Care Across America
"Care Across America, an Approved Senior Network® Podcast"—your go-to source for engaging conversations and practical insights from home care and senior care experts across the United States. Each episode will spotlight industry professionals, and their referral networks, sharing impactful stories, proven strategies, and innovative solutions in senior care. This podcast is perfect for professionals, adult children of aging parents, and family members struggling with senior care choices and care.
Care Across America
From Trigger Event to Trusted Care: How Aviva In Home Care Delivers Reliable, Concierge-Level Support Across the Bay Area
A hospital stay changes everything—routines, risks, and the decisions families must make under pressure. We open the door on a boutique, white-glove approach to home care that moves fast when life turns, and moves thoughtfully when families want time to plan. With Evan Loevner of Aviva In Home Care, we explore what it takes to deliver reliable, compassionate support across San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, and the Alameda Valley without losing the personal touch.
We talk through two pathways into home care: urgent trigger events that demand same-day or next-day starts, and slower, intentional transitions that let siblings and parents get aligned. Evan breaks down how owner-led care management, a small client census, and a large caregiver network create both intimacy and resilience. Backed by Honor’s nurse oversight and process rigor, Aviva can respond to health setbacks, update care plans quickly, and ensure caregivers follow best practices and physician directives—so the care stays safe, adaptive, and human.
Transparency and trust are constant threads. Families receive daily shift notes, access a secure portal, and coordinate decisions in real time, whether they live nearby or across the country. Caregivers benefit from clear directions, strong training in memory care and chronic conditions, and easy documentation—improving morale and continuity. We also detail the safeguards that matter: licensing, Live Scan background checks with ongoing alerts, drug testing, and thorough employment verification. If you’re weighing agency care versus hiring privately, this conversation demystifies the tradeoffs and shows how a layered backup system protects against missed shifts and mismatches.
If this resonates, follow the show, share it with someone making care decisions, and leave a review with the one question you still want answered—we’ll tackle it next.
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Hi, my name is Evan Lovner. I run Aviva in Home Care, and I've been doing so since 2014. We established the agency in San Francisco at that time, and we've expanded our services to actually four counties with the help of our strategic partner. I have a strategic partner who helps us really optimize the business and become a white glove concierge-level service agency. We service the counties of San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, and Alameda Valley.
SPEAKER_01:You guys have grown tremendously over the last several years, and it's so great to work with home care agencies that are growing and expanding. And that's a really big service area for you. So that's awesome.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you, Valerie. Yeah, it's in large part due to the really wonderful partnership we have with Honor Care. Honor helps us with really the more difficult parts of the business, which are finding really great care professionals. Because, as Valerie, in our business, the biggest pickle is getting reliable, solid care professionals. And they are so good at it. So we really optimize our business for our clients. It also frees up my time. And my right hand Gal Hazel, who's my client services director, it frees up both of our time to be more so with clients. So we do a lot more hand holding. We are uber attentive to every client that we have in terms of our personal time, which I think is very atypical for most agencies. So you actually have an owner who's spending more time and a director providing that level of basic care management, which I think is so vital for a good care experience.
SPEAKER_01:And I know that you guys emphasize care management as one of your concierge type services that you guys offer. Care management can be complicated and challenging when you have multiple physicians and hospitals and family members involved and care providers. So it's great that you guys incorporate that care management piece and you're able to do that because have a little bit of weight lifted off your shoulders about where the caregivers are coming from. You have an excellent setup and a great backup system for caregivers. So tell us more about what happens when I'm an adult child, I'm 54 years old, my mom is 75, I may live close by, or maybe I live all the way across the country. And I call Aviva, and what can I expect? What happens? I think one of the things we try to do is help people understand that when you call, there's a series of things that happen. And so what happens in your office?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and I think, Valerie, it's somewhat dependent on the nature of the situation as people engage in different ways with home care. In a lot of cases, excuse me, it's a trigger event. It's due to a hospitalization, something unexpected. It's a very emotionally charged situation. Obviously, we're trying to be providing some of the calm amidst the storm, talking to families in person about how we approach care, about how quickly we can start working with them. If it is that type of situation where it's a trigger event, we can often get out to the family the same day or even the next day. And we do an intake, like most agencies do, where we sit down with the family, collect all the information we need to set ourselves up for a successful relationship. And that can be done in the hospital, in the home. We really want to go to the client because getting eyes and ears on the client is so vital. So we do that again as quickly as possible. And in some cases, we're needing to staff quickly. It can be same-day staffing or next day. It can be challenging, but in in some cases, we need to do that. So we make it happen. The other scenario is where there's a more general decline and people are bringing us in for respite care potentially for a spouse, or they just see a situation where the care has been needed and they've come to grips with the fact that we need to start having folks in the home helping myself or helping my loved one, what have you. And we sit down with the family members in a bit more relaxed time frame because it's not so rushed and talk through our approach, what we can provide, how our caregivers work, again, collecting all the necessary points we need to make sure that the care happens. Usually, then we're going to a point where we go into staffing and we try to set up some form of care within a few days. Sometimes it takes families a longer period of time. Not everybody is necessarily copacetic. The kids might feel one way and the parents feel another way. So it can be a process of talking through the utility and the value and what to expect. And that might take some time to gel. So we might go in once, we might go in twice, it might stretch to a period of months where we actually have that conversation and it's all fine. Everybody moves in their own pace, but we try to move as quickly as we need to.
