Dementia support
for you
Caring for someone with dementia is complex, ever-changing, and plain difficult. Our Medicare-approved and fully-paid dementia care services can help to Stabilize immediate needs and Manage long term needs.
Certified by Medicare as a GUIDE program dementia care provider.
We are HōttoCare.
“Hōtto” means “a sigh of relief” in Japanese.
Dementia care shouldn’t be this hard. We make it easier.
If you are supporting a loved one with dementia or early memory loss - especially if you are noticing unsteadiness, aggression or behavioral changes - contact us for immediate help.
HōttoCare is a comprehensive dementia care service.
Stabilize Short Term Issues
Assess if your loved one or patient has dementia or early memory loss
Get strategies to deal with a new diagnosis of dementia
Understand if medications are causing aggressiveness or behavioral changes
Get 24/7 dementia care support
Manage Long-Term Care
Get a personalized care plan and roadmap
Develop strategies for better home or facility care
Optimize care with regular check-ins
Get a rest break, with $2500/year in Respite Care
Click the button below to check if your loved one or patient is eligible for this FREE Medicare dementia benefit.
How HōttoCare Works
Personalized
Care
Personalized dementia clinical care with medication, labs, & referral management by physicians.
Flexible &
Urgent Help
Text us - and we’ll give you support right away.
Caregiver
Support
We get you a $2,500 yearly allowance for
respite care so you can rest.
100% Covered
Services are covered by Medicare as part of the GUIDE program, and there are no hidden fees.
Medicare’s GUIDE Program: An improved dementia care experience
Why I Chose HōttoCare
HōttoCare service options:
Choose what is right for your family, when you are ready
Dementia Diagnosis & Stage
Virtual Visits
Medication Management
Orders for Labs & Imaging
Home Health Referrals
Communication with your existing Care Team
In-Home Assessments
Shareable Comprehensive Assessment & Action Plan
Resource Navigation
$2,500 yearly allowance for Respite (Caregiver Time Off)
Caregiver Coaching
Peer Groups
Multilingual Support
Who is Eligible?
HōttoCare is available to people who:
Are experiencing cognitive decline, or who have a dementia diagnosis
Have original/traditional Medicare with or without Medi-Cal
Live at home, assisted living, memory care, or personal care home (not a nursing home)
Are not enrolled in hospice or PACE program
Reside in Northern California (Caregivers may live anywhere)
HōttoCare Team Roles
Our Physician-led team of dementia experts will give you insights into your loved one's needs, help you problem-solve challenges, and get you connected to a kind, competent community.
Everyday Support
Care Assistants
We’re available by phone or text, and help you with onboarding and everyday needs. In times where you need clinical or care navigation support, we’ll get you connected right away!
We may also do a one-time home assessment to learn more about you and your needs.
Care Navigators
We partner with patients and caregivers to follow the care plan and give ongoing support.
We connect with you by messaging, phone calls and occasional video visits, and may also support you by conducting a one-time in-home assessment.
Clinical Care
Physicians
We create care plans, manage medications, and when needed, join your discussions with our care team. We verbally talk with your doctors about changes to your medication list.
Internally, we oversee our entire team to keep everyone connected on your care, and train teammates to keep everyone on top of the latest science and best practices - ensuring that you receive the highest quality of care.
Advanced-Practice Clinicians
When you message or call HōttoCare with medical questions, we’re the people to respond! We can provide medical visits by video or phone, manage your medications, and place orders for the labs and meds you need. We’re trained as Physician Assistants or Nurse Practitioners.
Social Workers
We lead caregiver group sessions and support complex case discussions, offering you personalized and practical solutions for your complex needs. We’re trained as Licensed Clinical Social Workers.
Clinical Care Providers
Meet the dementia-specialized physicians, physician assistants, and licensed clinical social workers who will care for your loved one or patient.
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Yumi Taylor, M.D.
She/Her
Founder, Head of HōttoCare
Dr. Taylor has dedicated her career to caring for aging adults, beginning as a caregiver in a community group home and later as a primary care physician. Her first role was in her rural hometown delivering care across the full continuum—hospital, rehab/post-acute care, home visits, nursing homes, free clinics, Medicaid clinics, and her office. This hands-on experience, typical of small-town doctors serving predominantly aging adults, gave her a deep understanding of the broken model of care.
Seeking to tackle system improvements, Dr. Taylor returned to academics at Stanford for executive training in healthcare management and technology. From there, she led a multidisciplinary team of clinicians, engineers, and designers at Sutter Health, a large healthcare system, innovation center, and health plan to develop a modern, virtual, team-based primary care model called Tera that exceeded quality benchmarks and patient experience metrics. While originally designed for younger, healthier patients, the model became a lifeline for family caregivers of aging adults losing independence.
