Founder, LTCareNav & CareBloom | Author | Care Advocate | Writer | Advisor | Social Media Marketing Specialist | Blogger | Copywriter
Ask most founders how they price a product for people in crisis, and you get a discount, a sliding scale, a hardship tier. Lindsay Friedman removed the price. Families who use LTCareNav pay nothing, and they never will. They are not a lead. They are not being sold to. The provider network funds the platform so that a daughter calling at midnight about her father gets help, not a pitch. Within months of launch, LTCareNav has partnered with CarePatrol and a growing roster of providers across long-term care.
The Aide Who Kept the Patent Portfolio
Lindsay Friedman is the founder of LTCareNav, the Cleveland-based long-term care planning platform she started in March 2025 and launched at the end of that year, and of Care Bloom, the home monitoring product she founded in 2017. She is a certified nursing assistant who has worked in memory care units, nursing homes, assisted living, and private homes, and she is also the former CEO of an AI mixed-reality company whose patents were acquired in 2020. Most people building technology for elder care have done one of those things, not both.
Thirty Years That Look Like a Mistake on Paper
Her record does not read as a straight line, and she does not pretend it does. She received a business degree at John Carroll University and worked as a nursing assistant in memory care. While she was still in school, she wrote a screenplay about her grandmother, which she later turned into a book, and the writing led her into ghostwriting and eventually into her first technology company. She founded WritingRoom.com in 2006, where I learned how to program, and ran it for a decade on the premise that everyone has a story and almost everyone freezes in front of a blank screen. She then became co-founder and CEO of FlipSnap, a mixed reality application whose machine learning engine cut people and objects out of video backgrounds in real time, on a phone. Its patents and intellectual property were acquired in February 2020.
In 2015, while all of that was transpiring, she began caring for her grandmother. It was the first time she understood that being a paid caregiver is nothing like being a family caregiver.
“Then my own family needed care, and I became the granddaughter and daughter instead of the aide.”
Caregiving became a full-time job, the unpaid kind. What she saw from that side was not a shortage of information. Information exists everywhere, in fragments a family has to assemble while losing sleep and losing income.
“You cannot design for that from the outside.”
Her first answer to it was Care Bloom, founded in 2017, which puts a smartwatch on the person receiving care and sensors in the home so a caregiver can see vitals, location, and how the day actually went. It lets people age in place longer and gives families some peace of mind about the hours they are not in the room. But monitoring answers what is happening now. It does not answer what happens next, and that was the question families kept arriving at without a map: what level of care is coming, what it will cost, how anyone is supposed to pay for it, and which documents should have been signed years earlier. By March 2025 she was building for that gap instead.
The resume that produced it looks wrong until you line it up against the problem. Almost three decades of writing and caring for others had trained her to say hard things in language a frightened person can absorb, which is an unusual skill to point at Medicaid eligibility rules and powers of attorney. The caregiving gave her the family’s side of the room. The technology companies gave her the ability to build. She is clear-eyed about how the combination reads.
“Almost 30 years of writing, caring for people who couldn’t care for themselves, being a family caregiver, a background in tech, and a patent portfolio is a hodge-podge of a resume. But for this problem, it is the right one.”
The Family That Came Back for Their Father
A family starts with an assessment covering current care needs, health trajectory, affordability, legal readiness, and a check-in on how the caregiver is holding up. What comes back is a plan: the level of care needed now, what is likely coming, what it will cost, how to pay for it, including Medicaid and Medicare pathways, which legal documents are missing, and which local resources they qualify for. They are then matched to vetted providers, many of whom discount for LTCareNav families. Medical and financial professionals helped design and review the underlying models before any family saw an output. But it doesn’t stop there; professionals are in place to help you understand, digest, and implement your plan. As Friedman puts it, the platform generates the plan, and real people validate it.
The early traction is lopsided toward the supply side, which is the point. More than 190 provider accounts nationally, 30-plus on the waitlist, and providers reaching out daily. A national partnership with CarePatrol. More than 40 corporate referral partners. Integration into three other elder care software platforms as their long-term care planning solution. And 900 assessments completed since January, with no ad spend behind any of them, because the company built into the places families already are instead of buying attention. Friedman is equally direct about what the model is not: LTCareNav is not a lead aggregator, and it does not sell families to the highest bidder.
One case shows what the plan is actually for.
“This family did not come to us for their mother. They came to us for their father.”
Mom was already in memory care, placed fast and under pressure, and the placement had cost the family more than money. They could not agree on what should have happened. So when they looked at Dad, they were not asking how to get through the week. They were asking how not to do that again. They arrived believing they would have to sell the house to pay for Mom’s care, and they did not have to. Protections existed for a spouse still living at home, and nobody had told them. Friedman’s team walked them through what could be protected, connected them to the professionals who could execute it, then built Dad’s plan for now rather than for the day it breaks: what in-home care would look like, what it would cost, roughly how long it could carry him, and the signs that a move had become the safer choice.
The house stayed. The plan sits in a drawer with names and dollar figures in it, and a family that could not agree on anything now has one document they all agreed to.
“They got with Dad what nobody gave them with Mom. Time to decide.”
The same conviction runs through The Caregivers Compass Podcast, 21 episodes in and releasing Wednesdays, where every guest is a vetted provider from her network. Most families, she points out, hire someone off a list in a week when they cannot think straight; the podcast lets them hear how a person talks about their work first. Twenty-one conversations later, the professionals who do this every day keep handing her back her own instruction.
“Start earlier than you think you need to.”
What Nobody Gave Them With Mom
The economics only work in one direction. A platform that billed families would reach the ones who could pay, at the exact moment another line item is impossible.
“Families in crisis do not have room in the budget for another bill. The moment you charge them, you lose the people who need it most.”
The providers on the site are not paying for access to desperate people. They are paying to be found by families who are still a year out, while the good options are still on the table. Lindsay Friedman has spent enough time in the corridor to know what happens to the ones who arrive late.
“By the time the hospital calls, the menu has already shrunk.”
Nobody sends those families a bill for the plan. What she is handing them instead is the one thing that has never arrived with a hospital phone call: time to decide.
Lindsay Preston Friedman is the founder of LTCareNav and Care Bloom, based in Cleveland, Ohio. A Certified Senior Advisor, certified nursing assistant, and family caregiver, she builds long-term care planning and caregiver support tools for families deciding how to care for aging parents, free for the families who use them. To connect with Lindsay or learn more, visit lindsay friedman | LinkedIn or ltcarenav.com.
