Lifetrend. Making Advance Care Planning Easy.

When carrying out Advance Care Planning, we want to focus on the person who is making his/her wishes known. People are often ill at ease in talking about the “D” word, but Advance Care Planning is not about death; it is about addressing the quality of life while we are living. It actually brings relief when we make plans about our healthcare decisions.

            Lifetrend, founded by local Rhinebeck resident Joel Herm, is on a mission to use technology to easily provide personalized Advanced Care Directives to as many people as possible. The company’s unique, bi-lingual Advance Care Planner arms physicians, nurses, and caseworkers to create legal, high quality, detailed Advance Directives through an iPad application. Resulting documents can be used to inform and direct family, significant others, and healthcare team members about what to do when an individual is facing critical end-of-life issues. Empowering people to live their end of life as they have directed is at the core of Lifetrend. Joel and his team have a passion for using technology to help change the healthcare landscape. They see this app as a way to empower people to have an end-of-life conversation with their doctor and give them peace of mind.
 
The Lifetrend Team:
            Joel Herm, Founder, Lifetrend LLC, is a software design entrepreneur with 30 years experience in high-security systems, focused on ease-of-use healthcare apps that are person-centric and which profoundly benefit patient and provider alike.
            Robin Goldsmith has been working in the digital health innovation space for the last several years. As a caregiver for his mom, he sought out digital tools to help him on his journey and thankfully found Joel and Lifetrend. Through personal experience he has seen the benefits of the Lifetrend app for the caregiver and patient. 
            Deborah Starr PhD, Columbia University, is a licensed therapist in California, with a dynamic background in psychology and neuroscience. See her "Plain Talk" video: http://www.theintima.org/multimedia-2 
            Charlotte Michos, RN, MS, CNS, CLNC, of Red Hook, NY has over 30 years of experience in the health field, including end-of-life and advance care planning. She values the personal-centered care approach and serves in helping others make informed decisions.
            As a nation we do not have a great track record at planning for our future medical decisions, but a good time to make a change is now. On April 16th we recognize National Healthcare Decisions Day. The process begins with a conversation, and it really is a huge disservice if we walk away from the subject. Most everyone would like to provide input about their medical treatment, but just don’t know where to start the conversation. Lifetrend’s program has questions built into the software to help get the conversation started. We all have thoughts, values, and emotions to express as well as potential religious, economic or cultural preferences. In the March 19th NY Times article, “Dying, With Nothing to Say”, reminds us “while nearly everyone has a fantasy of a last conversation with someone they love, very few people actually have it.” In addition to Joel Herm’s design expertise, he notes: “Our work just might help a few people to have profound conversations...that would be real success in my book.”