Imagine a world where a health care organization or social service coordinates all of your health, behavioral and social care needs.
Well, Activate Care, one of BostInno’s 2020 Inno on Fire honorees, is making this idea a reality.
Combining community coordination, referral management and data analytics, Activate Care offers a cloud-based software as a service (SaaS), called the Activate Care Hub. The eight-year-old startup sells the software to large organizations like hospitals, health care systems and insurance companies so they can coordinate a patient’s needs seamlessly. Activate Care also partners with local socia- service agencies like school systems, homeless shelters and hunger organizations to provide a well-rounded health care plan.
Through the Activate Care Hub, a care coordinator or social worker learns about a patient’s needs, creates a shared plan of care, then invites other professionals into the hub to work on the patient’s care plan.
“The shared plan of care has all of the patient’s details, needs, and goals. It’s the place where everyone can communicate together, so instead of relying on phone calls, emails, or believe it or not—fax machines—they can do it in a way like how we use software in the rest of our daily lives, right over the web with a secure tool,” said Dan Kamyck, senior director of marketing at Activate Care. “They can communicate in real time, send messages to each other and check boxes to confirm that assigned tasks are completed. Everybody can see what's happening and make sure that care is moving forward.”
Activate Care was founded in 2012 out of Boston Children’s Hospital. Two pediatricians, Isaac Kohane and Kenneth Mandl, and CEO Ted Quinn started the company to address challenges they saw with coordinating care for people with complex health and social needs.
Typically, people who need a lot of help have several providers, which makes the process of coordinating care complicated, Kamyck said.
“Our platform is designed to give patients the support of their whole care team by bringing their whole care team together and getting them on the same page,” Kamyck said. “Regardless of where all of those people work, or what their job is on the care team, they need to be connected.”
Recently, in response to the coronavirus pandemic, Activate Care created a new Covid-19 response platform. The secure, HIPAA-compliant platform tracks data for each patient, including current Covid-19 status, symptoms and date of most recent testing. The platform also provides outreach management tools, which create a running log of interactions with each coronavirus patient.
The best part? Activate Care’s Covid-19 software is available at no cost.
“Communities are already cash-strapped, and Covid-19 really made so many local social challenges much more severe,” Kamyck said. “We're at record high levels of unemployment. We're at record high levels of homelessness. We have been working on technology that was designed to help solve these challenges. The last thing we want to do is stand in the way of getting it.”
Emma Campbell is a contributing writer for BostInno.
