It's Not a Problem in our House; It's a Problem in the System

Start-ups believe the problem lies in our house. It's embedded in the system.

I attended a conference last week for home health and home care providers. I attended in order to find partners for our Certified Caregiving Consultants, who can offer services through Medicare Part B provider.

Within about 10 minutes of arriving on the first day, I connected to Sue, who’s working on a start-up to help family caregivers. She wants to develop a platform to organize the home care providers and professional caregivers we use. She shared how confusing and time-consuming organizing the providers and professionals caregivers can be.

That is the truth.

It’s confusing and time consuming because the system doesn’t have enough professional caregivers. We may have to use more than one agency because just one agency won’t have the staff to meet our needs.

It’s the system problem that impacts us.

In my conversation with Sue, she shared that the solution she found during her personal experience was an expert in her community who knew which agencies to use and how to work effecting with them. The expert organized the care and removed her headache.

But the solution Sue wants to build to help family caregivers is a technology platform. She isn’t replicating her solution (an expert that helps). She’s instead introducing something completely different that she didn’t use during her personal experience. She didn’t use technology for her caregiving experience because she didn’t need it. She needed an expert.

We all need the expert who understands how to work the systems in order to save work for us.

We don’t need one more platform, which adds to our data burden, when really we only need a shared Google calendar and spreadsheet to track schedules and providers.

Sue is a start-up founder in good company. Our caregiving space is full of failed platforms that missed the mark because the founder simply misunderstood the root of the problem and overlooked the solution. In this situation, the problem lies in the system, which can’t attract enough staff to meet the demand. Solve that problem — nurturing a large pool of professional caregivers earning a living wage while providing affordable services — and family caregivers are good.

Why does it matter that a start-up misunderstands the problem?

Because it drains resources. This particular start-up that will go belly-up doesn’t seem likely to impact anyone other than the owners.

But the start-up wastes time. It’s a waste of our time when we spend so much time trying technology that we later realize won’t work because it doesn’t solve our problem, which is embedded in the system. No technology that we use will add more staff at an affordable rate to the home care agencies in our communities. It wastes our time because we talk about technology when we should be talking about the solution — experts who get the caregiving experience and understand how to manage the systems. (Technology also won’t make anyone help who doesn’t want to help. If they aren’t going to help, they aren’t going to help no matter how nice the care coordination technology is.)

I’ve lost count of how many start-ups enter our space without understanding the space. The starts-up believe they can fix our experience. In truth, we’re not broken. The systems are.

So, what’s the solution? Keep talking about your experience and your challenges. When we educate, we change incorrect assumptions. When we share honestly about the broken systems we have to manage, we turn the attention from others believing we need to be fixed to others understanding the systems need to be fixed. We also emphasize how much we deserve to have experts who understand us, support us, advocate for us, and resolve challenges for us.

I’m curious: What’s the problem you face that you would like to be resolved?

(Image by Stefan Schweihofer from Pixabay)

Resources

• Would you like to be that expert that family caregivers need? Our Certified Caregiving Consultant, Certified Caregiving Specialist, Comfort Care Family Coach and Professional Listening Artist are on sale through today (August 25). Enroll today and save 20%.

• We finished our Summer Flashlight Camp two weeks ago. You can enjoy the five lessons by joining our free course, Summer Flashlight Camp. During the course, I help you see the light shining on your purpose and then help you take steps to make your purpose your reality. 

• Would you like to volunteer to support and mentor family caregivers? Our Certified Caregiving Mentor program is free through September 1. Watch 10 hours of Master Classes about the caregiving experience and then join me for two hours of live training which happens on the first Friday at 11 a.m. ET. Enroll.

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