Before there was a platform, there was the problem I was living.
I am a husband, a father, a son, and an older brother, so I know what it feels like to carry the weight of a family. This photo is my wife and my daughter. What it does not show is everyone else I was trying to hold up at the same time: my parents, in their early seventies, and a 94-year-old woman near us, someone we love, whose fall and fading mobility meant she needed more help than any of us could give from where she was.
I kept running into the same impossible math. Keep an aging loved one close enough to actually show up for them, or take the only open bed, an hour away, and let them be alone. Families get forced to choose between being near someone and getting them the right care. That never sat right with me.
So I set out to change it. No team. No outside funding. Just me in Fort Collins, Colorado, and a stack of AI tools running most of the day. This is the honest version of what that has actually looked like.
What I built
PatientSwaps is a transfer-matching platform for senior living communities. When a resident moves out, it surfaces matching options at other facilities in the network based on operational factors like bed availability, payer, distance, and timing, so the room can fill faster. When a direct swap is not available, it can form multi-facility chains. The facilities make every clinical decision. I am the software layer.
CareSwaps is the family side of the same network: families looking to move a loved one closer to home feed demand into the same matching engine.
What AI did, and what it did not
AI did a massive amount of the work: the code, the dashboards, the automations, the day-to-day building. What surprised me is how much a single person can own now.
It did not make the calls for me. I still had to own the architecture, decide where patient data is allowed to live, build the HIPAA data boundary and the Business Associate setup, and hold the compliance posture together. AI is leverage, not a replacement for owning the decisions that matter. A few years ago this would have taken a team and a raise.
Why I am sharing it
I think one person plus AI can now ship things that used to require a company, and I want to document what that actually takes in a real, regulated field like healthcare. Not the highlight reel. What worked, what broke, and what I learned as a team of one.