Claudia von Boeselager [00:00:50]:
Shauna, welcome to the Longevity and Lifestyle Podcast. So excited to have you with us today. So thank you for coming on.

Shauna Sweeney [00:00:56]:
Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to dig in and talk about so much of what we're doing at Tender Care.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:01:02]:
As I mentioned briefly, this is a topic so close to my heart with my mother with dementia, as my audience knows, and being far away. Right. I mainly live in London, back and forth to Florida. It's so challenging and I think the role of a caregiver is so understood, the support that's needed. So I really want to dig into everything. But before we do that, Shauna, can you share a little bit more about your background, your story and what led you to founding Tender Care?

Shauna Sweeney [00:01:26]:
I'd be happy to. I was called to this journey not by choice. This started as many of us who work in this industry do, with my own family story, which was that about 13 years ago I was working in big tech. I was over at Facebook at the time when we got the call. And this is from my dad who raised me as a single parent. He had been diagnosed by his neurologist with early onset Alzheimer's. I at the time was living 3,000 miles away. I had a very large job with a lot of responsibilities in a very fast paced world over at Facebook.

Shauna Sweeney [00:02:04]:
And because of the unique family structure, which was that my dad raised me as a single parent. It was really me and him against this illness that I knew very little about. And it was a very startling moment in time for both of us trying to understand what the modern experience is like of living with a chronic illness like this and really looking to work together now to help support my dad through this journey, make sure that we were honoring his wishes. There was a lot of unknowns, There was a lack of education in this. And what I very quickly realized was that tech did not play a very big role in the experience of so many families like mine. It was mainly out of places like hospitals or, you know, in physician offices and social workers workers. But that not a lot of tooling had been built for this experience. I was really just trying to solve this for my own family at the time.

Shauna Sweeney [00:03:01]:
So this was really me hacking together a lot of different tools. Technology, your own itch.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:03:05]:
Always if you understand the pain, it's like, how do I solve this for me? And I'm sure somebody else out there needs this too.

Shauna Sweeney [00:03:11]:
Yeah, exactly. And so I started hacking together a lot of things and I realized this could be so much better, this could be so much better for other families. And maybe this was an opportunity for us to take our pain and our hardship and a lot of the lessons learned and my particular background in technology to go out and build Tender Care. And that's really the inspiring engine behind this platform. And the idea of Tender Care is a one stop shop to get educated, empowered and to really lighten the burden of a lot of the main responsibilities that a family caregiver will find themselves confronted with along this path. So to make this really truly simple as much as possible. There's big parts of this journey that are not simple and that's really more on the emotional territory. But at least when it comes to the coordination, when it comes to the administration and the organizational effort, there would be a platform for anyone like me out there to be able to do this work.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:04:12]:
So amazing. And I really congratulate you. I'm sure you get this a lot too. So a lot of people reach out to me. Oh, I think my mother, I think my father might be having early stages of dementia. You know, they know I've been on this journey. They know I've gone down many a rabbit hole in this space. I think that there's a lot of people that don't understand the, the scenario around, like what it is like to live through something like this.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:04:36]:
Can you expand for my audience just to really help people understand the need to have support, why that's so important, what it is really like to experience it. Maybe you could share your experience of this and I'm happy then to share also.

Shauna Sweeney [00:04:50]:
Oh yes, and I absolutely want to hear your experience too. I think so much of this requires just sharing and norming of this. This is not a singular experience, although it feels that way. There are 54 million family caregivers in the US alone. We're not often talking to one another. We feel like this is a very personal and isolating moment for our family when it could be anything. But I do think kind of what you touched on there around having a suspicion that there might be something going on that is a. A very common and familiar experience from.

Shauna Sweeney [00:05:26]:
For so many of us. I certainly had that with my dad. My dad was a ship captain. And the stakes are really high. If you are not in charge of your full faculties while captaining a ship, this is really not a good situation.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:05:41]:
You're in charge of other people's lives as well. Right. So it's above and beyond responsibility.

Shauna Sweeney [00:05:45]:
Yeah, well, exactly. And so my biggest nightmare was, oh, man, if, you know, we don't get to this in time. My dad's stories were starting to wind. He wasn't finishing jokes that he normally would have known in a heartbeat. He was taking longer to pay some bills. We had to sit down and have that very awkward conversation about going in and having a conversation with his doctor. Not easy to do. So I don't, I don't sort of diminish how hard this is for any family to really sit down and address.

