CareMessage is a nonprofit health technology organization headquartered in San Francisco. We exclusively work with safety net organizations in the US to help communicate with their patient populations using mobile technology, specifically text messaging.
Text messaging is by far the preferred method of communication for practitioners to use to provide information to their patients, as our research has shown that more than 90% of patients served by safety-net organizations have access to unlimited texting. This quick and easy method of communication can remind patients about appointments, medication, cancer screenings, and checkups.
Currently, we are exploring how we can help solve social and environmental challenges facing the patient population, who often encounter obstacles around food and housing access. We are looking into ways that CareMessage can help healthcare organizations be a conduit to identify and help solve those needs for their patients.
CareMessage was originally called Anjna Patient Education, named after my mother. It was initially a student group at Stanford University that I started as an undergraduate back in 2011 and 2012. I was a Pre-Med student at Stanford University but decided to turn down my full scholarship to medical school at the Mayo Clinic Alix School of Medicine to start CareMessage full time.
I was inspired not only by the experiences I had at the free clinics affiliated with Stanford, but I also spent 4 months working at a free clinic in Galveston, Texas where my parents were living at the time. This clinic had been devastated by Hurricane Ike back in 2008-2009. I volunteered because I wanted to get experience in healthcare settings and felt compelled to help in this highly underserved part of Texas.
While there, I was struck by the enormous challenges facing patients in this demographic. It was abundantly clear that small but targeted interventions can have an enormous impact in helping change the trajectory of this population’s health, and the long-term effect of those small changes can be massive.
The support of the Trefler Foundation was the catalyst for getting us to where we are today. When we entered the Boston healthcare space in 2016, we had difficulty getting a foothold. We were an unknown organization, and we didn’t have the capability to interface with Epic, the popularly used Electronic Medical Records (EMR) system.
It was abundantly clear that small but targeted interventions can have an enormous impact in helping change the trajectory of this population’s health, and the long-term effect of those small changes can be massive.
Vineet Singal, Co-Founder & CEO
Having the Trefler Foundation’s support was the catalyst for getting us to where we are today. Currently, we are reaching 13 partner organizations in Massachusetts with the vast majority in Greater Boston. We are reaching just under 400,000 patients in Boston and in the late 2021, we have exchanged over 1 million messages with patients in Massachusetts.
We have since replicated our model in other places like New York City and Los Angeles and are looking to expand even further into Minneapolis and North Carolina where we have connections.
Back in March of 2020, we saw a huge increase in the use of our product because the Covid lockdown necessitated that communication be done virtually. Within 2 weeks we saw a 400% increase in the use of CareMessage. This surge in demand meant we needed to rebuild our infrastructure to meet the need almost overnight. Our engineering team worked tirelessly to make sure that every single message between providers and patients was delivered successfully.
We were also cognizant of other organizations providing similar services to the same populations of patients that would benefit from utilizing CareMessage. Many of these organizations couldn’t afford technologies like ours due to the effect of the pandemic on their revenue and budget constraints. We launched CMLight, which is a Covid-specific version of CareMessage, specifically to help these organizations. Unlike the full platform, which has startup costs and a months-long implementation process, CMLight is completely free and is operational within days of signing up.
Having the Trefler Foundation’s support was the catalyst for getting us to where we are today.
Vineet Singal, Founder & CEO CareMessage
Since the launch of CMLight in March of 2020, we have signed up over 200 organizations nationally that have seen enormous success with the product. With CMLight, we have facilitated over 60 million messages around Covid-19, including 10-15 million specifically about vaccines. CMLight has also increased the number of patients actively using CareMessage to communicate with their providers. When the pandemic started, we had 3-4 million active patient users. Today, we’ve grown to nearly 9 million users across the country.
First, I am very excited about the continued growth of CMLight. CMLight was originally intended to be a helpful, charitable, and mission-driven option for healthcare institutions in need of this type of platform. Right now, it is driving the business model for CareMessage in terms of how we grow, how we scale, and how we can reach more patients in a financially sustainable way.
I am excited about moving CareMessage towards thinking about health holistically. In other words, how can we get beyond health being solely a clinical issue tied specifically to medical intervention? Instead, how do we think about the patient overall and the things that they’re struggling with that affect their health, such as food and housing insecurity?
CareMessage received initial funding from the American Heart Association last year to do some pilot work around social determinants of health and, more recently, a $1 million grant from Steve Ballmer of the Ballmer Group. These funds are focused on expanding our research in 2022 and beyond to create new products in this area.