Aging in Place with Dr. Randall Williams of WellSaid

VFH Episode 60

In this episode, Teri welcomes Dr. Randall Williams, the Co-Founder of WellSaid, to talk about the work they are doing to help people age in place with a skill called “My Day”

Dr. Williams is a serial digital health technology entrepreneur, physician, founder and CEO. He supports C-suite executives, investors, and boards seeking to refine and implement scalable and engaging healthcare products and go-to-market strategies. He is also a trusted adviser who brings a unique breadth of healthcare market experience and understanding, ranging from reimbursement policy, market strategy, technology development, and executive development.

WellSaid connects seniors to Alexa for their healthy independence and so that their loved ones can have peace of mind. Through their MyDay skill, they support healthier behaviors, connects seniors to loved ones and bridges the digital divide for a fuller and happier life.

Key Points from Dr. Williams!

The aging in place Alexa skills that he is producing to apply voice technology to the challenges of staying healthy, active, and independent as one gets older.
The role patients should be taking as the users of the healthcare system versus how much of the responsibility is on the administrators and healthcare providers.

Background

He trained as a cardiologist (Heart failure and transplant specialist).
Being in healthcare, he saw some of the failings of the healthcare system and how people with chronic diseases really fell through the cracks and lacked the systems and support they needed to stay healthy and out of the hospital.
They built a program that provided resources in both a hospital setting and home setting to help people and also stay on top of where the patients were having challenges.
They got into voice technology and created an app (interactive voice response) that allowed heart failure patients to report in every morning on how they were feeling and how they were doing.
That enabled them to prevent 50% to 60% of hospitalizations in that group of people. That led to an opportunity to look into other chronic diseases and see if the model could apply elsewhere.
Between 2000 and 2004 they got the opportunity to commercialize their technology and form their first startup.
At some point he had to give up his clinical practice to focus on voice technology.

How WellSaid Came About

As they were growing their initial company (Pharos Innovations), they started to hear about and see voice assistant technologies starting to emerge.
They saw an opportunity in incorporating the voice technology into their platform as another interface.
They had a challenge with the fact that smart speakers at the time were not set up for HIPAA Compliance. They also had a disadvantage in the fact that they were often at an arm’s length from the users of their technology.
They therefore made the decision to venture into the “Aging in Place” industry and started another company from Pharos. And that’s how WellSaid was created.
Their goal was to use voice technology with the older adult population to help them stay healthy, active, and independent.
They created a prototype and tested it out with 50 seniors which taught them a lot that helped them improve on the technology.

All About MyDay

It promotes healthy and independent aging.
It links seniors with their family, friends and caregivers through daily interactions.
Seniors use a smart speaker to go through a daily program that looks at and assesses seven different dimensions of well-being that are known to create challenges to their independence like cognitive decline, nutrition status, mobility, and others.
Within the program, a senior can learn each day more about those areas, get coaching, or go through exercises or other interventions to help strengthen different areas of their well-being.
As a result of all that information, the seniors and their loved ones can understand where there may be risks and vulnerabilities, and where they may need additional support.
The back-end of the product is a companion app that allows family members to pair with a senior. The senior gives permission for their data to be shared with others so their loved ones can track how they’re doing.

Aging in Place with Dr. Randall Williams of WellSaid

Better Every Day Flash Briefing

It focuses on seniors and has the goal of helping inform, educate, equip and inspire them to stay on top of active healthy aging.

Administration of Healthcare Vs Proactivity in Personal Care

While the healthcare system is great at taking care of patients when they are in healthcare facilities, they do a poor job of helping equip people to stay healthy outside of the healthcare facilities.
Dr. Williams and his team aim at supporting consumers who bear the problem of not staying independent.
Voice in healthcare technologies are already emerging as HIPAA compliant and many people are taking advantage of that.

The Uniqueness of WellSaid/MyDay

Their technology leverages their expertise around the aging population from an ethnographic understanding where they have interacted with hundreds of thousands of seniors. Over 10,000 seniors have so far interacted with WellSaid/MyDay.
They are learning very rapidly by leveraging existing technology platforms to bring the competencies of implementation as well as the competencies of implementation, content development, and aging expertise.
Other companies in the same space have just chosen to just create devices or their own unique versions of smart speaker software.
They also have some continuous learning and optimization advantages with their platform.