You may not know this, but my job brings me into contact with a lot of people with intellectual or developmental disabilities. That’s because the company I work for makes technology to help people with disabilities live more independently. I’m very proud of what we do.
I work for GrandCare Systems. It was founded in 2005 and spent most of the last 18 years creating technology to help seniors live at home for as long as possible, staying safe and healthy and connected. Customers were hard to come by and many did not stay with us long term. It was a tough slog.
Then, a few years ago we were approached by a disability support organization in Cincinnati called LADD. They told us they wanted to completely reinvent their service delivery model for community supported living and similar settings–and they wanted to use technology to do it. Why did they come to us? Well, according to them we already did almost everything they wanted. So after vetting about 25 different technology platforms, they chose us and asked us if we would partner with them to take the platform that last mile for this particular population.
We said yes. And so for more than six months we, with their advice, added new features and new functionality specifically designed for this population and these settings. At the conclusion of this collaboration, LADD opened up their first Smart Living home. It had a smart refrigerator, a smart stove, a Ring doorbell and even smart toothbrushes. But most importantly, it had a GrandCare touchscreen in every room of the house.
In the summer of 2020, four men with disabilities moved into that house. They had never lived this independently before. I am happy to report that they still live there to this day.
What I didn’t know at the time was that nearby Xavier University took an interest in this project. Specifically, they’re school of occupational therapy. They began a multi-year study on the house and the guys who lived there. When I saw the paper they produced, I was literally stunned.
LADD had been able to safely reduce the number of in-person staff hours by 75%. This cut the total cost of support in half. All of the technology in the house paid for itself in about nine months. And the guys were living more independently and loving it. After skimming the paper and reading these findings, I wrote in Slack to the entire GrandCare team: “we are going to weaponize this.”
The LADD smart home got a lot of national attention. We started getting phone calls. The disability space was way more responsive than the senior market ever had been. People were responding when I reached out. Organizations started buying. There were disability support orgs like LADD. There were county governments. Managed care organizations. I’m even talking to whole states now.
Business is booming, which is why I have been flying all over the country to onboard new customers. I and the GrandCare team provide classroom training for support staff, and even do their first installations with them. Which is cool because it often means we get to meet the residents themselves. I have been to customer locations including Wisconsin, California, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and both North and South Carolina. And that’s just this calendar year so far. If I had to guess I’d say we maybe heading to Vermont next.
How exactly does GrandCare help people with disabilities? What are these onboarding trips like? How does someone go about getting GrandCare for someone they know? These and other questions will be for future blog posts.
For now I will simply say that I find this all very rewarding. I have never worked harder at anything than this endeavor. And it’s because every email I send, every pitch meeting I present at, every cold call I make, and every trip I go on, more and more people are achieving a level of independence they never thought possible. I think everyone at GrandCare feels this. More soon.