Care3 News & Events
The New Normal - Beginning Life as a Family Caregiver
As a family caregiver, you take on responsibility for your loved one's health when not in the care of a professional. What you do is the work of angels. When you're thrust into this situation unexpectedly, it can be difficult do know what to do. What does it mean to care? What am I supposed to do each day? What results should I strive to achieve?
At Care3, we have been through this situation and want to help you. People don't give you tactical advice on what to do in the beginning because they either don't know or don't want to overwhelm you with details when you're still adjusting to this new normal. While everyone is certainly being considerate, you do need a path to being successful and helping your loved one to heal. In typical Care3 fashion, here are three steps that can keep you less stressed, more organized, and help your loved one heal, recover, and/or be comfortable.
- Talk openly to others. This seems counterintuitive, right? When discussing health, privacy is the norm. Not in caregiving. One thing is true in caregiving and that is you can't do it all alone. Yes, you're an angel, but remember, you need sleep! You also have other life responsibilities. You want other people around you, trusted family and friends, to talk to about what's happening. You may also find those people willing to fill in for you if there are some care tasks that you can't complete for some reason. Those people are YOUR angels.
- Make a plan. You've heard this before: Failure to plan is planning to fail. Caring for a loved one is no different. When you left the hospital or other health facility, someone gave you instructions on how to care for your loved one. Yes, it was probably on a piece of paper and had some 'medical-speak' but it was at least a start in knowing what to do. Take that plan an break it down into simple steps. Mark each step by how often it has to be completed, multiple times per day, once daily, weekly, etc. and mark what happens when the plan is complete. When you've completed this plan, you'll know what you have to do each day, what the goal of the plan is, and can integrate all of that into the rest of your life routine. Care3 can help with this.
- Don't forget the simple stuff. One of the things that we often forget when we're caring for others is their routine. We get wrapped up in our own and forget that our loved ones had a routine, too. One of the most important things you can do is to give your loved one a new routine of basic daily life activities. Bathing, grooming, meal-times, etc. are how we organize our lives. Set up a routine for your loved one so everyone knows what to expect each day. You'll find that certainty reduces your loved one's anxiety as well, which really helps in recovery and healing.
Follow these three steps and you'll find caregiving to be a challenging, yet do-able action. You can do this.
Give Me My Care Instructions on My Mobile Phone!
It's 2016. We are in the age of smartphones and information overload. Yet, for the most important instructions we need, those for caring for loved ones, we are still receiving them ON PAPER!
See if this sounds familiar....
You’re desperate to go home and the discharge nurse is giving you care instructions verbally, then on paper.
At home a few hours later, where are those instructions again? (If you find them) Oh here they are—but what do ostomy, commode, and ambulate mean? Wait, I can’t even do this without spending a ton of money.
Loss, jargon, and hidden costs lead to poor outcomes for your loved ones and avoidable hospital readmissions.
There are 99 reasons we can't be perfect as caregivers, but how we get the instructions CAN’T be one.
Introducing Care3!
Care3 takes your paper care instructions and delivers them as text messages to your smartphone to be shared among family and friends. That's why Care3 has been called the world's first "care-sharing" app.
Here's how Care3 works:
- Email us a picture or scan (pdf) of your paper care instructions.
- Care3 breaks down the instructions into individual steps sequenced by how often each task needs to be done and by when (all instructions are reviewed by a registered nurse).
- You will receive an invitation via email to download the Care3 app from the App Store. Download and sign up. It's FREE!
- Like magic, your care instructions become a Conversation and tasks begin to appear as text messages in the order when they need to be completed!
- We will also email you a pdf of your itemized care instructions so you have a "paper version" that you can use to see an overview of all care to be delivered. (view sample)
It's high time we had instructions given in a way that's convenient for US. Plain language. Step-by-step. Mobile.
This is the future of care outside of the hospital. This is Care3.
FREE (for a limited time)!
Email us your paper care instructions now! This service is FREE, but only for a limited time. Tap below to send us your instructions.
