A shared caregiving log
CareCircleLog holds the running record of your mother's week: what she takes and when, who is driving her Thursday, what the aide noticed on Sunday night, and what the cardiologist actually said. Your brother in Denver, the weekend aide and the care manager all open the same page, and it is current.
Sunday, 7:40 a.m.Ray marked the 8 a.m. metformin as given. Diane saw it before she left for the pharmacy.
The daily gap
Three siblings, one aide, two pharmacies and a cardiology office. The information exists. It is just scattered across a group text, a paper calendar on the refrigerator, a notebook in the aide's bag and one daughter's memory.
A message thread scrolls. By Thursday nobody can find whether the doctor said to hold the water pill or double it, so somebody calls the office again and waits on hold for the nurse line.
2.4 hours a week spent asking questions the family already answeredYour sister does the morning visit, you do the evening, and neither of you knows for certain whether the 8 a.m. blood thinner went in. One doubled dose is an ambulance and a night in the emergency department.
$2,800 for one avoidable ER visit after a doubled doseShe noticed the swelling in your father's left ankle on Tuesday and wrote it down. The family heard about it at the next appointment, eleven days later, from the physician assistant.
$34 an hour paid for care the family cannot seeEveryone assumed someone else was driving to the 2:15 neurology follow up. Nobody was. The office charges for the no show and the next opening is in October.
$75 to $175 in no show fees, plus a six week waitHow it works
Set it up once on a Sunday. After that the log fills itself as people do the things they were already doing.
Type each drug, the dose, the times of day and the pharmacy that fills it. The refill countdown starts from the date on the label, so you learn about the last five pills on a Tuesday morning instead of a Saturday night.
Drag the rides, the meal drop offs, the med pass and the check in calls onto a rotating roster. Whoever holds a slot gets the reminder by text, and the slot turns coral on the family board until it is claimed.
A given dose is one tap. A note is one sentence. The aide checks in through a private link with no account, no password and no training call, and her note lands in the same timeline as your sister's.
Print the visit summary on the way out the door: current medications, what changed since the last visit, the aide's observations and the three questions the family wants answered. Hand it to the front desk and stop reciting it from memory.
Refill countdownLisinopril: 5 days left. Assigned to Marcus, pickup Thursday at the Walgreens on Fulton.
What you get
Every piece here came out of a family that lost something: a dose, a ride, a note, an afternoon.
Every drug carries its dose, its schedule, its prescriber and the days remaining before the bottle runs dry. When a hospital discharge changes the list, you mark the old line as stopped and the history stays readable.
Your home health aide taps a private link on her own phone, marks the shift tasks and adds a note in her own words. Nothing to install, nothing to remember, and her observations reach the family the minute she leaves.
An appointment is not booked until a driver's name is on it, so the 2:15 neurology follow up cannot sit there unassigned. Each visit carries the address, the parking note, the copay and the reason your father is going.
Write what the doctor said in plain language, tag it to the parent and the condition, and it joins a timeline you can print. Families take the one page summary to specialists who have never met the rest of the care team.
Set the pattern once and the roster moves the Saturday visit, the pharmacy run and the Sunday phone call around the circle. The board shows at a glance who has carried the most hours this month, which ends a lot of quiet resentment.
One button produces the sheet a triage nurse asks for at 3 a.m.: medications and doses, allergies, conditions, surgeries, the pharmacy, the primary care number and who holds power of attorney. Families keep a printed copy in the glove box and one on the refrigerator.
What changes
Measured across 1,206 circles that had been running at least 90 days when we surveyed them in January 2026.
The reminder goes to the person holding the slot, not to a group where everyone assumes someone else has it. If a dose is still unmarked 45 minutes later, the log escalates to the next name on the roster, and the primary caregiver sees the gap before bedtime rather than at the next refill.
That is the time families used to spend on status calls, repeating the same update to two siblings and an aunt, and hunting for the note about the diuretic. The circle reads the log instead of calling, so the daughter who carries the most weight gets her Saturday morning back.
The medication list, the recent changes, the aide's observations and the family's questions are already in one place, so preparing means pressing print. Front desk staff at cardiology and neurology offices tell our customers they wish every family arrived with the same sheet.
Aides check in from their own phones through a link, so a shift note takes under a minute at the end of a visit. Agencies use those same entries for supervisory review, and families finally know what happened on the Tuesday they were at work.
From the circles
Three of the people who keep a parent's week upright, in their own words.
My brother and I fought for two years about the pharmacy. Not about money, about who called. Now the log says Marcus picked up the lisinopril on Thursday at 4:10, and the fight is simply over. My mother's neurologist asked me to email him the visit summary after her last appointment, which has never happened in nine years of taking her.
