NIA Small Business Showcase: Plans4Care

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Many people—from those with dementia to family caregivers to health care providers who support caregivers—lack access to on-demand personalized education and strategies that effectively reduce or eliminate care challenges, improve dementia care, and boost caregiver well-being. This lack of personalized care contributes to the costs of dementia, which are now $321 billion a year in the United States.

Plans4Care provides personalized dementia care solutions to health care providers who work with family caregivers. It uses a digital platform and a database of more than 80 common caregiver challenges and more than 2,000 evidence-based nondrug strategies. The platform employs a unique clinical algorithm that accounts for the cognitive and functional abilities of the person with dementia in addition to other contextual factors from which a personalized care plan is generated. The care plan provides education about a selected care challenge and specific strategies to manage that challenge by modifying the environment, communications, tasks, and/or activities.

Conventional solutions deliver general information with limited situation-specific care strategies, and varying degrees of caregiver involvement and interaction. Plans4Care’s competitive advantage is its deep evidence-based caregiver playbook. The result of 35 years of NIH-funded research, experience, knowledge, and know-how, the playbook includes more than 80 care challenges and 2,000 nonpharmacological solutions. Covering multiple complex care scenarios and culturally adapted content experience, it delivers highly specified levels of education to caregivers and strategies personalized to their self-identified care challenges.