Jeryn Laengrich, MS, CCC/SLP is a 1989 graduate of the Harding CSD program. She immediately pursued a master’s degree at the University of North Texas and embarked on a normal course of providing speech therapy services in various areas of healthcare.
As she progressed further into her career, Jeryn witnessed first-hand how difficult and stressful the complicated world of healthcare can be, especially as members of her own family were diagnosed with neurological disorders—her grandmother with Alzheimer’s, both her parents with Parkinson’s and other family members with diseases like dementia.
Jeryn has spent the last 17 years taking on the responsibilities of caring for her parents who have battled Parkinson’s. With so much of her personal life being wrapped up with caregiving, along with working in healthcare systems her entire career, Jeryn was often left wondering where the “care” in healthcare had gone.
Thankfully, Jeryn’s connections in the healthcare community provided her opportunities to work with some of the new and upcoming innovations in healthcare looking to improve the healthcare experience. In 2013, Jeryn connected with one company she believed truly was working to put the “care” back in healthcare.
The company was called Cariloop and it worked to help relieve the stress and anxiety all family caregivers feel. Jeryn felt God was leading her to use her life experience as a caregiver and as a healthcare professional to walk families through the stressful caregiving moments she had experienced herself. Jeryn joined the Cariloop team in 2013 and is now the company’s Chief Service Officer.
As Chief Service Officer, Jeryn oversees Cariloop’s team of Healthcare Coaches, who guide family caregivers through the many challenges they face as they try to take care of their loved ones. This business model was inspired by the obvious gap Jeryn and the rest of the Cariloop team observed in the care coordination process.
When a medical emergency takes place and a patient enters the hospital, a world of responsibility often falls on the patient’s family members in determining what’s next. While hospital social workers do all they can to provide resources for families as they determine what’s next, the hospital social workers’ contact with the family ends as soon as the patient is discharged.
This lack of ongoing support for family caregivers also plays itself out when loved ones leave the doctor’s office after receiving a serious diagnosis or are simply beginning to decline in health. The question for all families in any of these situations always remains: Where do we go from here? What’s next? How do we provide the best care for our loved one?
With these challenges in mind, Cariloop’s core belief is that no one should go through caregiving alone. That is why Jeryn helped develop a coaching model that connects struggling caregivers with licensed or certified healthcare professionals who are available to provide dedicated, ongoing support for any of the wide variety of challenges families face on their caregiving journeys.
Communication between caregiver and Healthcare Coach takes place on a HIPAA-compliant, cloud-based portal, which allows the caregiver and the rest of the family ongoing access to the support of their Healthcare Coach any time a new question or concern arises. Families can also store important caregiving documents such as MPOAs, living wills and DNRs on the portal so they can easily access these documents for medical personnel in the event of an emergency.
Having access to a dedicated healthcare professional who knows the details of a caregiver’s situation and has helped families through similar challenges before has been the key to improving the caregiving experience for Cariloop members. When there are so many challenges needing to be solved with so little time to find answers, Cariloop’s members have an experienced Coach to turn to who will help shoulder the burden of caregiving for them.
With an experienced Healthcare Coach at their fingertips, families are able to focus more on being present with their loved ones and spend less time worrying and researching what’s going to happen next. Having this peace-of-mind led one Cariloop member to write,
“When I was first introduced to Cariloop, I was overwhelmed with my wife’s disability. I didn’t know that there was this kind of help out there for me. I got some great guidance and help solving some of my issues, and the person that got the most out of all this was my wife. I feel so much better. I am able to look at my wife as a loving husband and not so much as a burden.”
Cariloop’s Healthcare Coaches have backgrounds in fields such as social work, nursing, therapy and more. They walk with families through a wide variety of caregiving challenges, from finding appropriate doctors and specialists to understanding Medicare/Medicaid coverage to researching care facilities, and much more.
Above all, Cariloop’s Coaches have a passion for service and for meeting caregivers where they are in their most stressful caregiving moments.
If you would like to learn more about Cariloop or have any questions at all, feel free to reach out to Jeryn directly at 972-232-7561 x101 or email her at jlaengrich@cariloop.com.