Break the Cycle of ER Visits and Hospitalizations for Your Loved One
In one year my mother was in the hospital 12 times.
One time a month.
And that wasn’t the biggest year. She had COPD, CHF (chronic heart failure) and was a cancer survivor.
My wife and I tried everything to keep her out of the hospital. And each time it was the same.
Within a few weeks, she’d end up back in the hospital.
While there she’d get her vitals under control because of the round-the-clock attention. Everything would be ok—and she’d be discharged.
And within two weeks, no matter what we did, we just couldn’t keep her right and she’d end up in the hospital again.
That cycle went on for a year, year and a half. Sometimes twice a month in the hospital over the course of 2.5 years she’d be admitted or at least end up in the Emergency Room.
And finally, we realized something...
Finally—after that year when she was in the hospital 12 times—we realized we were doing things wrong.
We recognized what we needed as a family. Too much was falling on one person’s shoulders at a time. Care would fall on me for a time. When I wasn’t available, it was all on my wife.
Then we tried something new...
All that care that had to be delivered, all of those tasks, needed to be shared among more than one person at a time. We needed a group of people in the family working all at the same time.
One person didn’t have to take it all on.
Then we had to organize those tasks so that we made sure they got delivered at the right time. That was no small feat in itself. What we were able to do is get all those tasks organized into a list, know when each had to happen and then share those tasks with family and friends so others could take those on.
That’s how we broke the cycle.
That’s how we got more care and better care for mom so that she could feel better, longer.
What happened? We nursed her back to health.
Remember, she was living with us for 2.5 years. And after 6 months of not being in the hospital she was able to go home and live by herself independently.
Sure, we had people looking in on her. But living at home restored everything. Her health. Her independence. Her dignity.
That’s what we built Care3 to do.
It helps you do the 3 things that together we call “care-sharing” to keep your loved one out of the hospital.
- Care3 helps you create a care team of supportive family and friends
- Care3 creates a group care conversation automatically when you create your care team so communication is easy and efficient for everyone
- Care3 helps you enter and share all care tasks in a sequenced list so everyone on the care team can contribute by accepting a task
That’s the way to break the cycle. That’s the way to keep our loved ones out of the hospital. That’s the way to get them to live at home by themselves independently.
Care3 can help.
Download the Care3 iPhone app in the App Store. It’s FREE and will help you use care-sharing to care for your loved ones as a team to help them feel better, longer.
Take care,
David S. Williams
CEO, Care3
The Healthcare Industry is in its Terrible Two’s in Consumerism
By David S. Williams, Co-Founder & CEO, Care3. This article appeared originally on Medium.com.
My siblings and I cared for our mom for the last decade of her life. She had serious health challenges — multiple forms of cancer, bipolar disorder, chronic heart failure, and COPD (and she still smoked). We went to the emergency room too many times to count. We grew up managing her health issues. We’re smart. We’re educated. But we weren’t particularly good caregivers. And we’re not unique.
What belies our experiences with hospitals is an emerging crisis. The switch from fee-for-service to bundled payments outlined by the Affordable Care Act means that hospitals do not receive compensation for certain readmissions (in fact, financial penalties may be assessed). Readmissions are a significant financial liability for payers (health insurance companies) and now for hospitals for which they have yet to demonstrate an effective means of mitigation. In order to maintain financial viability, these organizations need to find solutions that provide better health outcomes when patients leave their facilities.
The industry has, of course, been trying to find solutions. A leading consensus is that engaging a patient about their activities outside the hospital provides significantly better health results. Welcome to the infancy of consumerism for the healthcare industry.
Two pilot programs in California focused on two different models for post-acute patient engagement proved engagement can improve outcomes. Both used basic human resources (i.e., Nurses and Case Managers making phone calls) to generate significant improvements.
They work. But they don’t scale. Implementing either model nationwide for the 9.2 million Dual Eligibles (patients eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid) alone would cost somewhere around a trillion dollars. So the fundamental solution is known: patient engagement. The challenge, then, is scalability.
