies are doing this now because it's a great service. It makes it like you could get clients earlier. You could provide 24 hour care at a nice margin for you, but not at 24 hour costs for the family.

31:19

You know the monitoring it could scale up to home health. It also has the Alexa which can you know, kind of talk to the person You know remind them of various things in their day. I mean, it sounds like a really really great solution and You know and you said that it's like they're paying around 200 a month for the client and that you know They could be charging, you know a thousand a month and then and then from there, you know I kind of like the idea of you know, if they have this service and then the check-ins from their care coordinator then

31:48

then the person starts getting more comfortable with the home care agency. They like the care coordinator, and then they can find in the care coordinator that they might like some caregiving as well. So I guess, so I could kind of see this as, I don't wanna say the Trojan horse, but I mean, it kind of gets them started in a case where they probably wouldn't have taken the case because they're like, we're thinking like maybe we can start mom with five hours and the agency doesn't want five hours because they can't staff that.

32:16

So they go with the virtual care, they go with the check-ins and then they add home care. So I think you've come up with something pretty special. So Stephan Habermeyer, the American pronunciation. So that's it and CalicoCare. And I think from there, I guess just the last question is could you remind everybody how they could come and learn more about Calico.Care? I know we said the website is calico.care.

32:43

But how else can they learn about you or how can they get in touch and learn more about the virtual care? Yeah, they can email us at info@calico.care or visit our website. We can arrange for a meeting to demo the application live, show you around and talk a little bit about the business model because I think the technology is one thing. The other thing and the important thing

33:13

What can you do with the current organization to scale your business, to make more money at a healthier margin without adding one more staff? All right, I love it. Okay, so one more time. So it's calico.care or email to info@calico.care. And thank you very much, Stephan Habermeyer for coming on the Home Care Heroes and Day Service Stars podcast.

33:42

Thank you, Ken, and looking forward to meet many of your listeners. Thanks. Thank you.

33:51

Thanks for joining us today on the Home Care Heroes and Days Service Stars podcast, produced by Ankota. You can listen to back episodes by visiting 4HomeCareHeroes.com That's the number 4, then the words, HomeCareHeroes.com(Home Care Heroes and Day Service Stars Podcast (ankota.com)).