Shauna Sweeney [00:06:21]:
We did have that conversation with, you know, within my own family, my dad had his own conversation with his neurologist. And that's really what set off the set of chart, like tests that led to the diagnosis. This is not easy. This is a hard pill to swallow, but a necessary one, especially when you have a parent like I did, who's in charge of massive tonnage and machinery. But in terms of just the actual experience of becoming a family caregiver, it's not something that I would wish on anyone. I think just in general, our human instinct is to want the ones we love to be well and to be healthy and to live forever. And the idea of being confronted with a chronic illness, or especially like in our case, Alzheimer's, you know, that has no cure. This is not the conclusion that we are hoping for our own families.

Shauna Sweeney [00:07:17]:
And so this was really difficult in the beginning for me and my family. My dad did not take it well, if I'm going to be totally honest there.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:07:26]:
Anyone would, though, right?

Shauna Sweeney [00:07:27]:
I don't think I would. Right. I don't think I would. And I think there's a certain. There's a period of processing this. And we had to deal with a lot of anger in the beginning and resentment and feeling like maybe the doctors had misdiagnosed him and happy to kind of be there for my dad through that. And then me on my side feeling very powerless as an adult child, wanting to make this pain go away or remove it for my dad, at the same time wanting to make this pain go away for me, realizing the role that I was going to need to step into as his primary caregiver. And so generally that beginning part was really about just processing that this was our new normal and what this is going to mean for us, which does not happen overnight.

Shauna Sweeney [00:08:14]:
And so my one advice to anyone who happens to be at the early stages, this going through this is to have patience and empathy for yourself in this. You, it's not going to be clear cut. You are probably not going to go into this willingly and that's okay. That's a very normal part of the experience.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:08:35]:
Thank you for sharing that from my journey. And also like my direct family, I think it's so important to realize the burden on the actual caregiver versus the patient themselves. It's terrible to see them suffering and fade away with Alzheimer's dementia. At some point they don't really, or at least our understanding is that they don't really fully comprehend what's going on. So it's almost less of a burden to them at a given point than to the family around them. I remember we had a specialist come to the house and explain to us and know in certain terms that actually more caregivers tend to die if they don't have the proper support before the actual patient does because of the burden. And obviously it depends on the age, it depends on the infrastructure of support they have around them. But it's such a difficult burden and task for some people and they try to take it on solely and that's not the way forward.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:09:30]:
And I think having that network, having that support, having the ability to talk about it and My father's now 86 years old. My mother had her very bad, bad fall in January 2020. He was 81. She had a procedure. She had then thrombosis in both legs, which went to her lungs, which caused her blood oxygen levels to drop, which made her collapse, open the back of her head. And my father thankfully was in the next room but found his wife unconscious, not breathing. Called 911 and the 911 operator explained to do CPR which essentially kept her alive until they, they came. But looking back, we should have.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:10:04]:
Well, we picked it up, but I think we were in denial that she was writing more notes, writing things down, forgetting things. But we're like, oh, it's normal we're all busy and brushing them away, knowing now what I know with protocols. Like, I don't know if you're familiar with the work of Dr. Dale Bredesen, but there are protocols that are shown to reverse cognitive decline if caught on time because he's identified 38 underlying drivers. But I can't emphasize enough the emotional burden, the logistical burden, the, you know, on so many levels, the struggles for the actual caregiver, the family. And then you have on top of that, the pain of seeing your loved one, mother, father, whoever it might be, fading away. And so it's really just naming it, I think, recognizing it and looking for support and then trying to automate and optimize what can be done. Therefore, I'd love you to share a little bit more about what you created with Tender Care and how it can help people on that journey or people who are already in that journey but feeling more and more overwhelmed because they're trying to manage their own life, plus, you know, support other loved ones.

Shauna Sweeney [00:11:09]:
Well, thank you for sharing. I can't imagine as a daughter what that must have been like to hear that news and not be there on site. Sometimes I find it's almost worse when you're not there because there's this feeling of powerlessness, you know, you're hearing after the fact that when something has happened. I can't tell you how many times I've had to jump on a plane across country to find my way to the error. Yep. I'm so mad at myself the whole time. Even though, I mean, when you actually pick that apart, that's crazy. But I'm so mad at myself that I wasn't there for the moment in time before there was some, you know, a fall or an emergency for Tender Care.

Shauna Sweeney [00:11:50]:
You know, the main premise is that so much of a lot of those, the mental health toll and a lot of the sort of burden that you talk, it comes from this intense cognitive load of taking on the administration, taking on the responsibility, the day to day responsibilities of another adult. Whether this is booking doctor's appointments, refilling prescriptions, this is ensuring that all of the legal documentation is in order, the health insurance is paid, the policy isn't paid on time. These are things that have very little to do with your actual relationship with the person that you're caring for, and more to do with managing through different institutions and ensuring that everything is moving fairly smoothly. What this often leads to is just an incredible amount of time spent on form filling and on transportation. We've all been there picking up the medications back and forth, or realizing when you get to the pharmacy that it actually hasn't been filled yet. And so now you got to go home and you got to wait until, you know, the new prescription is available, available. And all of this takes time. And so what tender care promises a family caregiver is time back.