There are 65 Million family caregivers like my siblings and me in the U.S. We are the ones who are actively engaged with a loved one’s health activities. We go to appointments, run errands, and fetch the remote when it’s too far away. It seems, then, the best opportunity to improve health outcomes for patients outside of the hospital is to empower family caregivers.
The healthcare community has picked up on this. Go on any hospital system’s web site and there’s almost always a segment there for caregivers. Toddler status. Though well intentioned, they usually consist of support groups and help lines. It’s really not in their DNA to create “consumerized” (yet HIPAA compliant) solutions. They don’t know how to be consumer-centric because for so long they only served providers.
How big is this problem? There’s roughly 70 Billion hours of health care activities that occur outside of institutional settings (hospitals, clinics, etc). About half of this amount is from home health care professionals. The rest are the activities from a patient’s dedicated family and friends; also known as consumers.
Home health firms (an $83 Billion market) are a fast-growing part of the market. Many companies have emerged to make finding home health care professionals much more efficient and easy. These are great services that are trying to figure out the right model for engagement. However, they only address half of the activities that go into caregiving. Their use may also be a symptom of other, unseen health activities.
It’s pretty difficult to figure out when health care support is actually needed. The only visibility into care activities happens when someone buys bandages (say, to treat a slip and fall), file a claim, or hire a home health firm. These are all after-the-fact instances that indicate much more significant health needs. So visibility, like scalability, must also be achieved in order to truly engage with caregivers. Achieving the visibility milestone would vault the industry into the tweens. This is the next decade of health technology.
There’s a third challenge that is deceptively obvious. Caregivers don’t really know what to do in order to care for someone. This can often be disempowering. When caregivers don’t know what to do for loved ones, they inevitably end up at the hospital — via the emergency room or the like. They need a more concrete set of information provided by a professional to serve as a guideline for how to care for someone after they leave a hospital. These care instructions should be structured, sequenced, and delivered in a way consumers can easily digest and implement. Helping patients and family caregivers understand what to do while engaging them in a way that meets their behavioral patterns is the next logical stage of development.
Healthcare as an industry has never had to focus on consumers to deliver care. They’re learning, but infancy is followed by the terrible two’s. Now, if the industry fails to adapt, the crushing cost of care will render them helpless to serve our communities and loved ones. It could be a painful period as many parents know all too well.
Please, healthcare industry, mature quickly.
Use Care3 LIKE A BOSS to Care for Loved Ones
Thank you for all you do caring for others! Check out the second video (<6 minutes) where our CEO, David Williams, walks you step-by-step on how to use Care3 like a BOSS to care for loved ones.
https://youtu.be/0qsIuXCyrK8
Bookmark this page so you can refer back to the video.
Questions? Comments? Email us at boss@care3.co/blog. We want to hear from you!
Finally! How to Unleash the Power of Your Smartphone for Family Caregiving
https://youtu.be/r8XxjB_GS04 Finally. It only took 100 seconds for this health technology CEO to reveal the secrets on how to unleash the power of your smartphone to care for loved ones.
He cared for his mother (cancer, COPD, and heart failure) for 10 years prior to her passing and has a son with severe autism, so he knows how hard caregiving can be.
Caregiving requires help. There's so much to do. Technology is supposed to make your life easier. You carry your smartphone everywhere you go, so why not use it to help provide better care for loved ones?
There are a few things to look out for, however. This video talks you through how to think about apps and how to avoid the pitfalls.
You're less than two minutes from better caregiving. Watch the video and use your smartphone to take care of the people you cherish the most.
Thank you for all you do!
(After watching the video, download the FREE Care3 app!)
Care3 Launches New iPad Version of Family Caregiving App
(Los Angeles, CA) – May 9, 2016 – Care3™, a leading developer of mobile health technology, is proud to announce the launch of the new iPad version of its flagship care-sharing app. Care3 built the iPad app to be used by family caregivers and professional home care aides when a greater number of tasks are being shared in a conversation.
ipad-1-care3-messaging
"We built the iPad app for people who need a little more to appear on a screen at point-of-care. Independent home care providers and care managers have been the most vocal about having an iPad version and we're happy to accommodate as they do God's work caring for our loved ones," says David Williams, co-founder and CEO of Care3.