The team leaned into diagnosing dementia in existing primary care practices, providing flexible communication with family caregivers, and removing high risk medications.
Recognizing the need for a more comprehensive approach, Dr. Taylor founded HōttoCare, a wrap-around clinical and social support model for individuals with dementia and their family caregivers.
Dr. Taylor loves being outdoors and exploring new foods with her family which includes 2 teenagers and an unforgettable wiener dog.
Medical Training: UPenn, Stanford
Practice Experience: 19 years
Board Certification: Internal Medicine, Clinical Informatics
Dementia CME: Harvard, UCLA/Alzheimers Association
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Sharon Tapper, M.D.
She/Her
Physician
Sharon Tapper is a physician with a passion for helping seriously ill people, their families, and caregivers. She is dedicated to improving the quality of life of those in her care. After losing family members to cancer and surviving cancer herself, Dr. Tapper switched her focus from Primary Care to Palliative Care and Hospice.
Dr. Tapper created a Bay Area home-based Palliative Care program designed to meet the needs of seriously ill people wherever they reside. She understands the critical role caregivers play in supporting those with dementia and the needs of people with memory loss.
In addition to her clinical practice, Dr. Tapper was chosen as a Medicare Innovation Advisor.
She is also an American Red Cross Hero.
Dr. Tapper enjoys nature, reading, gardening and traveling. Her greatest joy is seeing her children and grandchildren some of whom live in Norway and the Netherlands.
Medical Training: University of Maryland, UC Davis
Practice Experience: 35 years
Board Certification and Fellowship Status: Internal Medicine, Palliative and Hospice Medicine
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Hao Huang, M.D.
He/Him
Physician
As a physician with extensive experience in asynchronous care, Dr. Huang brings a unique perspective when it comes to aging populations and patients with dementia. From his experiences in remotely managing adult patient panels, and seeing the types of follow-up that are required for different kinds of patients, he has seen first-hand that traditional office-based visits are inadequate to meet the multiple and complex needs that arise in elder and dementia care. He believes that more and more, technology can help to patch some of these deficiencies as it continues to evolve, with oversight from multidisciplinary teams such as we have at HottoCare.
Dr. Huang is California-licensed, board certified Family Medicine physician with over ten years of practice experience in the San Francisco Bay Area. A California native and an undergraduate of University of California Berkeley, he obtained his medical doctorate at the University of Toledo, OH, and did his Family Medicine residency training at University of South Florida in Clearwater, FL. The latter being an area of high median age, Dr. Huang was exposed early on in his training to the unique trials and tribulations when it comes to elder and dementia care. He returned to the Bay Area and practiced five years of clinical medicine, focusing on adult primary care, before shifting his focus to asynchronous care.
In previous lives, Dr. Huang was an aspiring journalist and an aspiring academic biologist. Now he is happily married with one child on the way. In his free time, he enjoys hiking, gaming, sports/sports journalism, and anime.Medical Training: University of Toledo (OH), University of South Florida
Practice Experience: 10 years
Board Certification: Family Medicine
Dementia CME: Harvard -
Gunnar Johnson, P.A.
He/Him
Physician Assistant
Gunnar enjoys working within the Hōtto team to help patients and family caregivers navigate through challenging moments of their lives. He understands each patient is unique, so it is important to him that patients know their personal story is heard. From there, patients and providers can work together to implement a plan that both satisfies their personal desires, as well as meets their medical needs. This is especially beneficial for our dementia community.
He has significant experience caring for persons living with dementia. For the past several years, he has worked as a physician assistant in the emergency department. During this time, he has personally witnessed the complexities associated with dementia care. Not only is the patient's health an utmost priority, but you must also factor in their overall wellbeing, the caregiver and family wellbeing, and the resources available. Even relatively minor issues can become much more complicated. Successful dementia care certainly benefits from a team approach that takes into account all of the little things. Prior to his PA career, he worked on an ambulance within the EMS system. He has seen first hand the challenges and nuances that dementia care can bring for patients, caregivers, and family members, alike. It is because of this firsthand experience that he is so encouraged about the wrap-around services provided by HōttoCare!
In his free time, he enjoys hiking, surfing, and spending time with family and friends. He is from the Bay Area and completed his PA training in Atlanta, Georgia. He is also a big Bay Area sports fan!
Medical Training: South College (Atlanta GA)
Practice Experience: 2 years
Board Certification: CA Physician Assistant Board Licensed
Dementia CME: Harvard
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Ann Blick Hamer, LCSW
She/Her
Social Worker
Ann is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with over 35 years of experience working with older adults and their families. She facilitates several support groups for caregivers coping with the challenges of dementia, Parkinson's Disease and grief. Ann develops training for volunteers and caregivers and education for older adults in the community.
