Kansas City health care tech startup Community CareLink (CCL) received an investment from a notable name in the industry.
Paul Black, formerly the CEO of Allscripts and COO of Cerner Corp., joined the startup’s board of directors and became a minority shareholder. Financial details were not disclosed.
For CCL, Black’s investment will catapult growth and help the startup expand nationwide, CCL CEO and founder Dale Gray said. But even more important is having access to Black’s leadership, connections and wealth of industry knowledge, he said.
“He ran multibillion-dollar companies, and he’s done all this before. He gets us. He opens doors that otherwise wouldn’t be possible for us to open,” Gray said.
Black said he learned about the startup when he met Gray at a conference a year ago. His interest was immediately piqued. He believes in the mission of inclusiveness around health care, and CCL’s case management software connects a variety of social services providers and other agencies to provide more wholistic care for people.
CCL’s cloud-based portal is an all-in-one community information exchange, electronic health record and practice management system that gives organizations a central location to report, track and follow up on the services they provide to clients. Each client has one record in the system, allowing other agencies to view that record and add to it. It’s a community approach, Gray said.
And it enables better coordinated care and a “much clearer picture” of a patient coming into a new care setting, Black said.
“It’s truly understanding where they are and what kind of care they are going to need,” Black said.
CCL’s wholistic approach can improve quality of care and outcomes, and it also lessens the likelihood of individuals falling through the cracks, Black said. Another big benefit is the software allows agencies to measure outcomes and progress, which are needed for grant applications and other outside funding. Thanks to the ability to easily track metrics, agencies have bolstered their revenue by 30% on average by the second year of using CCL’s software, Gray said.
Some of the entities CCL connects include community-based organizations, shelters, rehabilitation centers, crisis call centers, municipal departments, first responders and health care providers. Kansas City’s Drug Court uses the software to refer people to treatment instead of sending them to jail, and first responders have used CCL to take unhoused individuals with non-medical emergencies to residential programs instead of hospitals, Gray said. Since 2019, more than 200 people have been sent to residential services instead of the ER, which isn’t equipped to address their needs.
CCL also recently started collaborating with area police departments to make it easier for officers to refer individuals to social service agencies.
CCL was born out of another local nonprofit, First Call, which serves the Kansas City metro and provides clinical, education and prevention services related to substance use disorders. The nonprofit, which also operates a call center, needed software to not only document calls but also make referrals. When First Call couldn’t find software on the market that met its needs, it built its own about 10 years ago, Gray said.
In 2017, First Call brought in Gray as a tech consultant to further advance the software. Gray, who has a background in health care IT and previously was a director at Cerner Corp., saw a bigger opportunity to spin out the software into a separate company. In 2018, the software offering became Community CareLink, a privately held company whose profits also support First Call.
CCL has clients in nine states. In the Kansas City region, more than 50 agencies use its software. When Gray came on board, there was one other employee dedicated to CCL. Now, there’s 14, and revenue growth has eclipsed 1,700%. Gray expects to double the headcount next year.
A goal is to build a wider safety net outside of traditional health care, which isn’t designed to help individuals with housing, utilities or social connectedness — all of which affect one’s overall health, Gray said.
“I feel like at this point, social services are the next step of health care, period,” Gray said. “Other countries have caught on faster than we have, and it’s time for us to take that next step.”
