CareCentra is founded on the belief that all patients can be nudged to do what they are both willing to do, and are able to do, to manage their condition provided these nudges are truly personalized. I first tried the approach on one of the most difficult patients I know.

My father, a congestive heart failure patient living in India, had turned 90 then. He was refusing to weigh himself every day despite knowing it would identify the need for diuresis in advance and avoid an ER visit. He saw it as a step towards prolonged hospital visits and had very little motivation to build a weighing habit.

As I sat down to dinner at 7.30 pm every evening in New York, my phone would ping. It was 6 am in India and my 96-year-old dad had just woken up and stepped on the connected scale. In the early days there used to be several pings! As far as he was concerned, he was simply building that graph! Over the last six years, he had managed to keep his weight in check. It crossed the threshold set by AHA – 2 lbs. a day or 5 lbs. a week – two times.

This triggered automatic SMS alerts to my brother whose home was nearby, and took dad to the nearby hospital for diuresis. There were no ER visits in the last six years (there had been a few earlier) of his life. And there was just one ping on the phone each day! - until there were none. Dad passed away in his sleep just after his 96th birthday - he was our first patient on our connected care platform that hid the complexity of algorithms and technology under the hood as it worked its magic. It has been my mission since, to replicate this support at scale, and deliver continuous, connected, compassionate care, where machine intelligence combines with human compassion to add life to years in a patient's journey.
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Vasant Kumar - Founder and CEO