The Memory Care Innovation program is designed to recognize passionate and innovative industry members who are shaping the future of cognitive care across behavioral health, home health and home care, hospice and palliative care, senior housing, and skilled nursing. To see this year’s inaugural Memory Care Innovation Award winners, visit https://innovation.memorycarebusiness.com/.
Gary Skole, the founder and CEO of AlzBetter, has been named a 2024 Memory Care Innovation Award Winner.
To become a Memory Care Innovation Award winner, an individual is nominated by their peers. The candidate must be a high-performing employee who knows how to put vision into action, and serve as an advocate for those living with memory-related disorders and the committed professionals who ensure their well-being.
Skole sat down with Home Health Care News to chat about innovating memory care in the home, the challenges that patients and their families face, and a better future.
What drew you to working in memory care?
In my case, I owned a home care business. And I finally realized how little I knew about memory care and how complex it was. I just really didn’t have an understanding of that.
Once I learned that, I really couldn’t find any information or training that was really more specific to caring for people in the home. Everything that I found was tailored more towards nursing homes and retirement communities, and I really couldn’t find what I was looking for to train my staff and do a better job of caring for people in the home.
Ultimately, I ended up developing materials that we could use at our own company to help our staff do a better job. As I looked into it, I came to the realization that I wasn’t alone, that really nobody knew what they were doing – including hospitals and primary care physicians, but particularly home care providers.
I saw an opportunity to try and bring what I was learning to more organizations, so they could ultimately provide better care for the seniors that are trying to live at home.
What’s your biggest lesson learned since starting to work in memory care?
It’s hard. This is a really challenging situation because of the complexities. When you’re talking about dementia care, there’s many different types of dementia. And people can have Alzheimer’s, they can have Lewy Body, they can have vascular or they can have a combination of multiple. And then you can throw behavioral health issues like depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, all that on top of that.
And you can’t see that.
The companies that we are trying to work with, they have to be willing to invest a lot of time. And it’s hard to get companies to do that. What I’m finding is that it requires a simpler approach. And that’s how we’ve done this as well – a simplified version of care that more people could use and still provide support. That’s been our approach. And now we’re building AI into the whole way of doing this. We can have that dementia expert in the form of AI, and have that not replace our humans, but accompany them all the time on their phone. Now, they always have that expert support at all times.
If you could change one thing with an eye toward the future of memory care, what would it be?
These families are really struggling. It’s hard on them financially, it’s hard on them emotionally.
I wish there were more services and more support for those individuals. And that’s what we’re trying to make happen.
What is the biggest obstacle to being innovative in memory care, and how do you try to overcome that obstacle?
I think it’s just the complexity of dealing with what we’re dealing with. We have to be creative.
In a word, how would you describe the future of memory care?
I would say hope or promise.
If you could give yourself advice looking back to your first day in the industry, what would it be?
I would really focus and commit to doing nothing but memory care, because I think the market is big enough. And the need is great enough. Generalizing is great, but I think being just focused on memory care, and trying to get the word out and the program out, I think that is what I would do.
