It is said that all you have is your health, but healthcare is neither equally accessible nor delivered at equal levels for all. Disparities in healthcare access, quality, and delivery are some of the global problems. With a motto to serve the underserved, Care3 is passionately addressing the needs of society’s most vulnerable people. The world’s first team collaboration technology platform for care delivered outside of hospitals, Care3’s goal is to keep seniors and others living independently and comfortably in their homes.
The company is called Care3 because it focuses on the three things that together, can drive measurable improvement in global healthcare: Community, Care, and Collaboration (C3). The company’s C3 model supports care programs that require interdisciplinary providers to work together with patients and family caregivers to implement a unified care plan to drive the best outcomes.
Care3 serves collaborative care programs (e.g. PACE) that deploy interdisciplinary teams to care for each patient in the home and community. Care3 alerts care managers when care tasks are not complete so that providers can intervene BEFORE hospitalizations and emergency visits occur. And finally, Care3 can integrate with any electronic health record system to help track the patient’s care.
David S. Williams III, A person for whom Care is the highest priority
Care3 is the dream of David S. Williams III, Founder, and CEO of Care3. “I was inspired by both my experience caring for my mother for ten years prior to her passing and the ongoing care for my special needs son. My mother had COPD, CHF, ulcerative colitis, and survived multiple cancers – she almost died having me. She ended up living for 28 years after the FIRST time she was told she would ‘die soon.’ My son’s autism diagnosis set in motion a process that required meticulous coordination among multiple care providers in order to help him develop and thrive. In both cases, there was no technology that allowed my family to collaborate with the teams of providers we had to deal with nor could providers easily communicate with each other.”
Each of the Care3 founders has a similar story. When they realized that there were millions of families who experience this pain and frustration every day while interacting with the healthcare system—and that the healthcare system didn’t have a solution to their collaboration shortcomings – they knew there was an opportunity to build a groundbreaking company.
“The most vulnerable members of our society include seniors, the poor, and the disabled and they do not have equal access to healthcare and receive woefully inadequate quality of care in their homes and communities. Care3 is built to fix these unacceptable and unnecessary inequities,” adds David.
Care3 Empowering Healthcare
Because Care3 must engage consumers while providing the power for the healthcare enterprise users, the founding team has a natural tension between its enterprise healthcare leader and its consumer product leader. Care3 assembled the team with both specialties because typical enterprise healthcare technology isn’t designed for consumer usage; and without consumer engagement, care providers have very little chance at materially changing behavior and outcomes. David reveals Care3’s strategy, “Our aim is to reduce cost of care for the most costly patients by solving two industry problems at once.”
Over time, Care3 will have the largest repository of real-world outcomes data from care delivered in the home and community. Care3 will have a comprehensive dataset of documented care processes correlated with health outcomes generating actionable best practices for home and community-based care. Caring for others is an intrinsically human action. Care3 will make it easier for all of us to care anywhere and everywhere.
Care3’s enterprise customers operate collaborative care programs for patients outside of hospitals. The key elements of Care3’s success are their customer service and a world-class platform that enables easy communication and generates structured care data that currently doesn’t exist. It sounds simple, but this balance has been difficult for Care3 to achieve.
For Care3, there is one more success factor: fast onboarding of customers. Today, most enterprise health software requires a lengthy setup and onboarding process. Care3’s customers can create accounts and onboard staff online with no long onboarding timelines or setup fees. This will be a major part of company’s ability to scale growth and provide better services to the customers, patients, and families.
David’s Future Plan for Care3
Collaborative care has emerged as a leading model for managing patients outside of health facilities, but the technology hasn’t kept pace. “Once care can be delivered using the ‘gold standard’ for technology, it will generate efficiencies and data, and we will see better outcomes at lower cost,” explains David. Care3 is leading this movement for improving community-based care by enabling better operational efficiency and family engagement for interdisciplinary teams.
The business case will be clear with the major investments taking place in technology leading to reduced overall costs of care for the most needy and expensive populations. As Care3 grows, the team must balance the rigid compliance and regulatory requirements of its enterprise partners with the beauty and delight consumers demand while using mobile apps. Care3 is proving its hypothesis that when providers and consumers collaborate on care, it increases the probability that patients will live longer and at their highest possible level.
“Our clients will benefit from our balanced approach because they have to deliver the same to their patients. For too long, healthcare has focused on the needs of professionals and billing requirements and not the satisfaction of patients and their families. Care3 makes achieving both possible so that everyone can achieve their collective goal: patients living longer and better lives,” concluded David.