Shauna Sweeney [00:13:09]:
It's taking a lot of that coordination and administration burden. For instance, monitoring prescription storing, all of the legal documentation, the health care insurance numbers, everything that you're asked for over and over again in one simple place with alerts and with easy to, like, essentially easy to recall places for you to go in the event of, for instance, doctor's visit or an emergency room visit, as opposed to the time and the urgency that is required to scramble for this information when it's locked in the file cabinet somewhere or whether it's in an email and you don't remember the name of the email. You know, this is the last thing.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:13:53]:
That I've been there, done. That's why I know all of these.

Shauna Sweeney [00:13:56]:
It's terrible. Yeah. And so we do things we really, we really think about how do we honor a family caregiver's time and give it back to them either to spend more time doing the things that they love with the person they care for, or quite frankly, giving back time in their own life. We believe pretty firmly that a lot of the time spent on caregiving is spent on the wrong things. It's spent on filling out the exact same form 20 different times right at the physician's office, or it's spent hunting down what prescriptions are active and which are like, which are expired. Tender care is a platform within seconds. We look to accomplish a lot of that work and then take it off of a family caregiver's plate. So set auto alerts, set reminders, triggers when something is happening that a caregiver needs to pay attention to, and then otherwise be able to get back into the things that they want to do with their own life.

Shauna Sweeney [00:14:57]:
So that's really our goal.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:14:59]:
I'm just laughing because you're like, you know, filling out the forms and having to do this and like that, that amount of time, the administrative burden that comes with it, because it's not just taking on someone else's life, but it's someone whose health is deteriorating. So the numbers of visits and the prescriptions and all these different things that are needed, so repetitive. You want to be spending that quality time that you have actually having a quality relationship and enjoying things versus just doing all this admin Stuff. So being able take that out and also the reminders, I think is gold. And in my, you know, family dynamic, it's my father, my sister and I, so we're three people. Like, you can have that automated because things get lost in communication, like all these other dynamics and people that come into something like this, to be able to centralize that, I think is so powerful. So, yeah, that's so well thought through. And I was looking at some of the statistics, and by 2034, adults age 65 + will actually outnumbered children under 18, which really intensifies the demand for caregivers.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:15:59]:
Right. You've said that we're facing a caregiving crisis in the US and not enough caregivers for a rapidly aging population. I'm curious to see how you see the role of AI bridging that gap without losing the human connection approach. Where do you see the opportunity there?

Shauna Sweeney [00:16:15]:
You know, this chapter of life is so well positioned, I think, for a technology like generative AI. I feel so grateful to be building and innovating in this moment in time in which all of these universal problems, these are not new, right? How we handle our old, how we handle our sick inside of a family, these are things that make us human. We've been doing these for, you know, these practices for thousands of years. But what is new is the application of generative AI. And what is so exciting about this moment in time is that there is this whole body of work we are doing that's often an invisible. It's unpaid. Right now, about $600 billion worth of unpaid hours are spent by families who are providing this care to one another, which is incredible when you think about it. That's the same as the global revenue for Amazon.

Shauna Sweeney [00:17:11]:
And so this is not a body of work. If you talk to families, they're just so excited to go do this is actually really stressful, and it takes up a lot of time, and they prefer, if they could, to be using that time towards other things. And so in this moment in which we are really exploring and innovating and tinkering with, you know, what does this look like to have this agentic workforce where you have these jobs that can now be offloaded and done by an agent, as opposed to another human or another family member in our case, that's actually a really big positive for family caregiving. So it's a really exciting moment. As opposed to taking away jobs, for instance, which is a big conversation, I think, in other industries. When you think about the application of AI here, it's actually A tremendous benefit. There is so much that comes from these complex, relatively complex, but repetitive tasks. You know, sending an email to a bank to find out where and what form to fill out to get durable power of attorney, filling that form out, resubmitting it, following up to make sure that that has now been implemented.

