JA: Bill Taranto, President of the Merck Global Health Innovation Fund, is the Chair of. More information about how to join the Breakthrough Alliance member board if you are interested either as an individual or as an organization. Later on in the symposium, we’ll have more information about that. But I’d like to pass it over now to Bill who interviewed John Wall, Co- Founder and Head of Engineering at MiiCare, around what they’re doing right now to advocate for equitable outcomes in healthcare. So over to Bill.

BT: Well, pleasure to be here with you monthly – to do my monthly interview. And Today, I have the great opportunity to talk to John Wall, who is the Co-Founder and Head of Engineering at MiiCare. And so, we’re going to have a great conversation on what MiiCare is all about and who John Wall is. So, John, well, I’m what I always like to start these kinds of conversations is, you’ve really brought on some entrepreneurs, students and even some investors, can you tell the audience about your career journey. Where did you start your career and how did you end up being a Co-Founder and Head of Engineering at MiiCare?

JW: Definitely. Well, thank you, Bill, and thank you for HitLab for having me. I started out very, very young, in my community tinkering with electronics on my kitchen table. And that grew into a passion for user-centered design and design thinking before I even knew what that was at an early stage. And over time, I would publicize and do blogs and live streams and really get the community involved to teach those kind of creative skills. And I found myself hearing the personal stories, getting really connected to the community and shifting those what turned out to be wearables and sensing devices and things like that and shifting it from fun into actually solving problems in my community. And so I did the high school summer college program at Stanford and really found the same passionate energy there that I had grown to know and love. And I then set my sights high and applied to Stanford, applied that sort of passion for problem solving and end-to-end sort of product design, went and did my four years at Stanford. And my first Christmas break while I was there, actually my first year is when I got an email from our founder, whose grandmother had recently had a fall. And he was struggling with a realization that in his 25 years of smart cities and IoT technologies in his career, solving global scale problems, he found it very difficult to take care of his own grandmother across the world from him, and found that the technology was not there in order to build that awareness and get ahead of the problems in chronic disease that that came up in his own personal life. And so I really found my calling in his in his mission. And together we went out into the community and saw the dramatic scale of that problem in aging. And at the same time, his father, who was a Green Beret, kind of military special forces man that had mentored him his whole life and was a really important part of his life and had grown to be part of my life as well, had a fall and was diagnosed with dementia. And within six months from secondary infections and being in clinics, he had passed away as well. And so at that point, we knew that we had to commit to this mission and scale MiiCare to help that – prevent that from happening to anybody else as well.

BT: Okay, great. Great journey. So now I want to talk specifically about the company and MiiCare, and I want to know about, just tell me all about what the company’s about, what you’re trying to solve for, and then what are some of your products that you’re pretty excited about?

JW: Definitely. So at MiiCare, we believe that everyone should be able to live the life that they choose from the comfort of home and not have to even worry about their health, let alone care homes or hospital as they age. And so to empower that independent lifestyle, we’ve created with our community, a preventative care platform that collects passive health data and converts that comprehensive sort of 360 degree view of the determinants of health in someone’s life into actionable wisdom for care providers in order to personalize care, shift it to the home and be able to sort of get ahead of those chronic illnesses that are the number one cause of death and disability in the world. So being able to create those effective care plans at scale that are able to individualize, and we do that via engagement with those older adults at home using Monica, our conversational AI digital health coach. And so she supports the older adults at home in order to self-care and empowers them in an aging experience that extends their health span where they feel comfortable, where they want to spend their lives at home with the support and wisdom for the providers to be able to achieve care excellence in a sense. So in terms of the actual, the product itself, we have wisdom, of course, on one side and then the engagement on the other side. So our healthcare platform has health scores and at a glance wisdom for the care providers to look at and see what on the determinants of health in a number scale, personalized to the person where their care could be best fit, where their needs are, and also, of course, the outcomes of their care that show up in those same metrics. So without noisy data, it’s creating wisdom from that data and empowering the care providers with the platform. And then, yeah, Monica at home conversing with older adults through MiiCube, which is our kind of hub that integrates telehealth devices, passive sensors together, and really abstracts all of that noise and stress away from both the older adults and the experience that they enjoy but also the care providers that may not know how to tie the software tools together and devices and piece these point solutions together. So, we’ve tried to create a kind of a one-stop shop infrastructure for preventative care plan that’s also valuable to the older adults and an experience they enjoy.

BT: Yeah, great product. I really like it a lot. So follow-up on the product, so maybe in a day in a life, so I’m either a caregiver or I’m the actual elderly patient. How do we interact with the company? How do you help an aging population maybe survive falls? What happens on a daily basis, maybe, once someone gets hooked up with your product and starts engaging?