SPEAKER_01:When I call the office and I get a hold of you or Hazel, and that's pretty much you guys manage this with all the caregivers and all the that come from Honor and with all the clients. I have to say, when I go down this road, what I'm saying is that it is refreshing that you guys, you two of you who've been together for a long time in this business, Hazel's been with you for many years, maybe from the beginning, I don't know, but that you guys together are able to go out and really give that extra touch and that white glove service and really make sure the families are comfortable with what's going on. That that makes that makes a huge difference.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's a really great model because again, we have through our relationship with Honor, we have nurses on staff who ensure that we're following best practice with every client, ensure that we're complying with doctor's orders. They jump in if there's any sort of health setback or, God forbid, occurrences within the home, a fall or somebody gets sick. And the nurses then step in and do a more intensive form of care review to make sure that, hey, if these care plans need to change, let's change it in the right way. Or did the caregiver respond in the right way to a specific situation? So together, through Hazel's and eyes, care management and honors support and oversight, we're really optimizing the care. So it's a great model for clients.
SPEAKER_01:That's wonderful. And what would you say? I mean, besides this, which is having the owner or the care manager or the office manager, care manager. I know Hazel wears a lot of hats. And you do too.
SPEAKER_00:More than me, probably, but yes.
SPEAKER_01:But when uh what would you say sets you guys apart? You've been around for a long time now. And if you weren't really good at this, you wouldn't have survived. You're in a very competitive environment. What would you say set you apart besides that one-on-one conversation with an owner or a the care manager?
SPEAKER_00:I think it's more than a conversation. I think the the again, the contact with the owner is pervasive throughout the whole life cycle, the whole relationship with the client. So that is a key part of it, Valerie, is that we are in some rare cases going out and even filling in a gap in care if that happens. And that is myself or Hazel doing that. So we will bend over backwards to make sure that a client is not missing a shift or put in some awkward situation because of our uh caregiver's inability to make it on a day for some reason or what have you. So that is really a differentiator. There's very few agencies, especially where the owner would go out and intervene. Yeah, that's exactly my own horn, but that is fairly unique.
SPEAKER_01:And we get that is very unique, especially in a bigger agency where you guys are serving a nice size set of clients. It's still very manageable for you. I love it that you're very involved.
SPEAKER_00:So that's one thing. And then secondly, with honors process orientation and really technology that is, I would say, state of the art. And people think about tech in this business and they're like, oh, how important is that? There's a lot of stuff that you don't see happening behind the scenes, the way that we are optimal in terms of scheduling people, making sure that people understand when they're going to specific clients, moving people around if we have to avoid those gaps in care. The training systems are really state of the art. So we're making sure that everybody is well-briefed in terms of memory care or specific aspects of how do I handle a chronic certain chronic disease that might be more rare. We're making sure they're briefed and competent in working with those types of clients. That's another thing. Also, the communications platforms that we're able to offer clients, everything is cloud-based, which means, in reality, you can get shift reports pushed to your email every day. If you have siblings or relatives out of state who want to stay in tune or dialed in to what's going on with regards to mom or dad's care or uncle's care or whatever, they can log into a portal, check it out, get an email report to understand what's going on, even as go as far as blocking or favoriting caregivers online. It affords clients a very sort of real-time open communication system that is not that common. I think we're still in a very paper-based industry, which does not lend itself to real-time, real-time communication. So our system definitely does that.
