“Coming from a data science and analytics background, that was shocking. “Communities are doing a good job of recording data on a resident,” but they’re not doing anything with it, Cohen said. After a resident moved in, that information was locked in paper forever and did not translate into care. “It kept coming back to everything - every problem - there was no system to do that.”Īt one community, for example, Cohen said, residents and staff members spent hours signing papers. Senior living communities, Cohen said, face problems related to resident care, staffing, transportation and occupancy, and families don’t have insight into what’s going on in a community. Together, the two began visiting senior living communities in the Bay area, where Schram had patients, speaking with staff, administrators and families. “There really wasn’t a tool out there,” Cohen said. Of the 26% of communities using technology, he said, it was legacy technology typically designed for an adjacent industry. Looking into the long-term care industry, Cohen discovered that 74% of senior living communities did everything on paper - medication, allergies, diagnoses, care plans, schedules. The two started talking, and Schram shared his idea, which he couldn’t quite execute. Cohen, a Silicon Valley IT expert, recently had left his role as an engineering director at Apple and was contemplating his next project. While pushing his son on a swing set, Schram met Cohen, founder and CEO of Mapsense, a data mapping company that was acquired by Apple. “The old system cracked, and the fault lines became clear, and people realized the old systems weren’t doing the trick,” he said. Sensing an opportunity with the demographic change led by the baby boomers on the horizon, Schram left his clinical job to explore his idea. Today, a new generation of operators who are digital natives are coming into the field, along with families demanding technology they already use in all other aspects of their lives.
The old systems of senior living were operating like 1950, or using older server-based software built for skilled nursing and bent into an afterthought for assisted living.”
“So much of what was frustrating them could be addressed through automation, technology - a modern, elegant platform. “I saw the burn, the churn,” Schram said.
“It was hard to get medication lists, code status, what’s going on with a resident,” Schram said, adding that paperwork was consuming the time and energy of frontline workers trying to keep residents from going to the emergency department. Schram, former medical director at California-based home care provider Landmark Health, said that with each home care visit to his patients - many living in senior living communities - his frustration grew at his inability to provide quality care because most records were on paper or “held hostage” within inaccessible, antiquated systems. The company has raised $17.6 million to date - including $2.6 million in initial seed money - and assembled a team of ex-operators from Apple, Google, Adobe and digital health companies.
The startup, which began using its platform to manage care in more than 60 senior living buildings within six months of the initial launch, recently raised a $15 million Series A, led by venture capital firms Matrix Partners and General Catalyst as well as industry veterans Columbia Pacific founder Dan Baty and Formation Capital founder Arnie Whitman. The two founded August Health in 2020 to try to address this gap, building a platform to “unblock” essential workers, guide them to best practices and build an underlying platform to “wire up the industry.”