Subtle user interface differences between the iPhone version and the iPad version highlight greater visibility of actions for care-sharing for those with higher amounts of actions to complete. Care3 works with any wifi-enabled system so doesn't require a cellular phone connection to be used.
Download the Care3 iPad app on the iTunes App Store.
About Care3™
Founded by three former Aetna executives with 30 years of collective experience caring for aging relatives and special needs children, Care3 solves the problem of organizing care tasks, sequencing them for real-time completion and mobilizing so care can be delivered anywhere. Learn more at www.care3.co/blog.
Care3™ Raises $500K to Make All Care Instructions Mobile for Patients and Family Caregivers
(Los Angeles, CA) - April 26, 2016 - Care3™, a leading developer of mobile health technology, has raised $500,000 from a blue chip collection of angel investors to mobilize paper care instructions including those provided at hospital discharge. Care instructions today are typically paper-based, full of clinical jargon and shared only with patients and not family caregivers. These factors make care instructions difficult to maintain, follow, and implement successfully leading to costly hospital readmissions." Our founding team and investors have been through the situation of caring for someone discharged from the hospital,” explains Care3 Co-Founder and CEO David Williams, “Distributing these critical care instructions via paper is simply unacceptable in 2016."
care3-press-medres
Care3™ plans to work with hospitals, health insurers, and other health entities to digitize and mobilize their care instructions while also making them more consumer friendly. Care3 will deliver each task step-by-step over their HIPAA-compliant care-sharing mobile app.
"I invested in Care3 because the founding team has both personal experience caring for loved ones and decades of highly relevant healthcare industry experience." explains Jabari Reeves, MD, MBA, a San Francisco-based emergency medicine physician.
Family caregivers can also send Care3 their discharge or other paper-based care instructions to make them mobile for FREE for a limited time. Caregivers simply email their paper discharge plans after signing up for the service.
About Care3™
Care3 founders have 30 years of collective experience caring for aging relatives and special needs children. Care3 solves the problem of organizing care tasks, sequencing them for real-time completion and mobilizing so care can be delivered anywhere. Learn more at www.care3.co/blog.
Care3 Presents at AARP Innovation@50+ LivePitch!
DSW AARP LivePitch
It was an honor to be selected to present at the AARP Innovation@50+ LivePitch in Sunnyvale this past Wednesday. Actually performing the one-minute pitch was absolutely amazing!
Standing in front of hundreds of AARP members and getting to present Care3 to them in the exhibit area provided unmatched feedback from people who would use Care3 to help themselves and their loved ones.
Check out the full official event coverage here. Our Care3 one-minute pitch starts at 7:39:03.
Thank you again AARP for this fantastic event and the opportunity to share Care3.
Care3™ Selected as Finalist for AARP Health Innovation@50+ LivePitch Event April 27
Care-sharing Mobile Platform for Family and Home Health Caregivers Chosen as a Finalist Competing at Pitch Event Featuring Digital Health Experts, Investors, and AARP Member Consumers.
Care3™ Selected as Finalist for AARP Health Innovation@50+ LivePitch Event April 27
Care-sharing Mobile Platform for Family and Home Health Caregivers Chosen as a Finalist Competing at Pitch Event Featuring Digital Health Experts, Investors, and AARP Member Consumers
Los Angeles, CA March 31, 2016 – Care3, a leading mobile health technology company enabling team-based caregiving to help people live comfortably in their homes, is pleased today to announce its selection as one of the finalists for AARP Health Innovation@50+ LivePitch, the one day pitch competition for emerging startups in the healthy living space with a focus on caregiving. Selected from more than 200 applicants, Care3 will compete against 13 other startups representing the best in digital health.
