May 7
2014
Health IT Startup: Caring In Place
Caring in Place helps family members become family caregivers for their aging loved ones. Based on the loved one’s health conditions, family members are taught what to do, when to do it and how to care for their aging loved ones. All instructions are doctor recommended and often include audio, video, images and text.
Elevator pitch
Caring in Place helps family members learn to become family caregivers for their aging loved ones. Through intelligent checklists, caregivers are taught what to do, when to do it and how to care for their seniors.
Product/service description
Caring in Place is a technology platform designed to help family members learn how to become family caregivers for their aging loved ones. Through an iPhone app, and a web portal (Android to be launched in the next few weeks), families are provided caregiving instructions based on the health conditions of their aging loved one. The platform also enables caregivers to coordinate care with other family members, friends, neighbors and even paid caregivers.
Founders’ story
Co-founders Josh Fotheringham and James Jarman met in 1996 while attending the University of Utah. Although they went separate ways with their careers, they knew that at some point they would join forces. In 2010, a friend running a skilled nursing facility in California asked for assistance with his facility. After several improvement attempts associated with Medicare billing, Josh and James began studying and interacting with family caregivers. Quickly they identified with the difficulty of caregiving and decided to help. Leveraging their backgrounds in technology, marketing and business, they started Caring in Place. In 2013 they received their first external investment from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts and also participated in a four-month healthcare accelerator program called Healthbox. Today they are building partnerships across the healthcare ecosystem to find new and improved ways to help family members in their role as family caregivers.
Marketing/promotion strategy
Caring in Place launched it’s first application around Thanksgiving of 2013 (late November). In just a few short months, we already have more than 2,500 family caregivers that have downloaded our application and are using it to care for their aging loved ones. No real marketing efforts have been implemented yet — thereby proving that the 44 million family caregivers in the US alone are longing for a solution.
Although our solutions are used by consumers, our partnerships will bring on masses of caregivers at one time. Recently we launched a pilot program with an assisted living facility that has pushed our solution to 2,000 of their current prospects. We will continue to grow organically, but will drive the most usage and revenue through the healthcare organizations listed in the Current Needs section below.
Market opportunity
- 43.5 million family members care for their aging loved ones in the US
- $450 billion: Value of services provided by family caregivers
- 48: average age of a family caregiver
- 900 million: Hours of family caregiving performed each week (US only)
- 72 percent: Percentage of aging population spend controlled by family caregivers
- 2x: US aging population will double from 2000 to 2030
- 50 percent: Percentage of family caregivers that also work full time
- 1 in 4: Number of working adults that are also Family Caregivers
- 50 percent: Working adults who believe they will be caregivers in next five years
How your company differentiates itself from the competition
Most of the competition in this space is focused on establishing repositories of information that families can post or store to enable care coordination. Care Zone is an example of such a company. There are other companies that focus on seniors as opposed to their families that care for those seniors. GrandCare is an example of such a company.
Caring in Place is myopically focused on the family caregiver. Our goal is to educate family caregivers, provide them tools that better help them do their job, and ultimately help them decide where to spend their money.
Additional information can be provided as needed.
Business model
Family Caregivers control 72 percent of all expenditures on behalf of the aging population. Caring in Place generates money by helping these caregivers know where to spend those funds. This includes pitching integrated products (e.g, wearables) and non-integrated products (e.g. diabetic supplies) as well as clinical services (e.g., home healthcare) and non-clinical services (e.g., home care), and referring prospects to managed care facilities.
Caring in Place also works closely with healthcare organizations that benefit from healthy seniors and healthy caregivers. These organizations benefit from reduced healthcare costs and generate revenue for Caring in Place.
Current needs
We are currently recruiting partners throughout healthcare. Current partnership opportunities exist with payers (medicare advantage plans in particular), providers (through our platform caregivers can reduce hospital re-admissions), assisted living facilities, home healthcare agencies, data management companies, medical device companies, and even non-clinical service companies.
We will be raising a Series A round within the next quarter.
Founded: January 2012. Launched November 2013.
Full time employees: Two. We have an advisory board, a medical board and a bunch of contractors, too.
Headquarters: Denver, Colorado.
60 second video of solution:
90 second animation of how the solution works:
11 min company pitch (5 minute pitch, 6 minutes of questions):