Shauna Sweeney [00:18:27]:
These are things that take up a lot of time but are actually perfect candidates for AI to be able to take over on our behalf. That's really the role that I see, especially at Tender Care, us leaning into, as opposed to replacing, for instance, human connection, human relationships. It's more a matter of taking the admin burden out of the way and then leaving more room to drop in and then further connect. Whether it's with our family, with a physician, those remain. There's so much to be optimized before we start replacing our human relationships. If anything, what I find is that there's too many things in the way of us being able to have those connections in this moment in time. And that's what we're really focused on at Tender Care.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:19:13]:
I love that. I think some. Everyone processes sorrow or sadness differently and I think some go into that, like, I have to organize everything and they're not able to be present. Right. Because they're in that administrative burden and trying to figure everything out. Also, like, I know from a personal journey, like, you don't even know what you don't know, so you're kind of blindly out there trying to figure it out. So in order to have a tool to say, hey, reach out to the banks or you maybe you need to clear some legal things before the, you know, dementia or kicks in so that they can't actually, yeah, give the powers of attorney over. So there's.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:19:49]:
There's a lot of components where it'd be so helpful to have that sort of coach along the process and then actually alleviate some of the burden of the administrative parts as well. I want to touch on another point from. From looking at the numbers, I was just, you know, mind blown in terms of 24.1 million family caregivers support older adults in 2022, up from 18.2 in 2011. Numbers are just growing exponentially and many assisting with dementia or chronic conditions. There's 63% of caregivers are reporting symptoms of depression, yet only 26% use mental health services. So I think that that's an unspoken thing of that depression. My father sadly suffers with depression as well, also in part because he has cancer. But seeing his loved one of 50 years together fading away often Caregivers put themselves last and we know from the airplane you have to put your oxygen mask on first.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:20:38]:
I'd be curious, what is your personal wellness protocol that you use when you're stretched thin or in general in your day to day? And what would you recommend for caregivers listening for wellness protocols like how can they take care of themselves? What is must haves in your toolbox for caregivers?

Shauna Sweeney [00:20:55]:
You know, it's so interesting. We we de identify ourselves the minute that someone is sick. There's a certain psychological profile to a caregiver. I found this over and over again. Someone in the family steps up, you know who it is in your family who immediately throws themselves into helping and trying to solve this and fix this, which is an incredibly important thing and an important role in a family. The problem to your point is that they immediately become sort of de identified, less important. Their own needs, their own wellness gets pushed to the very bottom of the list. And now if you're talking about a chronic illness, you can be talking about years.

Shauna Sweeney [00:21:35]:
In my case, I'm 13 years in with my dad. Very happy to be on this journey, but that's a long time to be a primary family caregiver. And so I would say that the lessons I'm sharing today are not ones that I had necessarily when I first started. I really burnt myself in the very beginning. I thought if I could just get to the end of the list somehow everything was going to be fixed. Took me a long time to realize that actually this is not like other areas of our life in which if you just put in a little extra effort, suddenly the problem's going to go away. There will just be another day with more work and more responsibility the next day. And so you're going to burn yourself out if you don't take the long view you of this role.

Shauna Sweeney [00:22:20]:
You just will. For my own personal wellness, I, you know, I think it's less about, it's less about finding some mythical balance, I'm not sure it exists in our modern world, and more about recognizing the signs in myself that I really need a break. So being okay with the fact that, you know, there's certain days where I, I like to check in with my dad every night. There are certain days where I'm really tired. We have three kids in the house. We've got one, we're expecting. Congratulations, Ashley. Thank you.

Shauna Sweeney [00:22:54]:
Right now. You know, sometimes I don't have it in me to do the call that I normally like to do with my dad giving myself permission that it's okay for me to take a day or two off, manage or just acknowledge the guilt that I feel in that, in choosing myself, and be okay with this being part of the process. So much of this is balancing our own guilt and shame and expectations on ourself. And you'll know it when you see it, and it'll come in a million different ways. Where there's a question of do you prioritize yourself? Do you prioritize someone that you're caring for and being very attuned to where it's really important to choose yourself. That's, that's a really important muscle to develop. The second is really just to kind of create an ongoing space for yourself. So for me, on Saturdays I like to take 30 minutes, whether it's for a walk, whether it's to just go grab a sandwich by myself, sit in my car where no one can find me.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:23:55]:
Just me. Exactly.

Shauna Sweeney [00:23:57]:
Just me. And knowing that's on the calendar somehow gives me more permission to take that time than I would have if I hadn't already created space for myself. So really making sure there's that time. Time. And then the third. We don't talk about this enough, but I have really prioritized therapy. This was an important part of my journey as a caregiver, was having space to process some of the more complicated emotions that come along with this. You don't solve everything every week and you, you know, there might be, there might be moments in time where you feel better or worse.