We staff 34 caregivers across Rhode Island and the biggest complaint was never the care, it was silence. Families called our office at nine at night to ask how the shift went. Since we put the check in link in every aide's phone, those calls dropped to almost nothing, and my scheduler stopped playing telephone between a daughter in Boston and an aide in Cranston.
I handle discharges for about forty client families. The dangerous window is the 72 hours after a hospital stay, when the medication list has changed and nobody at home knows it yet. I rebuild the board in the client's log the same afternoon, mark the stopped drugs, and the son who does the evening pass sees the change without me calling him twice.
Plans
Pick the plan that matches how many people you are keeping upright. Nobody pays per sibling, per aide or per phone number.
One adult child, a small circle, one parent at home.
$12 per month
Siblings in different states, a paid aide, a real rotation.
$29 per month
Home care agencies and aging life care managers.
$59 per month
Every plan is billed monthly in US dollars and can be cancelled at any time from the account page. No setup fee, no annual contract, and your export stays available for 60 days after you stop.
Questions families ask
Straight answers, written by the person who supports these accounts.
Plans start at $12 per month for One Parent, $29 per month for Family Circle and $59 per month for Care Team. We do not bill per person, so adding your brother, the weekend aide and your mother's care manager costs nothing extra. Family Circle is the plan most households pick, because the aide check in link and the duty rotation are the two pieces that stop the phone calls. Billing is monthly in US dollars and you can stop it yourself from the account page.
Plan on about 25 minutes with the pill bottles in front of you. You type the drug name, the dose, the times of day and the pharmacy, and the refill countdown starts on its own from the fill date on the label. Families with a long list usually enter the morning pass first, invite one sibling, and add the evening pass the next day. If you would rather not type it all, send us a photo of the discharge medication list and we will build the board for you within one business day.
Only the people you invite, and only the parts you give them. Notes are encrypted in transit and at rest on servers in the United States, and each member holds a role: family members see everything, aides see the shifts and tasks assigned to them, and a read only guest such as a nephew sees the calendar without the medical detail. We never sell records, we run no advertising trackers, and we do not train models on your family's notes. You can remove any member in one click, and their access ends immediately.
Appointments and duty slots publish to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar and Outlook through a private subscription link, so the ride to the cardiologist lands on the driver's own calendar. Refill countdowns are date based rather than pharmacy connected, which means they work the same whether the prescription comes from CVS, Walgreens, a grocery chain or a mail order plan. Patient portals do not open their records to outside tools, so we go the other way: the visit summary prints or exports as a PDF you can hand to the front desk. Agencies on Care Team can export hour totals as CSV for payroll.
Cancel whenever you need to and the plan stops at the end of the month you have already paid for. Before it closes you can export the whole log as a dated PDF and a CSV file, which families often keep for the estate file or hand to a sibling who is settling affairs. We keep a closed account readable for 60 days in case you need it again during a difficult stretch, then we delete it. There is no cancellation fee and no phone call to sit through.
It works, because most of the circle never has to open the site. Whoever holds a duty slot gets a text message with the task and replies with a single word to mark it done, and the aide checks in through a private link with no account and no password. The people who want the full picture, usually the primary caregiver and one sibling, are the ones who sign in. We built it after watching three families abandon a shared spreadsheet in under a month for exactly that reason.
Kitchen Table Care
Our magazine covers the money, the paperwork and the daily logistics of keeping a parent at home. Three of the newest reports are below, and every figure in them can be traced to a public program rule or a real invoice.
Practical guide
A hospital stay rewrites a medication list in ways nobody explains at the door. Here is how to compare the discharge summary against the bottles at home, catch the holds and swaps, and finish with one list everyone trusts.
Read this report
Comparison
Two services arrive at the same front door and do completely different jobs. What Medicare covers after a hospitalization, what an hourly aide does instead, and how most families end up using both at once.
Read this report
Mistakes to avoid
Most families discover the hole in their paperwork at the worst possible hour. These are the errors that leave an adult child unable to talk to a doctor, a bank or Social Security, and the fix for each one.
Read this reportNine reports on discharge rights, aide rates, fall prevention, Medicaid stipends and PACE, written for the person holding the pill bottles.
Start your circle
Send the shape of the situation: how many people help, what medications are involved, whether there is a paid aide. We will walk you through a live circle set up for a family like yours, and you will know inside twenty minutes whether this fits.
We reply within one business day, usually the same afternoon, and a person reads every message. If you would rather write directly, use jimenezjulien42@gmail.com.