Empowered Patient Podcast Tech-Enabled Support for Older Adults and Caregivers to Navigate Government Programs and Services with Karl Ulfers DUOS
Karl Ulfers, CEO and Co-Founder of DUOS, helps older adults and their caregivers access government benefits and programs to improve the quality of life and enable aging in place. Working with Medicare Advantage and dual-eligible health plans, DUOS uses a combination of technology, generative AI, and personalized support to help patients navigate the system to apply for and receive state, Federal, and VA benefits and services. The focus is on addressing the social determinants of health and health equity, especially in rural and underserved communities.
Karl explains "It's really interesting when you study these individuals that we work with. We tend to get about 15% of a payer's population activated and using our service, which is pretty high. And the people that make up that population, it's quite interesting - 88% of them make less than $28,000 a year. They're, on average, about 74 years old. They tend to skew female versus male and value what we bring to them in terms of helping them tap into these benefits and government programs available to them. They either didn't know about or didn't know how to use them."
"We love to say that we are re-imagining the aging experience and to some of the comments where we started our conversation - we believe that we're not just creating a system of aging. We're creating a system of aging that we ourselves are going to inherit. So we're motivated by the direct impact that we can have on the older adults in our lives, as well as the impact that we can have on the system in the future for ourselves."
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