Shauna Sweeney [00:24:34]:
But even just investing in yourself and having that space to hold for the harder or trickier parts of this huge boost in mental health, I can't recommend it enough. It's one of the first things that I recommend any from my own personal network who come to me on the heels of a diagnosis like spend some time seeing if you, you know, if it makes sense in your world to, if you're not already get therapy. It's a really important piece of this.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:25:03]:
Thank you for sharing that so openly as well. I think not enough people talk about it and mental health is such an important foundation that many people don't deal with. And then there's so many horrible consequences off the back of it. Also with physical health, right, people decouple the physical health and mental health, but they're all very closely related. And I can echo that with the self compassion I kind of feel particularly women are much about as long as everyone else is okay, you know, I come last. But how are you supposed to support, especially if you've got kids you're in that sort of sandwich position, take care of the, the, the parent and take care of the children and then somewhere you're in, in the mix as well. So having that self compassion, right? I mean it's tough having that self compassion and having that time in the week. I'd almost, you know, if possible recommend for you to have more than just 30 minutes on a Saturday if you can.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:25:51]:
I know it's tough, but you know, a few times during the week, you know, just having that, that time. And then also what you were saying with the, the therapist. And I only noticed a few times how much I had become organizing. How do I fix, how do I solve, what are the supplements, what are the modalities? You know, I get to speak to world leading pioneers in different modalities around longevity medicine and functional medicine. And I know so many things could be absolutely amazing. And it was very sad because I only discovered Dr. Delbredesen and his work and we had my mother on the protocols. But as I'm sure you're familiar, there's a thing called a MOCA score, the Montreal Cognitive Assessment Score.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:26:29]:
Perfect cognition is 30 and then it decreases over time. And Dr. Dale Bredesen's clinical trials have shown that people with a moca score of 18 have even managed to go back up to 30, which is amazing. But my mother was already at an 11. And so Dale had a frank and kind conversation with me and he's like, you know, unfortunately the brain deteriorates to a certain level. It's very hard to get back. And I realized I was in denial for so long and I didn't give myself the space to mourn, you know, missing my mother. Yes, she's still here, but she's not how she used to be.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:26:59]:
And you know, being okay that like I actually miss her. And I can just recommend to people to really carve out that time to mourn and to know that yes, they're here, but like it is sad that they're not there for you or they're not the same relationship as before. And you know, some people might say I can't afford therapy or you know, I don't have time. But even journaling and writing things down with a pen, there is some magic in this pen, is, is really powerful and just to allow that grievance and, and ideally finding even a free support group, I think around the world there tends to be a lot of these as well where you just understand you're not alone. And you alluded to this at the beginning that people kind of feel like, oh, we shouldn't talk about it or it's shameful. It's not. This happens to a lot of people. And knowing that there is a community out there and people going through this too, I think is really helpful.

Shauna Sweeney [00:27:49]:
There's so many incredible communities. We were just talking to the head of community at Reddit around this very robust caregiving communities and forums that are out there. So. Absolutely. And these are totally free. We have a community on tender care as well that's free. We've got thousands of caregivers who are out there and walking this journey. In addition to that, though, it's really interesting.

Shauna Sweeney [00:28:11]:
I've been guinea pigging this on myself. Really, like leaning into experimenting with ChatGPT around sort of a therapeutic conversation around some of those that grieving that you were talking about. It's, you know, it definitely is not a replacement, but it's an interesting new tool to be able to use to really hold space and, you know, just reflect for yourself on how you're feeling about all of it. Because to your point, I mean, they call it the long goodbye. It's not easy. There's no closure. It's not the same as, you know, saying goodbye to a family member and then finding a way to process and move on with your life. You are living with a new normal.

Shauna Sweeney [00:28:53]:
I have found that Alzheimer's has been an incredible teacher for me because there was so much of me fighting it in the beginning, denying it, you know, doing my best, doing my best to try and combat this thing that has no cure right now, and then ultimately surrendering to the process that we have been a part of now for some time and coming out on the other side with a new relationship with my dad. It's certainly not the same as the one that we had, you know, when I was in college, for instance, but it's still very positive. And, you know, you mentioned sandwich caregiving. If anything, having toddlers has really taught me to embrace what it's like to have a relationship with my dad now, which is that you can be so deeply connected to someone who is not speaking in complex sentences. Right. And is not sitting there and doing a lot of the adult activities that you would do with others that you would expect to. But you're still having the time of your life. And I found there's so many opportunities for that if you can embrace this very new type of relationship with your loved one.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:30:02]:
Oh, I love that. But that was a real pivotal moment for me to a friend of mine who's also a neuroscientist. Her father sadly died of Parkinson's. She said to me, you know, at some point, you just have to accept them where they are. So away from that fixing and what can I do? And just be like, you know, let me make the most of those moments. And as you'll know. And people might know that, you know, with dementia, they'll sometimes come out with random things or whatever. So sometimes I feel like I'm, you know, doing an improv with my mom.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:30:31]:
And, you know, she's talking about, yeah, the man had to go down the street. I was like, yeah. And then guess what? He did. It was really interesting. And she's, like, listening, like, oh, really interesting. So we're doing this, like, random conversation. If somebody's listening to us, they're like, what are they on about? But it's having as much fun and joy as possible in the moment. And then, you know, when we're there and I bring my kids then to see her as well and try as much as possible to bring out the joy and the fun and for her to bring that sort of positive energy.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:31:01]:
Like, she. She still notices that she doesn't speak very much anymore, sadly. But every now and then she'll come out with something, and I know she's listening. I can hear her and tell that that she's doing that. And, you know, it's. It's embracing them where they are, having fun moments as well, and just, yeah. Trying to make the most of the time that we have left together. Right.

