Ishanya Anthapur: Welcome to AI-Powered Caregiving, a podcast where we take on the stories of how technology is changing the world of aging care. Today’s guest is someone operating right at the intersection of rural health, innovation and impact. I’m joined by Lisa Lavin, founder and CEO of Ōmcare, a company building autonomous in-home medication dispensing systems.
Lisa’s work is tackling a critical challenge in aging: medication adherence. It’s a challenge for anybody, even me — making sure you take the right medications at the right time every day, without adding any burden to caregivers who are already stretched thin. She started with a career in marketing at 3M before evolving into a seasoned operator, and ultimately a serial entrepreneur building and scaling ventures across healthcare and technology. Lisa, welcome to the pod.
Lisa Lavin: It is a pleasure to be here. Thank you.
Ishanya Anthapur: Zemplee and Ōmcare met through the Ascend Rural Senior Care Innovation Accelerator in Minnesota, where we’re both working to bring impactful tools to rural Minnesotans. Can you introduce us to Ōmcare and tell us why it’s a good fit for rural health?
Lisa Lavin: Ōmcare is a digital health technology company. We’ve created a home health hub designed to bring together everything that enables remote care and medication management in the home. It also provides a portal for care teams and caregivers to connect remotely — to see someone’s status, and even just to have a social connection. It’s all about medication management. It’s about bringing care into the home where it’s needed most. And it’s about connecting the disconnected, especially in rural communities.
Ishanya Anthapur: What inspired you to build this? Was it something you noticed, something personal, or did you just see the need? And how did you decide to start a whole company around the idea?
Lisa Lavin: As you probably can relate, and so many people listening can relate, the path to anything meaningful is never a straight line. So many of us have experiences in life that inform who we become. Since I was a child I’ve had two passions: animals and older adults. You might laugh at that — they sound unrelated. But they share something very profound. Both depend on someone else to advocate for their care when they need it.
As I went through my career, every single role gave me a different lens into the same question. How do you innovate and address the cracks in our system, where loved ones fall through when no one is watching? Then for me it got personal. Growing up, one of the most important people in my life was my grandmother. As I watched her age, I realized that the most dangerous moment in healthcare isn’t the surgery or the diagnosis. It’s the moment when a person goes home, closes the door, and is alone with a bag full of prescriptions and no one is there to help. That’s where the system fails, quietly, every single day.
I’ve spent thirty-plus years circling that problem from every angle — pharmaceuticals and pharmacy, teaching, radiology, developing devices, healthcare operations, consulting — and all of it led to one place: founding my own company to help get the right care to people at the right time. That company is Ōmcare.
Ishanya Anthapur: So you had a background in a lot of different parts of the healthcare ecosystem.
Lisa Lavin: Yes. I was in academia for a while, teaching. I was in marketing. I was in sales. I was in operations. I was even in healthcare administration. All of it circling the same issue I kept seeing everywhere I went: we have cracks in our system that need fixing.
Ishanya Anthapur: Do you have any sense of why it’s so hard for people to focus on the rural healthcare ecosystem, or on these cracks around older adults and aging infrastructure? What’s behind the habit of forgetting these parts of the American healthcare system?
Lisa Lavin: If we look at rural America today, nearly 80% is considered medically underserved. I think it’s important to look at a real-life situation, so let me paint a picture. A 78-year-old woman in rural Minnesota misses her blood pressure medication two days in a row. There’s no pharmacist down the street to catch it. The nearest pharmacy is thirty miles away, and it closes at five.
She starts feeling dizzy. She falls. There’s no home care agency scheduled, because there’s no home care agency nearby serving her zip code. So she’s on the floor for hours before — thank God — a neighbor happens to check in on her and calls EMS. The nearest ER is 45 minutes away. By the time she gets there, what started as a missed $4 pill has become a $45,000 hospital stay, a potential fractured hip, and the beginning of a decline that so often leads to permanent institutional placement.
Here’s the deal. Seventy-five percent of the 65-plus population take five or more medications. Forty-five percent of everyone over 65 takes ten or more. Yet 50% of everybody taking medication right now, as we speak, is non-adherent. Medication non-adherence is the leading cause of hospitalization and a leading driver of people ending up in assisted living. Whether we’re talking rural or anywhere, if we can’t give people a way to access care and medication management where they need it — the home — we’re going to end up with bigger and worse problems in our rural communities.
Ishanya Anthapur: I love the story you painted, because it highlights the disparities in rural health. That critical window for treating someone is just massively increased. Distance, but also fewer people coming and going. In your story it happened to be a neighbor checking in. In rural communities people may not interact for 24 or even 48 hours.
