As part of our Boost My Business, Fiona Alston spoke to tech start-up Altra which offers nursing home residents and their families peace of mind during Covid.
Adam Keane knows nursing homes - he grew up working in his parents nursing home which they owned for over 30 years. It was because of his experience of how nursing homes operated that he saw a need for a better communication tool for staff.
He launched Altra Staff in September 2019. "It's SMS based communication with the staff," explains Keane, "it’s basically like a corporate SMS inbox for the nursing home to be able to communicate with their staff."
As Covid began to take hold of the country, Keane’s clients were expressing a need to have a better communication tool for the families of residents.
"They were talking about a SMS based communication," he says, "but I said I didn't really see the benefit in that, kind of like square peg, round hole situation, but it kept coming up more and more that they are having difficulty communicating with families and that’s how Altra Family came about."
For this particular product he decided to move away from the SMS type communication and created something more in keeping with a social channel.
"The best way to describe it is like a private social channel for the nursing homes, where you are able to share updates and engage with residents’ families," says Keane. "They can share everything and anything from videos, pictures, and general updates on the activities and the wellbeing of the residents with the resident’s families."
"The communication works both ways," he continues, "so the nursing home is communicating with the resident’s families, and then residents’ families can send in pictures and videos to be shared with their loved ones."
"Everything is based around the resident’s profile," he explains. "And how that works is, it's basically like a private group for the resident’s family to be a part of, so they're only ever seeing stuff related to their loved one. It’s like a private group within the nursing homes Altra Family profile."
Using Altra Family means that the whole family can take part in the communication and updates, and it can be viewed on PC, tablet or phone.
"Generally speaking, nursing homes would have only ever communicated, or they would only ever dealt with, one next of kin," says Keane, "and only interacted with other family members when they came in for visits."
There is no cost to the family as the nursing homes are the ones who purchase the platform for their business. The cost depends on the size of the nursing home.
"The way we've done it is, is essentially, we are opening up the ability to share general updates on how they're doing through messages, pictures and videos," he continues. "Just even simple things like sending a video message from the resident - you're basically opening the world for the families to stay in touch no matter where they are in the world whether they're five minutes down the road from the nursing home, or in the US, or Australia."
Since launching the Altra Family platform in nursing homes in September of this year, Keane is working with over 50 homes in Ireland and the US. The next stage for the bootstrapped start-up is to integrate video calling into the platform.