Shauna Sweeney [00:31:22]:
It's so precious. It's precious. And it goes by way too quickly. So finding the light in that. That's such a beautiful story and anecdote you shared. You know, it's not been. It's not been as easy for everyone in my family. My younger brother, you know, still thinks of the diagnosis as the point where he said goodbye to my dad.

Shauna Sweeney [00:31:42]:
It was as if my dad had passed away at that point. And that's really tough. I respect that. I understand. I have found that if you can meet them where they are and you can look at it his play and make up stories, and especially I found integrating my own kids into having a relationship with my dad, there's so much there to still be enjoyed and to be gleaned from this. Like, don't let that. Don't let those moments pass up because it goes by fast.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:32:12]:
Exactly. And my younger one, she doesn't remember as much pre accident, pre Covid with her because she's younger as well. And so I've kind of talked to her about creating a different type of relationship with her now, like pre, when she was still so small, when her grandmother was more, you know, normal with her, and now this one. And so now it's more about her telling stories and creating a different dynamic. So allowing the kids also to be part of that journey, I think too is really important and embracing it and having that support as a family and that love. We all have our different journeys and it's finding a way as a family unit to be able to support each other as best as possible with, with the scenario that we, we have ground.

Shauna Sweeney [00:32:54]:
Common ground is so important. You know, we see there's. So it's rife with potential for conflict and with misunderstanding as a family works their way through a moment in time in which family caregiving is required. One of the things that we really try and build into the products of Tender Care is just empathy for understanding another's perspective. It's not always going to be the same, but generally, more often than not, everyone has, has the same goals, safety and health and making sure that everything is taken care of. And if you can understand, everyone has their different path into that. One of the things that we like to do at Tender Care is sort of set these overarching goals for a family to agree to and then give everyone roles within that, to see the visibility of how everyone is applying their efforts towards that. Well, you know, what is everyone contributing? How is this working? And then also translating a lot of that effort for the other family members so that, you know, as much as possible, we're all different, we're all going to approach this differently, but that, you know, there's a certain amount of community staying on the same page within a family that having a neutral platform like Tender Care can bring to the table.

Shauna Sweeney [00:34:05]:
That ideally lessens a lot of the conflict and the misunderstanding that can sometimes be a big part of this.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:34:12]:
This. Yeah, I, I think a lot of the time, frankly, because, like, I'm pulling all the weight. He's not doing anything. I'm getting commands from here. Da, da, da, da. So having that neutral third party is excellent. Such a brilliant idea. And you won best AI idea of the year in 2024.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:34:27]:
So huge. Congratulations on that. That must have been a really exciting moment, right?

Shauna Sweeney [00:34:32]:
We're, we're very excited about using new technology and applying it towards something that so many of us at the, you know, on the team, we're active caregivers ourselves. Most of us are taking care of a family member. And so it gives us great honor to be using this medium towards something that matters and that we never have to spend a single moment of our day wondering, like, was this Tuesday worth it? Was this, you know, was this meeting worth? Feels wonderful to be on a mission and to be so well received on the other side with some of the tools that we're building.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:35:09]:
Can you share a little bit about the roadmap? What's next? What are you guys planning? What would you love to see in the coming years?

Shauna Sweeney [00:35:16]:
I would love to. So first, we're really excited we've just integrated with Medicare and why that's huge is again, it saves a family so much time of tracking down physicians, medications, emergency room visits. What used to be a total treasure hunt to try and find all the hospital records. The different systems now takes a family about 15 seconds on our platform to bring in and then to be able to offer immediate tips and suggestions for what to talk to the doctor about as a result of that information. This is super exciting. This is just within the last week, so congratulations. Hot off the press. Yeah, hot off the press.