When you were designing the Ōmcare Home Health Hub, did you envision building it for the older adult, for the exhausted family caregiver trying to keep up with their own life and their loved one’s, or for the professional caregiver at a home care agency?
Lisa Lavin: I love the question, and I’d say all three. But if we’re going to be honest with each other, we have to admit it’s the caregiver who’s breaking. The senior needs the medication and the remote care. The caregivers need some way to extend their reach and do more with less. But it’s the daughter who’s calling three times a day from 800 miles away — Mom, did you take your pills? She’s the one who can’t sleep at night.
One in five Americans is an unpaid family caregiver right now, as we speak. Most of them are simultaneously working, taking care of kids, holding down a job, and carrying the guilt that they can’t be in two places at once. We built our hub so that a caregiver can see their loved one, confirm medication was taken, and have a real human moment together through our two-way video platform right on the device. So it’s not surveillance — and that’s what’s really important when we’re talking about these platforms. It’s about connection, and it’s about peace of mind.
Ishanya Anthapur: That’s one of the things I appreciate about the Ōmcare Home Health Hub. If you haven’t seen a picture of it, go online and look it up, because it’s really unique. It’s not only dispensing the medication — you may have seen tools like that — what’s unique is the built-in video communication platform.
Family caregivers want visual confirmation. You can ask your loved one, did you take your meds, how are you doing? But they aren’t always in a position to give you the most accurate information. A lot of family caregivers, myself included, just want that visual confirmation. How do they look today? I want to see them, I want to talk to them. We can’t always see someone in person, especially if they live far away or rurally. Can you talk about how the rural community is also short-staffed for caregivers, and how the medication actually gets to someone’s doorstep? Is a family caregiver loading it, or the older person themselves?
Lisa Lavin: When you’re coordinating care in an urban setting, you’re coordinating between existing players. You’ve got the primary care physician, the pharmacy, the home health agency, the health plan. In a rural community those players simply don’t exist. There’s no home care agency. The pharmacy is closed. The nearest specialist is two hours away.
That’s the reason we developed the hub and integrated directly with national pharmacies, so that we can serve as the last mile of the pharmacy in the home. We’ve built the enablement of a new infrastructure, because we have to bring care into the home rather than expecting the patient to navigate to care — which can be close to impossible in a rural community. That’s what the platform does. It turns the home into the point of care. The hub dispenses medication that the pharmacy ships directly to the door. The caregiver connects via video. The clinician gets real-time adherence data. You’re not coordinating between buildings anymore, you’re coordinating through a connected device on someone’s kitchen counter.
Ishanya Anthapur: You launched a rural health innovation initiative in Lanesboro and Whalan, Minnesota — towns with fewer than 900 residents between them. What have you learned from the model deployed out there? How is Ōmcare addressing the medication access problem in rural communities right now?
Lisa Lavin: I give a lot of credit to the mayor of Lanesboro, Mayor Alicia Pearson, for seeing the writing on the wall. She took office in January of 2025, and one of the first things she heard from her residents was: we want access to care in our community. We don’t want to have to drive more than thirty miles to get it.
So Mayor Pearson started reaching out to see if she could bring somebody in. No healthcare provider, no pharmacy, would come into their town, because there simply aren’t enough people to support the infrastructure. That’s why beautiful communities like Whalan and Lanesboro are medically underserved.
What we’ve done is launch a six-month pilot study testing a virtual-first care model, with partners Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota and PharMerica National Pharmacies. Participants receive the Ōmcare Home Health Hub in their home. Prescriptions are prepackaged and pre-sorted in multi-dose pouches and delivered directly to the home, eliminating that thirty-mile drive. The hub dispenses the medication on schedule, confirms adherence, and connects them to caregivers and clinicians through the built-in video platform. We’re also filming a documentary alongside the study, to capture the real impact — the human voices of the participants, the families, the community leaders actually testing this model. What we’re trying to answer is whether technology combined with remote care can make it possible to age safely and independently in a small town, without leaving the community you love. We say yes, and we’re planning to prove it.
Ishanya Anthapur: On the topic of that documentary, which I think is such a great idea — I can see your sales and marketing background coming into play. How can we access it? Do you know roughly when it’s going to be released?
Lisa Lavin: The study is still underway, so we’re going to be filming throughout, and probably afterward as well, to capture the impact we’re making. Quite frankly, the whole purpose of filming it is this: if we’re talking about how you replicate a model, the first thing replication requires is awareness that the model exists.
That’s one of the big reasons we wanted to film it. But we also know that the story of rural health deserts, and of people who have become invisible, creates awareness of a problem that exists in 46% of all counties in Minnesota. Eighty percent of areas in the United States have at least one rural health desert. So it’s an awareness creator, and hopefully a way to show that a new model is possible — one that brings care to rural communities so people can age in place. The documentary will likely be available sometime in 2027, maybe halfway through.
