MemoryWell Founder, Jay Newton-Small
Along with an extensive community of professional writers, Washington DC based founder, Jay Newton-Small and MemoryWell are working to improve the Senior Care experience through intentional storytelling. At a time when social isolation is very real for many of us, our seniors are among the most vulnerable to the effects of loneliness so this team is putting their time and resources toward ensuring a better standard of life for more than 40 pilot communities.
Jay Newton-Small will pitch MemoryWell in the 6th annual CVC-SF Demo Night on Wednesday September 30th. MemoryWell will be one of five teams who will participate in our first all-virtual Demo Night event.
This year’s event will be a little different than years prior. The San Francisco Demo Night will be focused on HealthTech. The all-virtual nature allowed more teams to apply from anywhere and will also allow a larger group of attendees. While we will miss the in-person event, we are excited to host all of you that might not have been able to travel to these cities. Remember to RSVP!
Jay Newton-Small is CEO and founder of MemoryWell, a national network of more than 700 writers who tell the life stories of seniors to help improve their care. Previously, Jay was Washington correspondent for TIME Magazine, where she remains a contributor. At TIME she covered politics as well as stories on five continents from conflicts in the Middle East to the earthquake in Haiti and the November 2015 Paris terror attacks. She has written nearly a dozen TIME cover stories and interviewed numerous heads of state, including Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush. She authored the 2016 best-selling book, Broad Influence: How Women Are Changing the Way America Works.
Before TIME, Jay was a reporter for Bloomberg News, where she covered the White House and politics. Jay received an M.S. in journalism from Columbia University and undergraduate degrees in International Relations and Art History from Tufts University. She is a 2017 Halcyon Incubator fellow, a 2016-2017 New America fellow and a 2015 Harvard Institute of Politics fellow. She is the 2016 winner of the prestigious Dirksen Award for congressional reporting and the 2016 Deadline Club award for community service reporting.
What made you want to create MemoryWell and what is your ultimate goal?
MemoryWell grew out of my experience caregiving for my father, who had Alzheimer's. When I moved him into a senior community, I was asked to fill out a questionnaire about his life. This made no sense: who would remember pages of hand-written data for 100+ residents in that community?
Instead, as a longtime TIME Magazine correspondent I wrote his story and it transformed his life.
Two of his caregivers were Ethiopian and they'd had no idea he'd served in Ethiopia early in his United Nations career. They became his champions, asking him for hours about working with Emperor Haile Selassie. MemoryWell was born.
When I write for TIME, it’s about the richest, most powerful people in the world for an audience of millions. When we write for MemoryWell, we’re writing about the other 99%, in this case seniors. The audience for each story may only be 20-50 people, but the impact on that life is much more profound.
Whilst we got our start in senior care, we have pilots starting with hospitals and insurers. We are amidst a telemedicine evolution—hastened by Covid—and never has healthcare felt so estranged from empathy. Trust between patients and doctors is low, particularly amongst minorities. We believe that stories are what’s needed across the health care continuum, putting the heart into the tin man of care.
We envision health care where a short bio of every patient is on the front page of every electronic health record, so health providers can treat people rather than symptoms. And the data that we pull from our stories can help improve outcomes with researchers and make care more holistic across the board.
What has the building process been like for you and your team through this unprecedented year?
Anyone who’d been in senior communities pre-Covid knows how isolating they are. No one knows anything about anyone. Staff turn over at an annual average rate of 75%. Covid has exacerbated this, cutting off family for, potentially, years.
Keeping seniors safe from coronavirus comes at the high cost of social isolation. Research shows loneliness is as damaging to health as obesity or smoking 15 cigarettes a day; 40% of seniors say they feel more lonely since the start of Covid, according to a SeniorList poll. Our platform enables seniors to reminisce and connect with distant family.
What makes MemoryWell so unique?
Using writers to tell stories may sound old school, but our digital platform is far from pen and paper. To augment the brief stories, we have built multimedia digital timelines, allowing far-flung families and paid caregiving staff to connect by sharing memories and updates.
MemoryWell is the most comprehensive biographical solution available on the market today. We are the only company that a) uses professional writers, b) digitizes the data in a searchable way, c) makes stories directly relevant to care and d) offers two-way input from both families and staff.
We have competitors in the legacy space, looking to capture life stories; and we have competitors in the healthcare space using different technologies to engage in person-centered care. But we are the only solution that combines storytelling and applies it to humanizing patients and improving their outcomes with data mined directly from the source, the patients themselves.
Never before has this information been more vital: to help patients be known and transition between health care settings when families can’t be there for them.
Thank you Jay! We look forward to hearing you pitch on September 30th. Don’t forget to RSVP!