Shauna Sweeney [00:35:59]:
We've also, we've also unveiled as of today a trusted services marketplace across the United States. This is across over 20,000 different providers of home care and elder law and move managers and financial advisors who have a specialty in working with families who are managing through caregiving.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:36:21]:
Absolutely amazing.

Shauna Sweeney [00:36:24]:
We are announcing our rollout of being able to show to families not just what service providers are in their area, but like an incredibly vetted set of businesses that meet our criteria and our standards for who we would want to bring into our own home. So really taking away a lot of the research and the guesswork of what this looks like when it does come time to, let's say bring someone into grandma's or your parents home or even your spouse's is home. We feel really proud of the work we've done to be able to pull this down to these incredible local heroes who are true angels in a lot of the work that they do and making those connections really easy for families. So very excited about this.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:37:12]:
That's super exciting just to break down and specifically so for people listening, what exactly is in that portfolio of different service providers that you have to meet.

Shauna Sweeney [00:37:20]:
Over 14 different categories. So this is from anything from home care to elder law, senior move managers, this is long term insurance providers. This is home health. You know, it's essentially like a full robust marketplace for a number of different services that a family will need along the way. Whether you're just starting out or you're getting to the place in which it's time to bring someone to the home or even start to think about relocation and moving into a new, like a new assisted living facility. This is, this is an incredibly rigorous, tested marketplace that we have essentially asked all of the providers who are trusted members to go through background checks, licensing, accreditation audits, real deep dives with our team around what their risk mitigation is, how they train their staff so that only the very best of these service providers, who are really truly role models in their category, are served up to a family when and if the family is entering into a situation. Let's say, you know, grandma just had a fall, ended up in the ER and is now being discharged. Would need.

Shauna Sweeney [00:38:38]:
One of the things that really makes this, this different than other marketplaces is we know that most families don't know the name of these services. They didn't go to school for this. This is not their area of expertise. All you need to know is what scenario you happen to be going through, a common care scenario. And we will immediately start to suggest a whole list of suggest, like suggested services that you could reach out to if you wanted to and why we believe they're the best in your area.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:39:05]:
Oh, amazing. And that's so, so helpful because finding a trusted person to look after your love is really difficult. I mean, I know my parents are in South Florida and there's just so much demand there and not many people are available or there's a high turnover or they come and they go. And it's just very tricky because it's something so personal as allowing somebody else to come into your home and build that relationship with your parents. So that is really, really exciting. Congratulations on that part too.

Shauna Sweeney [00:39:33]:
Thank you. We're really excited. We believed that this needed to exist. So many of us live far away from one another these days. Word of mouth doesn't work as well for us. And it's also really difficult to find the best services. Many of them don't have websites.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:39:48]:
Yes.

Shauna Sweeney [00:39:48]:
It's often just word of mouth, a referral. And so bringing that online and modernizing that experience felt like a valuable contribution.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:39:56]:
Yeah, this, this space is ripe for technology innovations. So in an ideal world, Shauna, what would the, the elderly care and caregiver model look like in say, two to five years time?

Shauna Sweeney [00:40:10]:
First, we need to normalize this. There is so much of this that's invisible right now. And we don't have a common language. We have a lot of confusion around what the word caregiver means. Does it mean a parent? Does it mean a professional? Does it mean an adult child? There's a lot of work there to be done. It kind of reminds me of where we were with mental health probably a decade ago. A lot of this was stigmatized. And so as a culture and a society especially, you know, you cited some of the numbers.

Shauna Sweeney [00:40:38]:
We are moving into a moment in time where we are the majority rather than the minority. And so it's a long overdue for us to understand this and to understand that we're all going through this together. That's the first piece, I think, so just a massive education on this and a clarification of what it means to be taking on this chapter as a family. And then I think second, what I would love to, to see is more institutional acknowledgement for this body of work. You know, family caregiving is something that I think in certain pockets is well understood, but more largely very sort of like poorly understood and poorly tracked. Right. Even in terms of like, what, what is happening in the workforce and what's happening to those who, you know, run the gamut from anything from senior managers all the way down to those who are just entering into their careers. What's the impact of family caregiving on their time and their productivity? I think also from a policy level, what is the financial impact of family caregiving right now? What is it doing when we're looking at the larger demographics in terms of, you know, you've got like what we've talked about before, sandwich caregivers who are thinking about paying out of pocket for parents at the same time that they're paying out of pocket for their children.