JW: Sure. So as soon as, let’s say Jane, who might live alone and be in her 80s, she might struggle to stay independent. She might’ve been in the hospital several times with UTIs, recurring infections, or even have been diagnosed with dementia and just finds it difficult to manage independently by herself. As soon as she walks into her living room in the morning, Monica’s there to greet her by name, saying, “good morning, Jane. Hope you have a great day today. Well done on your steps so far this week. You’ve been doing super well. How about we hit those goals and make your family and your caregiver proud today?” She’s able to help with hydration routines during the day, staying up to date on medicines, and not just with dumb reminders that are set at a time. We actually have little motion activated stickers you can put on both hydration, sort of a mug or even a Brita filter or the water tap, as well as a medicine box or a prescription container or the door to the medicine cabinet in order to positively reinforce and really go towards behavior change versus just reminders or being passive. So Monica’s proactively there. She can bring in digital therapeutics as well at the right time. She asks comforting questions about how they’re sleeping at night and has the sensor data to back it up as well. And so that is packaged into, “hey, it looks like Jane hasn’t been sleeping too well the past couple of days”, or “hey, it looks like they’re doing really well with hydration, but they’re kind of struggling on their medicines. Maybe you’d like to explain that more.” And so those concise, need to know, timely and targeted personalized insights are what’s then on our dashboard for care coordinators to look at, caregivers before they go in, say for home care services, are able to glance at who they have that day, glance at who they’ve just shown up at, and have a really valuable sort of timed session with them that has the most impact and then be able to see the impact of their work and their passion and their dedication as a caregiver as well at the end of the day.

BT: And John, one of the questions I want to ask you is about health equity and social determinants of health and really how MiiCare and your team are thinking about that and progressing that forward.

JW: Definitely. So overall, MiiCare is squarely focused on the early intervention and prevention side. So niche data or niche insights, or even being just reactive is not going to cause that kind of health system change that we’re looking for. And so being able to early detect on those health problems in chronic disease, being able to help people self-care and manage those chronic conditions in order to intervene and prevent very costly, very stressful, very time-consuming, and often leading to more health decline spirals in hospital and in the healthcare system afterwards. And so we are kind of really focusing on that preventative aspect. One other area, of course, is access to care. So being able to care at home, being able to live the lifestyle that you want to, even if you live in a rural population, even if maybe you are relying on reimbursement and you’re waiting for services, being able to have the same level of preventative, kind of the latest technology applied to your care, is something that we care very deeply about. And of course, with all different spectrums of need, both on the health side and on the access to care side, that’s something that we’re very, very close to in our inner communities as well. Another aspect, of course, is digital and health literacy. So we’ve designed a system to, literally from our community, what happens if I’m sat in my chair with my hands up, with no devices on, with my eyes closed? What then? What do I get without having to do anything, change my lifestyle, any of that sort of thing? So Monica being socially conscious, not interrupting conversations, for example, but being proactive and really meeting you there and giving you that value, even if you don’t have to do anything, and then bringing content to you with that knowledge of what’s going to be valuable. So we’ve integrated with third-party digital therapeutics for diabetes management, for example, where the alternative is scrolling through an app on your phone, picking an area of health, trying to manage it yourself. And if you’re not in that lifestyle of doom scrolling for your own health benefit, certainly having Monica chime in with a nutrition piece, or if you’re feeling anxious, being able to calm you down before bedtime with the value of that digital intervention, but present it to you if you didn’t have to do anything and you’re sat there in your chair. I’ll summarize some of the other ones, of course, being able to personalize care to you in an experience that you deserve, lowering costs. So being able to assess exactly what your needs are so you don’t overspend, and that you’re not overly requiring staff in a workforce shortage, for example. You’re not having – what we see sometimes is over- provision of care. So someone that might stay in 24×7 with you, and maybe if you don’t need that level of care, you just resign yourself to maybe I do, maybe I am that sick. But what we’ve seen is that if we’ve been able to sort of have the care plans on average about 50%, which saves just over half on costs, we give the difference back in independence. So people find that they can do that, that they are motivated to take back some of their health, and that sets them up on a trajectory for healing and success. And then they’re open to the social side as well. So being able to connect to communities, people who are using MiiCare with similar interests, being able to connect them together, being able to connect with community events, for example. One thing we’re getting into is live events. So you could imagine augmented reality bingo. We call it audio reality bingo, where you have a physical bingo card with a code on it, and you can play along with a community center of connected people, wherever they are, play along with bingo. And once you get the winning token, you can leave your number out and confirm that. And so that same sort of idea applied to book clubs, applied to musical events, that sort of connection of people based on both their health needs and their interests in that social inclusive engagement experience with them as well on the MiiCare platform.

BT: Great. We have time for one quick last question. Just what is your – how’d you hear about HitLab and what’s your involvement with HitLab?

JW: Yeah, definitely. So MiiCare is an AARP, Agetech Collaborative Portfolio Company. And so HitLab is part of that whole circle of aging innovation. I was actually aware from LinkedIn. We’re very popular public on LinkedIn. That’s where our sort of community is in the health sector. And so I saw one of those events and of course went to the first symposium last year, I think it was, and was just super impressed with the community, of course, everyone here in the chat, the ability to connect afterwards and make lasting relationships. And of course now with us having joined recently this year, the Agetech Collaborative from AARP being part of that circle as well. And they’re a sponsor of today, being able to close those circles and know that the right people are here to make aging innovation happen. So I’m really thankful to be here. I’m glad everyone could join us today too.