Ishanya Anthapur: You’ll keep us posted. It hearkens back to what we were talking about: these communities are sometimes overlooked or forgotten, and a documentary shedding light on these stories is exactly what’s needed. The huge federal rural health initiative is finally shining some light on these communities too — on the problems, but also on the impact we can have. We’re at a ripe moment in history to change how healthcare is delivered in America, especially for rural communities and older adults.
Ōmcare is part of the Rural Aging Transformation Alliance through Ascend Rural in Minnesota, alongside Zemplee and Syncara Virtual Home Care, run by Shanna Eckberg. It combines ambient monitoring, medication management and care coordination into one integrated model. When all three pieces are in play, how do you see caregiving changing? What becomes possible for that caregiver that isn’t possible today?
Lisa Lavin: Here’s what we’re hearing from every corner of the market right now — whether it’s a health plan, a home care operator or a family caregiver. They’re all saying the same thing: we’re tired of point solutions. We’re inundated. There’s an app for everything, a device for everything. The last thing they need is to be required to implement and integrate them all. What they want is for those things to come integrated for them.
Providers don’t have the bandwidth to vet, let alone integrate and implement, dozens of disconnected tools. Consumers just want something that works and is easy. That’s why we’re proud to be part of this Rural Aging Transformation Alliance with Zemplee and Syncara. It’s not three separate products stitched together. It’s one integrated, turnkey platform — ambient monitoring, home care, medication management and the two-way audiovisual platform — with Syncara tying it together through care coordination and implementation, so providers and families all work from the same real-time data.
What becomes possible? This is what I love about it. It’s the daughter in Chicago who’s able to sleep through the night. It’s a doctor who can adjust medication based on real adherence data, not guesswork. It’s a fall that gets flagged before it happens. It’s a senior who gets to stay in her home, in her community, living independently with dignity.
Ishanya Anthapur: What I’m excited about is seeing that people can stay in the home, be comfortable, and have care provided from a distance — with the level of care improved. Caregiving at this stage is overloaded with operational tasks, and the Alliance is designed to take that burden off the caregiver, leaving more time to spend with their loved one and dig into the whys rather than just the whats. If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about aging in America, what would it be and why?
Lisa Lavin: I would want to end invisibility. In our country we treat aging like something to manage quietly, out of sight. We warehouse people in facilities. We exhaust family members without supporting them. We wait until there’s a crisis — a fall, a hospitalization, a death — before we pay attention.
If I could change one thing, it would be this: that we invest in people at home with the same urgency and resources we invest in putting them in hospitals. Prevention, not reaction. Connection, not isolation. Dignity, not decline. The technology exists. The pharmacy partnerships and alliances exist, like ours. The will of the family certainly exists. What’s missing is the system-level commitment to say that aging in your own home, in your own community, is a right, not a luxury.
Ishanya Anthapur: Very well put. And the thing is, it’s coming for everybody. We’re all going to get older. The sooner we all sign on, the better. Are there any books, shows or pieces of media you’re absorbing that you’d like to share with our listeners?
Lisa Lavin: As a caregiver, I really loved Being Mortal by Atul Gawande. It changed the way I think about what it means to age well, versus just age longer. I also recently saw a really good PBS documentary, published in 2025, called Aging in America: Survive or Thrive. What I love about it is that it covers the statistics, and what a rapidly aging population means for healthcare economics and society — but it also talks about how we make nursing homes obsolete. Wouldn’t that be kind of cool?
Ishanya Anthapur: I love that idea. Nursing homes as they exist today are doing good work, but they can definitely afford to be modernized, upgraded, even phased out where possible. And that becomes possible with something like our Transformation Alliance, where we bring a suite of tools into one solution for aging at home. Anything you’re reading or watching just for fun that you’d recommend?
Lisa Lavin: Oh my gosh, fun. I’m so busy right now. What’s fun? I don’t know. I’ve got nothing for you.
Ishanya Anthapur: That makes total sense. You’re a CEO. You’re an ambitious, busy woman.
Lisa Lavin: My team, if they’re watching this, would probably say, yeah, she’s very serious.
Ishanya Anthapur: You’re like, my emails.
Lisa Lavin: Yeah, I’m reading my email. Actually, I will admit — to unwind at night, I can keep rewatching Ted Lasso over and over again, because that show makes me laugh and lightens me up. So I recommend Ted Lasso.
Ishanya Anthapur: That’s a great one. Love that. Well, Lisa, thank you so much for coming to AI-Powered Caregiving. It was lovely to kickstart our rural health series, and we’re so happy to have you here.
Lisa Lavin: It was an honor to be here. Thank you so much.
Ishanya Anthapur: Thank you.
