Lily Vittayarukskul once imagined building rockets. As a child, she won a NASA competition with a homemade water rocket and later interned at NASA. She expected science and aerospace engineering to shape her future.
Then her aunt was diagnosed with cancer.
Because her aunt spoke limited English, Lily's mother became the translator, appointment companion, and primary caregiver. The family quickly learned that serious illness extends far beyond medical treatment. There were unexpected expenses, disrupted work and school, caregiving responsibilities, and the quiet exhaustion of trying to keep a family functioning.
Lily was 16.
Years later, that experience became the foundation for Waterlily, an artificial intelligence platform designed to help families estimate when long-term care may be needed, how much it could cost, and how they might prepare financially.
The most important part of the story is not the technology or the funding. It is where the idea began.
She Did Not Begin With AI
Lily did not begin by asking, "What can we build with artificial intelligence?"
She began by asking, "Why was this so difficult for my family?"
That distinction matters.
Some of the least useful technology begins with a solution searching for a problem. Someone becomes excited about artificial intelligence, automation, or a new platform and then tries to find a place to insert it.
The strongest healthcare technology usually develops in the opposite direction. It begins with someone who has seen the problem up close: a nurse who knows where documentation repeatedly breaks down, a caregiver coordinating several specialists, a patient struggling to obtain understandable information, or a family discovering too late that Medicare and health insurance do not cover every form of long-term care.
The technology comes second. The problem comes first.
Aging Is Not One Industry
Planning for long-term care may involve healthcare, family caregiving, insurance, retirement savings, housing, legal documents, transportation, and decisions about whether someone can remain safely at home.
Families experience all of those systems at once, even though each organization usually addresses only one part of the problem.
The physician discusses the diagnosis. The insurance representative discusses coverage. The financial advisor discusses assets. The home-care agency discusses staffing. The adult child is left trying to turn four separate conversations into one workable plan.
That is one reason families feel overwhelmed.
Artificial intelligence may help families organize information and consider possible future scenarios. Its greatest value, however, will not come from producing an impressive prediction. It will come from helping people make better decisions before they are in crisis.
Personal Experience Is Expertise
Healthcare and technology companies often talk about the importance of domain expertise. Usually, that means professional credentials or industry experience, and those things do matter.
But lived experience is also a form of expertise.
A caregiver understands problems that may never appear in a workflow diagram. She knows that medical instructions can be correct and still be impossible to follow while working full time. She knows that two appointments scheduled on the same day may look efficient on a calendar but leave an older parent exhausted. She knows that a recommendation to "consider home care" is not a plan until someone explains the cost, availability, family responsibilities, and what happens during the hours when no caregiver is present.
That knowledge should not be treated as an anecdote added after a product has been developed. It should help shape the product from the beginning.
The best healthcare AI will not be created by engineers alone. It will be built with nurses, caregivers, patients, social workers, therapists, insurance professionals, direct-care workers, and the families who live with the consequences when systems do not work.
The Story Should Guide the Technology
There is an understandable temptation to focus on what an AI platform can do. How many data points does it analyze? How quickly does it generate a result? How many scenarios can it compare?
Those capabilities may be valuable, but families will judge the tool by more human standards.
Does it help us understand our choices? Does it give us enough time to prepare? Does it make a frightening situation feel more manageable? Does it help us have a difficult conversation before an emergency forces it upon us?
Those are not technical questions. They are human ones, and they should remain at the center of healthcare innovation.
The best healthcare AI does not begin with what technology can accomplish. It begins with what people are struggling to carry.
Waterlily's story resonates because it did not emerge from an abstract interest in artificial intelligence. It grew from watching a family become overwhelmed by illness, caregiving, financial uncertainty, and systems that did not prepare them for what was coming.
That is the kind of origin story healthcare innovation needs: not technology searching for somewhere to belong, but a real human problem and the determination to make the journey easier for the next family.
Brightway Reflection
What healthcare or caregiving problem do you wish someone would finally build a thoughtful solution for?
Share your thoughts in the comments or contact Brightway Aging Advocacy to continue the conversation.
Susan McDonnell, RN, BSN Founder, Brightway Aging Advocacy
Helping older adults and the people who love them navigate healthcare with clarity, compassion, and confidence.