When Ali Ahmadi, CEO of caregiver support solution TCARE, and his wife began experiencing burnout from taking care of Ahmadi’s mother, they thought what they needed was home care. But the opposite proved to be true.
“Home care is what everybody thinks they need,” Ahmadi said. “But when we went through the TCARE algorithms, what the system identified we needed in our care journey, in our care plan, was marriage counseling.”
TCARE is a caregiver analytics platform that works with managed care organizations and insurance carriers. For Ahmadi, the platform didn’t just recommend marriage counseling, but it found a local church that provides free family counseling sessions every Saturday. Now, the St. Louis, Missouri-based company is working to expand its services to help more caregivers after securing $17 million in Series A funding this month.
The funding round was led by American Family Ventures and brings the company’s total funds to $20 million. Other investors include Ziegler Link-age Funds and Inception Health.
American Family Ventures chose to invest in TCARE because of its proven track record in supporting caregivers, said Brittany Clements, managing director of the firm.
“TCARE has 15+ years of longitudinal data and outcomes on caregivers that identifies their risk factors to burnout and suggests proven interventions,” Clements said in a news release. “Their ability to tailor an individual caregiver care plan and measure the cost savings of those interventions is impactful. Furthermore, TCARE’s growth has proven their business model alignment with enterprise clients, and we’re impressed with their ability to execute with several Fortune 100 companies.”
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Some of its Fortune 100 clients include UnitedHealthcare, Cigna and Prudential.
Its Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services-approved platform provides several solutions, Ahmadi said. One is TCARE Assist, which is geared towards caregivers and begins with an initial assessment and then provides ongoing monitoring and support. Another is TCARE Connect, which is a database of 168 categories of social determinants of health resources. Then there is TCARE Insights, which measures the success of the resources.
By reducing burnout through the TCARE platform, caregivers are able to care for family members over a longer period, Ahmadi argues.
“Thus, it delays or diverts nursing home placement of patients and members of risk-bearing entities,” Ahmadi touted.
TCARE clients are state and agency organizations, health plans and private insurance companies. The company makes its revenue through value-based contracts with these clients, Ahmadi said.
With the funding, TCARE will work to expand its offerings with its existing clients rather than seek new clients, Ahmadi said. One way it plans to do that is to hire at least another 100 employees, he added.
Other caregiver support solutions include Cariloop, Wellthy and Homethrive. However, these companies are more consumer-facing whereas TCARE is more enterprise-facing. Therefore, Ahmadi doesn’t consider them direct competitors, but solutions that complement TCARE’s services, he declared.
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