Care Thread

Care Thread is a healthcare information technology company that sells a HIPAA- and HITECH-compliant mobile platform for care team coordination and clinical communication. Its product set has four components: Care Team Mapping, which maintains a real-time roster of the clinicians involved with each patient and attaches patient context to every message; secure mobile messaging with end-to-end encryption, sender-set message priority, read receipts, colleague and team directories, full audit trails and BYOD support; real-time clinical information feeds that push patient data such as labs, medications, reports, dietary information and ED encounters, admissions, discharges and transfers to a clinician's mobile device; and collaborative workflow tools providing shared per-patient task lists, task priority and completion tracking, and clinical summaries for handoffs and transitions of care. The platform is positioned as system-agnostic, layering on an organization's existing clinical IT systems and EMRs rather than replacing them, and includes analytics on how clinical and operational communication flows across an organization. Medical speech recognition is provided through Nuance Healthcare's Dragon Medical 360 [0][2].

The company frames its value proposition around reducing time clinicians spend at workstations and reducing miscommunication at handoff, citing Joint Commission findings that 80% of major medical errors stem from handoff miscommunication [2]. Contemporary press coverage described the model as patient-centric: rather than connecting computers to computers, Care Thread aimed to connect the patient, the patient's family and the full set of caregivers in a virtual, mobile patient-centered medical home, replacing legacy hospital tools such as pagers [6]. Company leadership at the time estimated the addressable market at $5–6 billion at the low end and $15–20 billion at the high end over five years, and cited embedded costs from poor provider-patient connection in excess of $150 billion [6]. Third-party profiles classify the company under healthtech/telemedicine software with a platform, recurring-revenue model serving enterprise and small-business customers [5].

Founding story

Co-founder and president Nick Adams has written that he came from a family and social circle working in medicine and previously worked in pharmaceuticals and life sciences, spending time in hospitals and clinics, where he was struck by how often colleagues were checking pagers — a starting point for the company's mobile communication approach [3]. Andrew Shearer is the co-founder and chief technical officer [3][6].

Business model

Care Thread licenses a mobile software platform to healthcare provider organizations, marketed through personalized demos and downloadable product collateral on its website [0][2]. A third-party profile characterizes the model as a software platform with recurring revenue serving enterprise and small-business customers [5].

Third-party classification describes the revenue model as recurring software/platform revenue [5]. The company's own materials do not state pricing.

Traction

As of January 2014, reported clients included the Eastern Connecticut Health Network (affiliated with Yale New Haven Health System) and Vanguard Health Systems, with a pilot program underway at South County Hospital in Wakefield, Rhode Island, and negotiations in progress with a large primary care provider, a health insurer and a hospital system in Rhode Island. The company had also been awarded two research grants, from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and had graduated from the BetaSpring incubator [6]. A third-party profile lists 11 employees as of February 2024 and cumulative funding of $525K as of December 2016 [5].

Latest developments

A market-data profile records a Rule 506(b) Reg D offering with a first sale on 2022-06-10 raising $150K from two investors, and notes no further financing on record [4]. A third-party profile lists 11 employees as of February 2024 [5].