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By Nichole Villegas – Reporter, Pacific Business News

Nov 19, 2025

Story Highlights

• Vivia Cares charges by task instead of hourly minimums.
• Gregory Leong joined as chief strategy officer in September.
• The company expanded from Hawaii to Washington state recently.

Gregory Leong joined Vivia Cares Inc as chief strategy officer in September to help the company rapidly scale and transform the way home care is delivered to seniors in Hawaii and across the country.

Vivia Cares, which launched in Aiea in 2006 and has long served Maui and Oahu, recently opened an office in Washington state, introducing its hire-by-task rather than hire-by-hour home care model to the Mainland.  

In addition to expansion across the states, Leong is working to expand Vivia Cares to the other Hawaiian Islands and create partnerships with adjacent industries to better serve seniors in their home. The company recently launched a pilot with nationwide Medicaid provider Centene, called Ohana locally, to provide services to its clients.

What does the future of home health care look like, and how is Vivia Cares leading that future growth?

Hookele Home Care, a wholly owned subsidiary of Vivia Cares, Inc., is the traditional homecare company – that is a model where they price by the hour. … Vivia Cares has a different model, which we call Vivia, which is this task-based model where we’re providing solutions and we’re charging by task, not by the hour. So, traditional home care models charge by the hour, and what that means is, typically, you have a minimum of four or eight hours, so if you need a feeding or a bath, and you need a caregiver to come, most caregiver agencies would say, “Well, it’s a minimum of four hours.” Customers would say, “I just need 30 minutes or 40 minutes for a bath, or I need a check in.” Very few, if any, home care companies provide that. …

When Vivia pivoted, they were asking customers what they wanted, and this was the feedback: They wanted it by task. … So, each caregiver is assigned a neighborhood that they cover, and instead of covering one or two clients in a four-to-eight-hour day, they can now cover 15 to 20 clients in the overall neighborhood. But what that did was by now having island-wide coverage, these [business-to-business] institutions started coming and said, “Hey, can you take care of this constituent base?” … Customers are changing. Typically, when you think about senior care and home care, you think about just the end customer being the kupuna, and that still remains the same, but now, Vivia’s customers are hospitals and insurers and the Veterans Administration and Triple A and the state government. So, those are B2B contracts, which don’t typically exist in this space.   

What is the role of technology at Vivia Cares, and how are you shaping or changing the use of technology as chief strategy officer?

Vivia built this entire platform around an electronic health record for caregivers. And so, that system now, when the caregiver comes in, they check in, they check out. We know exactly what time they were there, what they did, they provide notes for them, and all of that is done digitally. … In health care and home care, demand outstrips supply, so your biggest constraint here is labor. This problem is particularly acute in Hawaii because cost of living is high and housing is high, so labor is hard to find. …  The only way that you can really start to solve that problem is with technology, and so part of it is leveraging technology to reduce the need. You are always going to need that caregiver, you will, but how do you leverage technology to make that caregiver more efficient?

Let me give you an example. … We have medication dispensers, where it’s dispensed and we can see on camera that the patient has actually taken their medication. So, all of that is to basically increase the efficiency of the caregiver and the platform. With Covid, between all the mobile technologies, the monitoring technologies, the diagnostics – everything that you can do at home – you can reduce the overall care cost and time for patients. It’s being utilized in in the healthcare system, it just hasn’t reached the in-home care models.

About Vivia Cares Inc

Chief strategy officer: Gregory Leong

Address: 820 Mililani Street, Suite 711 Honolulu, HI 96813

Phone: 1-888-484-2250