Touching Hearts at Home of the Capital District provides personalized, non-medical companion care to older adults across New York’s Capital District, helping older adults remain safe, supported, and connected in their own homes.
Led by Executive Director and part-owner Jennifer Harvey, a geriatric social worker, the agency takes a person-centered approach to care. Its team of more than 100 care partners supports approximately 80 older adults across Albany, Rensselaer, Saratoga, and Schenectady counties.
As the agency grew, maintaining that personal approach meant finding better ways to coordinate care, keep families informed, and support the people delivering care every day.
The challenge: Keeping everyone connected without adding to the office workload
For Touching Hearts, communication is central to delivering great care. But the agency’s existing tools and processes made it difficult for families, care partners, and office staff to communicate efficiently.
The central agency office had become the go-between for everyone. Their platform for scheduling and care documentation, WellSky, only allowed for one-way push notifications to families. The portal lacked any kind of two-way messaging and responses to notes were not visible to families.
When families wanted and care partners needed to share more timely updates, they sometimes exchanged personal phone numbers to communicate more quickly. That created an inconsistent process and made it harder for the agency to maintain visibility into conversations about a client’s care.
In addition to the inefficiencies, Jenn noted there was a disconnect between the personalized experience they were promising and the communication they were actually facilitating.
“We’re encouraging communication and connection, but then it all falls on the office to be the go-between of all of that,” said Harvey.
In addition to the communication challenges, care partners were struggling with documentation. At the end of each shift, care partners entered notes into WellSky and also wrote in a paper binder kept in the client’s home. The binder offered a record that families and other caregivers could reference. But that meant double the paperwork for care partners and remote family members could not see the record.
The agency needed a better way to bring everyone together: one that supported timely communication, gave caregivers access to relevant care information, and reduced administrative friction without compromising the personal nature of its service.
The solution: A shared communication and care record with Maia Care
After learning about Maia Care from a mutual connection, Harvey quickly recognized an opportunity to solve the communication challenges facing her team.
Touching Hearts launched an 18-week pilot with 46 care partners and 22 clients. Adoption grew steadily in the first 6 weeks of the pilot, with 68% of care partners using Maia to track notes, events and exchange messages weekly.
The team focused on several practical improvements:
1. Give families, care partners, and office staff a direct way to communicate.
Maia Care’s care circles gave everyone involved in a client’s care a place to exchange messages, ask questions, and share updates in real time. Over 30 family members participated in the pilot.
Touching Hearts created a shared care stream for families, care partners, and office staff, alongside a separate stream for agency employees to discuss internal care coordination when appropriate.
This made it easier to keep the right people informed while preserving the office’s role in managing boundaries and expectations.
2. Help caregivers learn from one another and coordinate care more effectively.
47% of care partners reported that using Maia Care helped avoid confusion or crisis. Care partners could access colleagues’ notes and ask family members questions. For instance, a simple question about where a client should get a haircut was answered within minutes instead of hours and phone calls. In other cases, care partners could more easily share observations with other caregivers supporting the same client.
For lead care partners who cover shifts or step in when someone is on vacation, Maia Care made it easier to understand what had been happening with a client before arriving at the home. Instead of relying on a paper binder or tracking down the office, they could review previous notes and care snapshots.
3. Replace duplicate documentation with an accessible record of care.
Maia Care gave the team a place to document care and review historical notes, reducing the need to maintain a separate paper binder alongside WellSky.
Families could also contribute information, helping build a fuller picture of a client’s needs and circumstances.
For an agency that often helps families navigate broader aging-in-place challenges—not just the immediate tasks of a care visit—this shared information was particularly valuable.
The impact: Better communication, more efficient workflows, and greater visibility into care
The pilot quickly demonstrated value for families, care partners, and the office team. Harvey described the feedback on communication as overwhelmingly positive, with benefits extending beyond the original goal of connecting people more easily.
Families and care partners felt more connected.
Once family members started using Maia, they kept using it, and 78% logged in daily. One family member valued being able to reach all caregivers, including substitutes, at once. Care partners said they appreciated getting real-time feedback from families.
Harvey believes this more collaborative approach to care will help build stronger job satisfaction, which she continues to track across her care partners.
Small problems got solved fast, and bigger ones got caught early.
Most care partners reported that the Maia app helped avoid confusion, and family members said the same thing. 56% of family members reported that the increased, real-time communication helped avoid confusion or crisis.
When a care partner needed to know a client’s preference, the family answered in minutes instead of after hours or days of back-and-forth through the office. In other cases, visible notes helped families and the agency spot a change in a client’s condition before it became an illness or a trip to Urgent Care.
Care partners spent less time duplicating documentation.
One of the most immediately appreciated changes was eliminating the paper binders. Care partners no longer needed to enter the same notes in two places, and they could look back at previous care updates digitally.
“They’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is so nice.’”
— Jennifer Harvey, on care partners no longer having to document in two places.
Over 60% of care partners reported that the Maia Care app made day to day work more efficient.
The office gained a more efficient way to manage day-to-day communication.
78% of care partners reported that the Maia App improved care coordination within the agency. Written messages in the app gave staff another way to handle questions and routine updates without every interaction requiring a phone call. That helped the office respond more efficiently while preserving time for the conversations that genuinely needed personal attention.
Better visibility helped one family recognize a changing need for care.
One client’s daughter began seeing more real-time updates about her mother, who has dementia. With a clearer picture of what her mother was experiencing day to day, the daughter recognized that her mother needed additional support and increased the hours of care provided by Touching Hearts.
For Harvey, this illustrated a benefit that extended beyond communication itself: when families have a better understanding of what is happening, they can make more informed decisions about their loved one's care. The result is mutually beneficial — the client receives improved care and the agency can increase client hours.
Looking ahead
For Touching Hearts, Maia Care represents a way to strengthen the agency’s care model while preparing for families’ growing expectations for accessible, timely information.
Harvey believes better communication can help agencies build stronger relationships with families, support care partner retention, and identify changing care needs earlier. Those longer-term effects, including potential reductions in emergencies and hospital visits, remain opportunities to measure over time.
Maia Care has helped Touching Hearts take a practical step toward making the work of caring for older adults easier, not more complicated.