Trusty Care, a New York City-based firm that offers health care and financial planning solutions for seniors facing serious illness, has obtained more than $25,000 worth of free legal services through a competition organized by End Well, a nonprofit that seeks to improve the end-of-life experience in the U.S. health care system.
End Well sponsored a competition in which six start-ups competed for the award via video presentations to investors that were aired online. The competing companies offer products and services that address the needs of seniors, serious illness care and the end-of-life. A panel of four judges selected the recipient based on several criteria.
“We were provided with an extensive and in-depth list of consideration factors to evaluate with each pitch including product feasibility, market analysis, operational viability, ideas and impact, market entry strategy, strength of presentation,” said Piper Goodspeed, head of brand for The New Yorker, WIRED, Ars Technica magazines, one of the judges for the competition.
To participate in the competition, each company had to be based in the United States, have less than $500,000 in annual revenue and have raised less than $5 million in total investment funding.
Trusty Care, founded by entrepreneurs Joseph Schneier and Gerry Carey, launched in 2018 and currently has 11 employees. The company has created a dual-facing digital platform that it sells to health insurance brokers, financial advisors, and other professionals that have interactions with older adults.
The platform is designed to help identify the risks that clients who are seniors may face in regards to health care and their financial health, and helps match them with the right insurance products, public benefits and cost saving tools.
“My co-founder and I founded [Trusty Care] after having worked in the nursing home facility industry for about five years. That sort of laid the foundation for starting this company. The core reason that we started it was really observing this intersection between financial insecurity and health care costs for the retiree population,” Schneier said. “It was this massive area of risk, and that was hard to control. We felt like there was the possibility of potentially building products that could help people to understand and control those costs.”
Schneier was also inspired by witnessing the struggles of his younger brother who was seriously injured in a car accident four years ago. He did not have health insurance at the time, and Schneier helped him enroll in Medicaid. The research Schneier did in response to that incident helped him realize the importance of the type of planning Trusty Care’s platform is intended to provide, he told Hospice News.
Trusty Care will receive $25,000 in covered legal fees and have the opportunity to pitch their company at the AARP Innovation Summit, which could lead to additional funding.
“We launched the End Well Innovation Startup Pitch Competition because the advanced aging and end-of-life space is ripe for disruption, and we want to encourage more entrepreneurship and investment in products and services that serve these people,” End Well Founder Shoshana Ungerleider, M.D., told Hospice News. “Each day, around 10,000 people turn 65 in this country. The goal of this event was to highlight some of the best solutions that improve the lives of people who are aging, facing serious illness and caregiving. Now more than ever, COVID has shown us that life is fragile, the most vulnerable among us deserve our attention and care. By encouraging more innovation and investment in this space, we all have the opportunity to change outcomes for people and to shift culture.”
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