SPEAKER_01:That's great. Yeah, the communication piece is what it used to be, everybody would say pick one person to be our main contact. And that still is a good idea. But now anybody who really wants to be involved can download the app or log in or get an email or a notification if they want to, and all get the same information at the same time. So it's you're right. It's still a very paper-based world and a very it's hard to manage when a lot of people want information. However, when you have state-of-the-art system set up, it's much easier for those families to be able to talk to each other and say, Did you see that report? Maybe we should have another add another caregiver tomorrow or another shift. Or maybe he's doing great. That's so nice to see. Yeah, that's pretty nice.
SPEAKER_00:And how I think it also one comment I would make Valor too is it makes we're much more professional and pleasant in a way, environment for the caregivers to work in. In some maybe even direct way, it makes our caregivers more loyal, happier, because they can take notes easier and share information easier and understand directions a lot more easily than they would in a more archaic system.
SPEAKER_01:That's really nice to hear that Honor has done such a good job with this piece of it and the communication and all the technology that goes behind it. And I think they started in your area. So I'm guessing they do a really good job where you guys are too.
SPEAKER_00:So yes, they did. They did exactly.
SPEAKER_01:So that is really nice. Is there anything else about Aviva that you would think that you think that a an adult child would want to know before they call a home care agency? I know there's lots of questions that people should be asking, but what would you recommend that people be asking about a home care, asking a home care agency before they sign?
SPEAKER_00:I'll answer that in three different ways. Number one, things about us. If I can speak to my own background a little bit, I'm an ex-hospital administrator. I'm a healthcare careerist. I've been in healthcare for over 20 years. I have a master's in in healthcare administration. So I again, not that this makes me tremendous, but it does afford me some level of competence and rigor to bring to the business that I think a lot of agencies don't necessarily have. And it's in large part why I decided to work with ANV, because I think the marriage of those two things, having a company to work with that is equally knowledgeable and process-oriented is very, very valuable and benefits our clients tremendously. So that's one thing. In terms of what else people should know, one aspect of our model, again, we have a census right now, Valerie, just to paint a picture of 31 clients, which is fairly small, small, medium-sized ish in terms of agencies around here. We've never had more than 35. I don't know that we'll ever get to a 50, 60 client agency. So we're not, we'll never be huge. But on the other hand, because of the Honor Partnership, I have access to about 425 caregivers throughout the four counties that we work with. What that means are faster starts of care and also more reliable backfills. So for clients, the reliability factor goes way up. Even the choice factor, because it's not the marriage between caregiver and client, doesn't always work right away. And we know that. Sometimes it's just an energy thing or some other aspect of the relationship that's not quite clicking, in which case we can switch people out. We have people to choose from and other people to draw from. All of those things make working with us, I think, a lot easier and a lot more comforting because you know that we're going to backfill, we're going to get things done, and we're going to get really good people to work with your loved one.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I think, you know what, that we talk about agency versus hiring someone privately, and there is no better example of this than a Viva. If you want to make sure that if that caregiver is sick or they have a flat tire, or there's something else, their children are sick, that there is a backup plan on top of a backup plan on top of a backup plan to help fill that role while that person is out. Hiring an agency, first of all, provides that level of assurance. But when you have in Viva's case, it's layers of backup plans, which is really nice. Right. So that's great. And I would say all the licensing and all of the background checks that you can explain and all of those things are also questions that people should be asking anybody that they have. Sure. Any agency.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. As a licensed agency, obviously, we're complying with state mandates, which means that everybody's fingerprinted background checked against the same systems that the police departments and the fire departments use, which is called the live scan database. I'm sure it's that way in many states. But they're checked 10 years back against the FBI and the Department of Justice databases. And it's a live database. So if we hired someone two, three years ago, and then a felony comes onto their record, like a DUI, for example, we get notified. So it's a dynamic, constantly updated database. And of course, we drug test, we go thoroughly into employment backgrounds and such. So these people are very thoroughly vetted and of course trained.
SPEAKER_01:That's great. Yep. I think safety is one thing that adult children, especially if they're not right there or they can't be there during the day, they they worry about and fully spot with all of those, all of those things put in place, and that makes it a very trustworthy service. So I appreciate that. And I love it that you're able to talk to us about Aviva and all the benefits of using Aviva for the San Francisco area because you have a there are a lot of home care agencies to choose from. But if you want a very nice boutique, concierge, white glove service, I think you guys you really are the choice.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you, Valerie.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you for talking to us.
SPEAKER_00:My pleasure. Thanks very much.