Ann was the Director of the Adult Day Health Center at the San Francisco Institute on Aging for 10 years and she later developed and implemented Memory Assessment Clinics at Kaiser Permanente. Ann enjoys working with the diverse population of older adults in the bay area and learning how culture informs our caregiving.
Ann received her Bachelor's degree from the University of California, Berkeley and her master's degree from the University of Chicago.
Ann is proud to be a San Franciso native, enjoys the parks, museums and theater in The City. She loves to travel, read and her new interest is watercolor painting. She admits that she has much more enthusiasm than talent!
HōttoCare is a trusted part of our local healthcare ecosystem
We’re grateful to caregivers from these organizations for inviting us onto their care teams
These logos list organizations whose providers or caregivers trust HōttoCare with their referrals. While there’s no formal partnership, we’re honored to support their patients with compassionate care.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Your involvement in the program is entirely up to you!
Our goal is to support you as a caregiver in whatever capacity you request - immediate needs, caregiving education, to long-term planning.
After completing the onboarding process and care plan development, the only "mandatory” participation required is a monthly to quarterly telephone check-in with your care navigator. You decide the duration of this discussion.
You can also take advantage of other optional enrichment resources like more frequent check-ins, virtual education sessions, and peer group sessions.
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Our Onboarding Process and Care Plan Development have two parts: the completion of forms and a video assessment with a Care Navigator. We take the time to get to know you but also understand that most caregivers are busy. We will guide you through quick, bite-sized forms - just 2-3 minutes each. You set the pace on completing these. The video assessment with one of our Care Navigators takes 15-20 minutes. There is no travel involved.
Following the Onboarding Process, the time you commit to HōttoCare is up to you. Depending on the stage of Dementia, certain individuals are eligible for a Home Assessment as a free benefit. This takes 30-60 minutes. We travel to you.
The Care Navigator will do routine Check-Ins by telephone, usually monthly, and you decide the length of the check-in. There is no travel involved
We offer routinely scheduled Dementia-related Optional Education and Peer Group Virtual Sessions, to deepen understanding of Dementia, provide tools as a caregiver and build community. These are 60-90 minutes long. Participation with these are optional. No travel involved.
Once a year, there is a Re-Assessment to measure Dementia progression, again done through quick, bite-sized surveys, each 2-3 minutes each.
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Starting in Summer 2025, we will provide a one-time in-home visit to make professional recommendations for environment changes that can maximize remaining independent at home for as long as possible. This is a free benefit for individuals past a certain stage of their Dementia.
When regular in-home support is needed, we will get support for you through home health, palliative, and hospice agencies.
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Yes! We offer you assistance with securing in-home respite care and facility based care (Day Programs and overnight facilities) through Medicare.
During the onboarding process, you will have a chance to elaborate more on your specific needs and concerns that we can address.
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Enroll and log-in to medicare.gov.
However, if you are still unsure, we can verify eligibility by filling out our Welcome form!
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The individual with Dementia keeps their existing healthcare team.
We are an additional benefit and our focus is to provide exceptional, specialized Dementia support, pay attention to the details, and coordinate with your existing healthcare team.
We become the easiest point of contact to help the journey feel less lonely. That’s a win!
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You do not need a diagnosis of dementia! Our clinicians can make a diagnosis of dementia. We do the cognitive testing and can order labs and imaging if needed. You'll also be given a detailed explanation of the results in your care plan.
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Your primary care doctor & neurologist (as relevant) will get a copy of your care plan. When there are major updates, our physicians will either send them an email, text message, staff message or talk with them on the phone.
Your care navigator may sometimes ask to join your visit with them to support care coordination. -
Decades of research on similar programs at academic centers and in Europe showed these services reduced caregiver burnout and doubled the time patients were able to remain at home. In turn, this saved tax payer dollars by delaying time to nursing home care. Medicare is funding this program to expand these benefits into the broader community.
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If you are fortunate to be in an early stage of dementia, proactive learning & planning, sets you up for a smoother journey! Prevent some "fires” by planning ahead. You don't have to “reinvent the wheel” because we give you a roadmap on what to expect and key areas to prepare. The discussions with family take time and can involve the person with cognitive impairment in a meaningful way while they still have decision making capacity. Financial planning, delegating roles and responsibility, wishes at the end of life, living options based on finances, what to expect with behavior challenges are a few examples.
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Yes as long as you also have Medicare. In fact, many of our patients have Medi-Cal as a supplemental plan to Medicare.