“We are honored to present the Care3 platform at the AARP Health Innovation@50+ LivePitch event,” says David Williams, Co-Founder and CEO of Care3. “Care3 helps reduce caregiver stress and improves accountability while helping loved ones live independently.”
Care3 will present on stage before a panel of expert judges and an audience filled with AARP members. These members will share feedback in real-time on business viability, interest and value, providing invaluable market data on the spot.
AARP’s Health Innovation@50+ LivePitch event will be held at Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale, CA on April 27, 2016. For more information, go to http://health50.org/. To learn more about AARP, visit http://www.aarp.org.
About Care3™
Founded by three longtime digital health innovators with experience caring for aging parents and special needs children, Care3 has invented “care-sharing” (patent pending), the process of breaking down a care plan into individual steps and sharing those activities on mobile devices as Action Messages™ with a team of family and professional caregivers in the home. The Care3 care-sharing mobile app is free for family caregivers to easily coordinate care anywhere. Learn more at www.care3.co/blog.
Care3™ Launches the First Care-Sharing Mobile Application...
Care3™ Launches the First Care-Sharing Mobile Application that Allows Patient, Family, and Home Care Providers to Share Clinical Care Tasks on the Same Platform
Care3™ Launches the First Care-Sharing Mobile Application That Allows Patient, Family, and Home Care Providers to Share Clinical Care Tasks on the Same Platform
LOS ANGELES, CA (PRWEB) MARCH 14, 2016 - Care3™ pioneers care-sharing, the process of taking a clinical care plan and breaking it down step-by-step into sequenced activities in plain language and sharing those activities as Action Messages™ (patent pending) with family and professional care teams.
“The spirit of care-sharing has always existed. We just created a platform that allows it to be easily done in a HIPAA-compliant manner so family and professionals can collaborate in unison.” said David Williams, Co-Founder and CEO of Care3™.
This launch comes after a rigorous four-month beta period in which Care3™ worked with dozens of home & community-based care providers and their client families to refine the care-sharing process so that it meets family expectations, home care business needs, and industry compliance requirements.
Care3™ will be offering demonstrations of the Care3™ care-sharing app on March 14th during the SXSW Interactive conference at Capital Factory (701 Brazos St, Austin, TX 78701) by invitation only. Please contact SXC3(at)care3(dot)co for more information.
“We’re seeing a massive growth in Health Tech startups in Austin and are excited to welcome Care3 to SXSW Interactive." said Joshua Baer, Executive Director of Capital Factory.
About Care3™: Care3™ is a leading mobile health technology company focusing on creating groundbreaking applications that meet the needs of home and community-based caregivers. The Care3 care-sharing™ mobile app for patients, families, and their care teams makes it easy to coordinate care and assist with activities of daily living on a fully HIPAA-compliant platform. For more information, visit http://www.care3.co/blog.
Care3 Stands With Tim Cook and Apple Regarding Consumer Privacy
You’ve probably heard how Apple CEO Tim Cook is taking a stand against the Federal Bureau of Investigation regarding building a “back door” that would bypass the security measures on the iPhone. The FBI wants to access the phone of a San Bernadino bombing suspect to mine for information about other potential terrorist activities. The San Bernadino incident was abhorrent; and as a southern California-based company, we were personally devastated by the events. At Care3, we do not condone any type of terrorism.
We do consider the privacy of you and your family’s health information paramount. We stand with Apple on preserving our freedom to privacy without a requirement to allow the US government access to information. Our latest app update achieved a significant security milestone. Care3 storage and messaging meet HIPAA standards for data security, privacy, and encryption. Reaching this milestone means that you and your healthcare team can have the most important conversations, those about the health of loved ones, on Care3 securely and confidentially.
Because the Care3 mobile application is made for iPhones, we applaud the stance from Apple on its device security, adding another critical layer of safety for you. Thank you for trusting Care3 with your most important conversations. And thank you to Tim Cook for Apple’s stand on device security. Together we will help our families securely share data and experiences without the threat of others, well-intentioned or not, to access your personal information.
Co-Founder & CEO, Care3