Dear Caregiver,
I’m writing to caregivers everywhere, whether you’ve been with us from the beginning or are just discovering AtendaCare.
The Atenda 10 is our family guidebook for caring for someone with dementia. Ten caregiver principles that came from thousands of real caregivers. If you haven’t had a chance to read it, I encourage you to take a look. You’ll find a link to it at the bottom of this post. Share it with anyone you know who is caring for someone with dementia. It’s already reached many caregivers, and I hope it continues to reach more.
My goal, and I hope it’s yours, is to help caregivers care for the person they love and to help them through a job nobody signs up for and nobody is ever properly prepared for.
We’ve been deeply involved in developing AtendaCare, and in my humble opinion, we’ve built an amazing platform. We thought we’d have alpha testers in it early. That turned out not to be possible. For that, I apologize, because many of you offered to help us build this program. But we couldn’t put a working piece of it in anyone’s hands without building most of the platform first, so we put our heads down and built. That’s largely why I’ve been quiet about our progress.
I’ve been testing AtendaCare the only way I trust: in my own home, with my own family. Day after day in real caregiving. I’m thrilled with the result.
We brought in the lawyers, HIPAA experts, and a compliance team, because AtendaCare is not a general AI tool. Everything you say stays private. Nothing is shared with anyone unless you say so. Atenda doesn’t forget what you told her last month, so you’re never starting over. And every month she turns what you’ve told her into a written summary of how things are going. That summary is yours. You decide who sees it, your doctor, your sister, your kids, or nobody.
Here’s what else we’ve accomplished along the way. We’ve worked with developers to build this platform and have brought engineering and design in house, so the people who care most about how Atenda talks to you are the ones designing it. We brought on a certified dementia practitioner to lead our work with doctors and practices. Two family practices have signed on to run a beta test with their own patients, with real families, before we go commercial at all. And we’re working on the piece that matters most to your wallet: getting AtendaCare to where a doctor can prescribe it and Medicare pays for it.
The alpha test is an important step in bringing AtendaCare to caregivers. It’s a small group, and it’s hands-on. Caregivers will use a home version, and Atenda will ask you herself how she’s doing. The engineers are building the feedback right into the conversation. On top of that, me or someone on our team will be watching and talking with you directly. Nobody starts testing without sitting down with a person first and going through what we’re testing and what we’re looking for. That kind of direct feedback is what tunes the way Atenda talks to a caregiver, and there’s no substitute for it. Exciting times around here. If that sounds like something you’d like to be part of, I’d love to hear from you.
The beta comes after that, in the app, once the alpha tells us how we improve and fine-tune. I’m not going to put a date on it and then miss it. That’s the wider circle, the First Atenders, and you’ll get in before launch and tell us what’s right and what’s wrong. I’m looking forward to it. If you want to be on that list, say so and I’ll add you.
I’ll continue sharing what we’ve learned building AtendaCare, along with updates on where the project stands.
I’d like to hear from you. Call me or write to me and tell me how things are going.
We’ll be talking soon.
