People affected by dementia or other mental illnesses can have many different behavioral reactions during the time a caregiver is providing them with personal care and helping them with their daily needs. Now, there’s a lot of variability in the type(s) of dementia that a cognitively impaired person affected by dementia can have. Because of that, a caregiver who’s providing healthcare measures for a person affected by dementia might not know all the intricacies that differentiate each type of dementia. As such, it can be quite difficult to evaluate what approach and healthcare measures should be taken for patients with a specific type of dementia. Nevertheless, it can be extremely helpful for a caregiver to understand exactly what type of dementia a patient has as well as knowing every possible detail about that patient’s background, as that can ultimately help the caregiver themselves to more closely personalize the healthcare measurements that they’re required to take for each patient struggling with a specific type of dementia. Enter TapRoot, who recently debuted its proprietary digital healthcare assistant and healthcare management platform called “Ella” (showcased at 2023 SXSW), which is designed especially for caregivers of people with cognitive deficits as a way to help improve the healthcare for both the cognitively impaired individuals and their caregivers.
WHO IS TAPROOT?
TapRoot Interventions & Solutions, Inc. is a digital healthcare company headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona experienced in the fields of AI, healthcare and behavioral health whose mission is to improve healthcare outcome measures (i.e. caregiving services) for cognitively impaired people and their caregivers / long-term healthcare operators via their proprietary AI-powered personalized digital healthcare assistant and healthcare management platform, Ella, which ultimately enables caregivers to mitigate and ultimately prevent high-risk behavioral reactions of cognitively impaired people affected by dementia-related symptoms (such as Alzheimer’s, another type of dementia, or any other sort of mental illness).
The name of the company (TapRoot) comes from the belief that tapping into the history and long-term memory provides the best opportunity to truly impact quality care. It is within this philosophy that non-pharmaceutical and person-centered approaches prevent and decrease adverse reactions.
The idea behind TapRoot was born after the two founders, Dr. Linda Buscemi and Business Expert Scarlett Spring, identified that there was an urgent need to provide caregivers with a better way to support cognitively impaired patients affected by dementia, especially when accounting the high costs of personalized treatment done by licensed professionals, and also the lack of trained caregivers involved in Behavioral Science interventions.
According to a study published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease in 2021, it is estimated that 90% of patients with dementia experience a wide spectrum of behavioral or neuropsychiatric symptoms, including agitation, psychotic symptoms, apathy, depression, and sleep disturbances, all of which can negatively affect a patients’ quality of life. Not only are these adverse behaviors the main factors that cause caregiver burden, but consequently, they can also have a direct impact on healthcare resource utilization and healthcare costs.
As Co-founder and Chief Clinical Officer of TapRoot Interventions & Solutions, Inc., Linda Buscemi cleverly noted in a recent interview with GadgetGram’s Editor-In-Chief, David Novak: “By understanding that adverse behaviors are essentially reactions from unmet needs and by using a patient’s background, caregivers of cognitively impaired people affected by dementia can successfully prevented and decreased adverse behaviors”.
This is exactly what TapRoot’s recently announced its proprietary digital healthcare assistant and healthcare management platform called “Ella” aims to offer caregivers in order to better help them care for people affected by dementia.
WHAT IS TAPROOT ELLA?
Essentially, TapRoot Ella is an innovative HIPAA-compliant, cloud-based and AI-powered personalized digital healthcare assistant and healthcare management platform that aims to “elevate” (i.e. improve) caregiving offered by caregivers to people affected by dementia by providing those same caregivers with evidenced-based behavioral approaches that can help them to mitigate and ultimately prevent high-risk behavioral reactions whenever they’re providing personal healthcare for dementia patients.
More specifically, the TapRoot Ella platform is a software as a service (SaaS) digital healthcare solution that combines cognitive-behavioral interventions with cutting-edge technology to ultimately improve the quality of life and health outcomes for cognitively impaired people and their caregivers.
HOW DOES THE TAPROOT ELLA PLATFORM WORK?
By utilizing TapRoot’s Ella digital healthcare assistant and healthcare management platform, not only are caregivers are able to track healthcare outcome measures, but they’ll also have complete control to:
- Analyze data, produce outcome reports and justify caregiver activities for family and insurance providers.
- Collect data that supports value-based care, risk-sharing agreements and improved quality management decision-making.
- Provide automated updates to family members and keeping them informed of their loved ones status.
- Incorporate an audit component to ensure quality and compliance standards are being met.
- Enable outcome measures for rate negotiations.
- Quantify evidence-based practices.
- Reconcile ROI regarding fewer medications and hospitalizations.
WHAT ARE THE COMPANY’S FUTURE PLANS FOR THE TAPROOT ELLA PLATFORM?
Following TapRoot’s participation in the South by Southwest 2023 convention, TapRoot’s Co-founders Linda Buscemi and Scarlett Spring will be traveling to San Francisco, where they’ve been invited to do a presentation at the Institute On Aging’s Tech Talk about the topic of “AI for Care”, along with five other tech startups. This presentation will take place on March 14, 2023.
If you’re looking to learn more TapRoot’s Ella digital healthcare assistant and healthcare management platform, you can do so by visiting TapRoot Ella’s official website.
