Blogs

Kinto, an AgeTech Collaborative™ startup participant, is a tech-enabled care coaching service that trains and supports family caregivers of seniors with Alzheimer’s disease and other serious health conditions. Their service is delivered via mobile app and combines three mutually reinforcing elements: personal care coaching by trained experts, personalized curriculum to address each family’s specific needs, and peer support groups to enable caregivers to share knowledge, experiences and emotional support.  

We recently sat down with Joe Chung, Kinto’s co-founder and CEO, to learn more about their services and why it's so important to support dementia caregivers. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

Can you give us an overview of Kinto? 

Kinto is an evidence-based caregiver support intervention — a program that trains and supports the unpaid family caregivers of dementia patients. It’s been proven that caregiver support interventions are highly successful at improving health outcomes for both the caregiver and the person they’re caring for. 

Traditionally, such programs have been delivered face-to-face by licensed social workers, often in the person’s home. That’s very effective, but it’s also very labor-intensive and unscalable. We deliver Kinto through modern technology in order to scale it and to make it more accessible and affordable to a wide variety of dementia caregivers.  

Let's say I'm a caregiver for someone with dementia. How do I access and utilize Kinto? 

The vast majority of people with Alzheimer’s are over 65, so they’re generally eligible for Medicare, and sometimes for Medicaid. Those programs, along with hospital systems and accountable care organizations (ACOs), are our primary delivery channels. We provide Kinto free to the caregiver, and it’s paid for and distributed through those partners. 

For example, maybe you’re a caregiver for your mother. While discussing her dementia diagnosis, her doctor might tell you that you’re eligible for this great program that can help you manage the situation. Or, your insurance provider might call you with a similar message. Then, if you’re interested in learning more about Kinto, we call you and have you download our app, then we’ll schedule your first coaching session, which happens over Zoom. From there, we’ll keep engaging with you: We’re an ongoing service designed to be a companion guide for you for years, because it’s a very long journey. 
 

What kind of coaching and support could I expect to receive? 

We often surprise our caregivers, because they’re expecting to be taught about medical care, or how to help the dementia patient use the bathroom, or things like that. But we’re really focused on the caregiver’s well-being, especially how they’re coping with stressors. Most caregivers feel isolated, and it’s easy to go down a path that leads to burnout. We focus on normalizing the situation and on how the caregiver is coping with it. 

Can you say more about why you focus on the needs of the dementia caregiver, rather than the needs of the patient? 

It’s shocking how much our healthcare system depends on unpaid family caregivers to perform enormous amounts of essential medical care for seniors. And the burden is only getting worse, because population dynamics show that there are fewer and fewer younger people to look after a bourgeoning aging population. 

We can’t cure Alzheimer’s, but we can improve quality of life and health outcomes by training the caregiver. It’s been proven again and again that caregiver support is the most effective intervention there is for people with dementia. It also makes intuitive sense: If you have Alzheimer’s, your well-being is inextricably linked to the person giving you care. The caregiver’s emotional well-being has a direct effect on the patient’s well-being. 

What was your inspiration for starting Kinto? 

Kinto’s co-founder, Jeet Singh, and I started a successful company a while back, took it public, and retired young. We had a great time for a few years, but after a while we realized we were unfulfilled. We felt we still had work to do, so we teamed back up again. This time, we wanted to start a company that was mission-oriented and would make a difference, and we got really interested in the longevity space — in dementia caregiving, specifically. 

Then, as it happened, my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. It was a strange coincidence, and I got to see how that played out directly in my own family. We got to see how little the healthcare system does to help caregivers: There’s no entry in the medical record for the family caregiver; there’s no provision for them in insurance policies. That made the mission a lot more personal. 

What speed bumps have you encountered along the way? 

I had to learn the hard way that healthcare is a vastly different market than enterprise software, which is where I came from. People don’t purchase healthcare products the way they purchase other products; they’re not shopping around, and normal consumer behavior doesn’t apply. 

Also, healthcare providers and payers have a different set of business drivers. For example, the way that Medicare and Medicaid operate is driven by the policies and legislation set by Congress. So part of the challenge of being a health tech entrepreneur is the constant and continuing learning curve to understand how it all works. 

What’s on the horizon for Kinto? 

What I think about every day now is artificial intelligence. It’s going to be absolutely transformative to the healthcare industry in general, and specifically to behavioral science, where human counselors try to affect behavioral change. AI is going to be enormously impactful in helping human counselors be much more efficient.  

That’s important, because there is a massive shortage of care workers and coaches, and that shortage isn’t going away any time soon. But the need for human outreach to build those trusted relationships with patients — and in our case, with caregivers — keeps growing every day, so I think this is where we’re going to see an AI revolution. 

Visit Kinto's website to learn more.