A personal experience with a relative with dementia inspired high school student Logan Wells and his family to develop an app to help improve communication and the coordination of care among professional and family caregivers.

CareZare, now available in the Apple App Store and Google Play, is designed to ease the stress on individual caregivers. Once downloaded, users can:

  • Bring care team members — including professional caregivers — together to plan, schedule and track caregiving activities in real time.
  • Assign caregiving tasks and update needs and statuses.
  • Stay informed on their loved one’s day with live updates on care tasks, events and a full history of care at their fingertips.

It was seeing his parents, Eric and Hallie Wells (who flank Logan in the accompanying photo), and an aunt care for his grandmother that motivated Logan Wells to create the app.

“While the initial CareZare release is targeted for families/individual care teams, it can still be leveraged by caregiving companies,” Eric Wells, Logan’s father and a co-founder of CareZare, told McKnight’s Senior Living. In fact, Boston-based CareZare also will offer an enterprise solution for organizations such as assisted living communities and nursing homes as well as professional caregivers.

“Although not exposed in the initial release, ‘under the covers’ we have designed in the ability for caregiving companies and communities to leverage CareZare in a way best fits an organizational context,” Wells said. “We are actively engaged with several such companies and plan to expose those capabilities in the near future.”

Senior living operators were involved in the development of the app, he said. “We were fortunate enough to talk with a number of professionals from caregiving communities early on as we were developing CareZare,” Wells said. “In fact, their feedback helped validate the idea as well as shape its development.”

Future plans for the CareZare app include expanding it as a platform to link into wearables and other healthcare technologies.

Subscriptions are $9.95 per month and are based on the number of people being cared for (the team size is unlimited). New users of the app can receive a free 30-day trial.

From the February 01, 2018 Issue of McKnight's Senior Living