Skokie, Illinois, health information technology company RemCare Inc. has closed a $2.7 million Series A round of investment and taken the name of its flagship product — Care Team Connect.
Care Team Connect was launched in 2008 to create technologies that use evidence-based practices to reduce the risk of patient readmissions by coordinating healthcare among hospitals, community providers, family members and patients.
The company’s Care Team Connect product is aimed at helping hospitals and accountable care organizations make their care management more efficient, and improve patient outcomes and reduce costs.
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Hospital readmissions were a costly problem long before Congress and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services addressed them in healthcare reform, said Ben Albert, Care Team Connect’s chief executive.
Albert and Care Team Connect co-founder Jim Wills, now an adviser to the company, watched the eldercare system fail their own grandfathers, who were in and out of hospitals for unnecessary reasons.
“Care coordination is at the root of health reform,” Albert said. “I can’t say I saw this coming at the level that it’s here, but even before heath reform became a topic of conversation… we were in tune with readmission rates as a big financial problem.”
Care Team Connect will use its latest investment to hire sales people and attract new business, said Albert, who expects his employee headcount to grow to 16 from 10 in coming months.
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The company took in new investor money of $1.8 million and another $900,000 from the conversion of notes held by existing investors to equity, he said.
Care Team Connect’s funding was led by two strategic healthcare investors: The Martin Companies of Nashville, Tennessee, and National Healthcare Services of Orange County, California. “Our round was fully subscribed,” Albert said.
“Care Team Connect offers a unique platform that allows hospitals looking to easily coordinate care and reduce preventable readmission rates — and with recent health reform legislation, this is more important than ever before,” said Hal Andrews of The Martin Companies in a Care Team Connect release.
Andrews and Brant Heise of National Healthcare Services will join Care Team Connect’s board of directors. The company also recently added Dr. John Loughnane, a cross-continuum care expert, as medical director; and Salman Khatri, an expert in “software as a service” architecture, as director of technology.
As for the name change, the company’s new name “speaks a lot more to what we do” than its old name, Albert said.
