Transforming the Way Patients Receive Care

Founded in 2017 in Silicon Valley, CAREMINDr enables patients to have regular periodic check-ins from their doctors, a "Digital House Call " that monitors each patient's health without requiring visits to the office.

By communicating with their doctors and clinicians between office visits, and being able to easily provide important information about their conditions, patients can better work with their care team and strive to be as healthy as possible. In underserved, lower-economic populations, our technology overcomes many of the obstacles they encounter: difficulties with transportation, inaccessible appointment times, or problems involving language or familiarity with healthcare terminology.

Healthcare delivery is an enormous industry

Healthcare is enormous: tens of thousands of doctors, clinics, hospitals, and specialists. 

We fully understand this, and CAREMINDr has laser-like focus on one specific segment of this industry.

Our market is the largest primary care system in the US. It serves about 29 million patients; it's been around for over 55 years --- and it's likely you've never heard of it.

It is the Federal Community Health Center program: over 1,400 locally governed, non-profit organizations that operate about 14,000 sites. They get base funding directly from Washington, this year about $6 billion.

You probably don’t know of them because their 29 million patients are mostly low-income people, covered by Medicaid. About 1/3 are under 18, including teenage moms, the rest are working-age adults, with a small percentage over 65. Some are veterans, some are uninsured, some are homeless. They come from all racial and ethnic backgrounds.

Over 55 years ago this program was implemented as a safety net for U.S. healthcare, to assure that basic services were available even in the poorest neighborhoods, so that hospital emergency rooms were not overwhelmed with patients needing everyday care.

The COVID pandemic was brutal in these communities.

In mid-2020 low-income people, especially those who were people of color, were dying at unacceptably high rates.

The main reason is that these families have more obstacles in receiving care, difficulties with transportation, food, housing, and even language.

The pandemic put a bright spotlight on this inequity, and Congress responded.

Last April, the American Rescue Plan was passed. It sent an additional $6.1 billion to the 1,400 Health Centers, and added almost a billion more in September. The 2021 Federal funding for Health Centers was over $12 billion.

With this money comes disciplined accountability. Every year each center must file a highly detailed report that lists over 100 key statistics about their patients and the care they delivered.

More importantly, each Health Center lists 20 clinical issues, showing the number of people in each category, and how well they are managing that group's condition. Strict guidelines dictate how performance is measured. Each score is then compared to the other 1,400 centers and a grade is assigned based on where they rank.  This is a true quality of care report card --- and it is public.

There are also special programs that provide additional funding. Last January $90 million was awarded to about 500 Health Centers specifically to improve Hypertension. This is where CAREMINDr first entered this market.

Today we have over 30 Health Center clients who are providing nearly 40,000 blood pressure cuffs to their patients. CAREMINDr enables these Centers to regularly check in with each patient and track their progress.  These Digital House Calls can instantly identify and help the patients who need attention. We enable Health Centers to exceed the performance goals set by their funding, at levels never before achieved.

Here are 5 reasons why we like this market, the Community Health Center system:

First, it is really big, about 29 million patients (source).

Second, it has enormous needs, and challenges that require new technology to overcome (source).

Third, there is a staffing crisis. Healthcare workers are exhausted or burned out and all of the centers have staff vacancies they are not able to fill. They need to get the job done with the team they have on hand; our technology is automation that performs key patient care tasks, freeing up current staff time to help solve this problem. (source).

Fourth, there is proven financial support. Significant money has been made available, focused on overcoming major problems that truly need to be addressed.

And fifth, there is accountability: mandated reporting pushes each center to take action and not delay, providing them a way to provide accurate reporting (source).

The pandemic greatly accelerated the evolution of the ways primary care can be delivered outside of traditional offices and especially to underserved vulnerable communities. We think CAREMINDr is a way to lower the cost of providing such care while improving the outcomes of care patients receive. This combination is recognizably valuable to the entities who are the financial risk-bearers in the system, from the federal government to the local community health centers.

Moreover, we are not aware of any direct competitors facilitating the Doctor-Patient communication that CAREMINDr enables for Community Health Centers; it is an underserved market. 

Being able to effectively sell to the 1,400 Community Health Centers only recently became possible,  when the pandemic drove the universal adoption of video business meetings.

Going to see a doctor is a hassle

Especially if you need to go back time after time for an ongoing condition.

In our eyes, the current system relies on too much human effort and, because of this, is inconsistent and cannot be scaled to serve large communities of patients effectively. Disadvantaged people also face problems with transportation, or the inability to find time for appointments. 

This is where CAREMINDr comes in, providing an easy-to-use way for a patient to conveniently complete a short form that periodically tells their doctor key information about their condition. The questions on the form are multiple-choice or a number, so the patient does not need to compose a sentence or worry about word choice.  This all occurs on a pre-set automated schedule so no check-in dates are missed. 

Transforming the way patients receive care

We’re leveraging patients’ affinity for mobile technology to keep doctors informed about their chronic health conditions and adherence to treatment plans. We have seen how such communication improves the health of large patient populations at the clinics we serve.

We do this by creating automatic check-ins between doctors and their patients - we refer to it as a “Digital House Call,” built to be convenient, private, and fitting patients' schedules.

This remote patient care is designed mostly for patients who have ongoing health conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure, depression, and pregnancy. These check-ins help a doctor track how a patient is doing, keeping them up to date in case any problems come up that require intervention.

We are unique in that CAREMINDr performs at least 15 key patient care tasks typical to a doctor checking in with a patient who has a condition that lasts for an extended period (source).

We believe we are delivering value that is seldom available to our current community health center partners, with technology rarely seen in this market segment.  (source).

Gaining speed with partnerships and patents underway

We have signed 30 community health center clients, and have launched large-scale operations with them, initially directed at 80,000 hypertensive patients. This hypertensive cohort represents less than 20% of the 500,000 patients our clients serve each year, who themselves are a small fraction of the 1,400 community health centers nationwide (source).

For programs that have been operating for at least 3 months, our clients are achieving results that are at high-quality levels unprecedented in the industry.

Beyond hypertension, we have expanded our library of clinical management to a growing list of primary care conditions, now including diabetes, asthma, depression, COVID-19, flu, and many others.   

Regarding Intellectual Property, we have ten patents in process, one of which was recently filed and is in provisional status. All the others are non-provisional and two have reached the pre-release publication-for-comment stage.

Join CAREMINDr to make a difference in healthcare

We are actively helping the providers who care for those most in need - this means Medicaid recipients, the poor, the uninsured or underinsured, veterans, and the homeless: anyone who seeks their primary care from Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) and FQHC Look-Alikes (LALs). These facilities are tasked with providing healthcare services to these underserved populations - and we are here to help.

With this in mind, we aim to be leading edge innovators in how primary care should be delivered to everyone.  

CAREMINDr is here to be a large part of how all of U.S. healthcare evolves.

We not only believe to have the best technology solution to achieve these goals, but we also believe we may be one of the only vendors with a broad suite of solutions ready to go today, with a particular focus on an underserved yet increasingly well-funded market segment. 

Remote patient care is a reality.  Its challenge and potential in the patient population served by Community Health Centers is real and well-recognized. CAREMINDr delivers a solution.