Shauna Sweeney [00:41:58]:
And what is this doing for their long term ability to save? These are areas that require more policy around them in order for us to set up a healthier, stable, caregiving population, which is going to be required of us for us to get through this large demographic shift? And then I think on the innovation side, we need some like really easy and universal tools that can plug in to systems that quite frankly, were not built for generational secession. You know, we've only moved online really in the last 20 years. This is a relatively modern phenomenon. And a lot of the structures we have in place, whether it's, you know, the modern adult has over 100 digital accounts and passwords. There is not a great process for being able to give power of attorneys to someone else in the family for all of these different passwords and usernames. And so there's a bit of updating that's going to be required for us to be able to pass the keys of the torch to the next generation to take on a lot of this now digital footprint that we've built out, but have not thought about how it ages and what it looks like long term to be passed family to family. And this applies across finance like the financial industry, the health care industry, you know, even day to day things like Facebook and you know, your Instagram accounts. These are, these are all one off ways of being able to move these accounts to different family members.

Shauna Sweeney [00:43:31]:
And so it could be much simpler in terms of the overall infrastructure for how a family tackles these things.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:43:37]:
Is there? I think so. But I'd love to hear your view, a wider use case essentially not just for people in medical need, but as, as parents and family members are aging to actually bring them onto the platform to enable more easier flow of management and less stress around the whole administrative task, etc. Would you say that there's use cases essentially of non sick parents, but just from a pure elderly perspective and aging.

Shauna Sweeney [00:44:05]:
Perspective, we do ourselves a huge disservice by running in the other direction from aging and not planning and really thinking about this as a net negative as opposed to a chapter that can be embraced and planned for, and can be a team sport, if you will, across right. And really reframing this and norming this, I think unlocks so much opportunity to approach this as a family, as a culture, much differently. And one of the things that we already see from our users on Tender Care is that once they put so much of this infrastructure in place for someone they're actively taking care of, they realize it's not that difficult and it's actually much less scary than you think it is. And at that point a light bulb goes off and they actually start to build this out for themselves, for their own children, for their own spouses. Once you've sort of broken the seal, if you will, you realize it's a much more positive and much more proactive approach to thinking about aging and thinking about infrastructure around it once you've already started down this road. And so one of the things I'm most excited about as we norm all of this is what that looks like as a culture when we start to embrace this and we start to build this infrastructure out and it feels like a positive as opposed to something to be avoided.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:45:31]:
Shauna, where can people find out more about Tender Care about you? Where can they follow you? We can link everything in the show notes, but where would you send people.

Shauna Sweeney [00:45:39]:
To Please come on over. We love to connect we love to build our community. You can find so much more about Try tender care@tri tendercare.com we're on all the socials. We're also online at our website. For me personally, I love hearing from anyone who has an experience in caregiving or perspective or industry expertise. You can find me on LinkedIn under Shanna Sweeney. I am the proud CEO and founder of Tender Career. So find me and we'd be happy to connect and come be part of our community.

Shauna Sweeney [00:46:11]:
We are actively involved in building technology as a result of what our community shares with us that they need. Like I said, we have thousands of families who are currently on our platform. It's very easy to get a hold of the entire team from engineering to product to design inside of Tender Care. So absolutely go ahead and download the app. We're free. We're on the App Store and go ahead and reach out to us. We love ideas for new products or for features or even just to hear what your experience is like. I promise you everyone on the team reads that and oftentimes some of our biggest features of like our Medicare integration has come as a direct result of someone writing in and just asking us to build something.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:46:55]:
That's huge. I have an idea as well. I'll share with you. Thank you so much for taking the time. Do you have from my audience any, you know, recommendation or a final ask or parting thoughts or message that you'd like to share today?

Shauna Sweeney [00:47:09]:
Such a good question. I think my one ask is many of us know when someone in our circle is on the receiving end of starting caregiving. Whether it's a diagnosis, whether it's, you know, a mention of an ER visit. Those individuals often don't know how to ask for help. They're not going to. They don't know what they don't know. And so often the most valuable people in their circle are those that don't ask. They just step in and say, hey, I'm going to come over and I am going to go through, you know, your mail for you and figure out what you need or I'm going to drop off some food.

Shauna Sweeney [00:47:55]:
They're not going to ask for help, but you have no idea what an impact that will make in their life by just stepping in. You will know when the moment comes. Someone will drop a little update to you. That's the moment in time. I would just ask you to remember this conversation and find something that you can do without asking them how you can help.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:48:15]:
Beautiful. Yes, I hear you. So, so wonderful. Thank you so much Shauna, for coming on today. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for what you're building. I know how desperately needed this is and how many people this will really, really support. So anyone out there on that sort of elderly parent or aging journey, this is a really, really phenomenal tool with tender care to try.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:48:36]:
So, yeah. Thank you so much again, and thank you to your audience for listening.

Shauna Sweeney [00:48:40]:
Thank you.