NIA Small Business Showcase: CareVirtue
The more than 14 million family caregivers to people living with dementia face overwhelming challenges in providing care at home, including the complexity of managing the cognitive and behavioral changes caused by dementia progression, high levels of stress, physical burden, emotional burnout, and the financial strain of providing care resources. These caregivers are often under-resourced and not trained in contending with the challenges of disease progression, and they may also lack training in the legal planning and financial management aspects of dementia caregiving.
CareVirtue is an online social network and care platform that helps families communicate and share important information from one centralized account. The company’s platform provides methods to:
- Connect a trusted care team of family, friends, and other (formal or informal) caregivers.
- Update and share important information on a daily care journal.
- Create and share a personalized care guide that captures activities of daily living (ADLs) and important quality-of-life needs for each care recipient.
- Access vetted caregiver resources geolocated to the care recipient, along with national 800-number support line resources.
- Track, manage, and help inform family care teams with organization tools and reporting capabilities.
In the future, the platform will also deliver predictive insights on managing the behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD), as well as a data-driven, context-aware resource matching service for family caregivers using an AI-enabled caregiver assistant.
CareVirtue helps caregivers get timely personalized support and become more effective caregivers. The company’s platform helps family caregivers prepare and organize a care plan for a care recipient, share the plan with a trusted care circle, and communicate important care support needs. In a feasibility test (STTR Phase 1) with family dementia caregivers, participants reported a range of positive outcomes from using CareVirtue, including being more organized and effective as caregivers and feeling a greater sense of emotional support from the care team, as all allowing members to be cognizant of the care realities posted in the team care journal. CareVirtue achieved an excellent usability rating from participants, based on the System Usability Scale (SUS), a measure of perceived use of software and technology.
Company Milestones
Scientific and Clinical
- 2020: Received STTR Phase 1 grant ($488,000) from NIH/NIA to field test CareVirtue with family dementia caregivers
- 2021: Received SBIR Fast Track grant ($2.13 million) from NIH/NIA to conduct deep research into the legal planning and financial management needs of ADRD caregivers. The company has formed an expert advisory board and family caregiver co-design teams to guide prototyping, development, and validation.
- 2022: Made presentations at national and international events, including BOLD Dementia Caregiving conference and Alzheimer’s Association International Conference.
- 2022: Publish a peer-reviewed research paper reporting findings from feasibility testing with dementia family caregivers (Werner N, et al. CareVirtue: A mixed methods feasibility study of a web-based platform to support caregivers of people living with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias)
- 2022: Planned SBIR Phase 2 application, based on the predicate STTR Phase 1, to conduct a 2.5-year clinical trial to evaluate CareVirtue as an intervention to reduce dementia caregiver burden
Business
- 2019: Ideation and rapid prototyping of the CareVirtue platform, funded with internally generated company cashflow
- 2020: Completed University of San Diego (USD) Lean Startup program
- 2020: Developed progressive web application (PWA) version of CareVirtue
- 2021: Submitted application for design patent to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
- 2021: Conducted successful field trial of the CareVirtue platform with more than 100 primary and secondary family caregivers (STTR Phase 1)
- 2021: Accepted into I-Corps™ at NIH program
- 2022: Conducted successful co-design and prototyping of legal and financial planning tools for dementia caregivers
- 2022: Invited to join the Milken Institute Alliance to Improve Dementia Care
- 2022: Plan to establish industry partnerships and confirm consumer feature-market fit
Financial Overview
CareVirtue was bootstrapped with $75,000 of internally generated cashflow in 2019. In 2020, the company received a $488,000 STTR Phase 1 award from NIA. In 2021, the company received a $2.13 million SBIR Fast Track award from NIA to conduct research on legal planning and financial management needs of ADRD caregivers, with development of solutions tailored to the needs of diverse family caregiver communities.
The company anticipates seeking a $2.5 million seed round in 2023 or 2024 to invest further in its software engineering and customer support teams,and to augment business development resources to focus on revenue-generating industry partnerships.
Intellectual Property
The company’s intellectual property includes trade secrets covering proprietary internal processes, software, data, and machine learning models.
Product Development and Regulatory Strategy
Based on CareVirtue’s current work and data derived from ongoing field trials, the company is pursuing development of an artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled caregiver assistant that can provide predictive insights on managing the BPSD. An additional development effort has a focus on a data-driven, context-aware resource-matching engine that will help family caregivers access vetted resources at the right time.
Current guidance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) indicates that the FDA does not intend to enforce regulation for digital health solutions that are not providing medical diagnoses, advice, or treatment.
Commercialization Strategy
The foundation for CareVirtue’s market strategy is understanding the customer journey. The company recognizes that the customer journey can include the family caregiver, the person diagnosed with dementia, and an ongoing partnership between the two, especially during the early stages of impairment. Typical end users will be caregivers (both formal and informal), while the payer will likely be an organization. The company is pursuing a combination of business-to-business (B2B) and B2B-to-consumer efforts, including financial professionals, health care organizations, insurance providers, legal professionals, and elder community service providers.
Company Details
San Diego, CA
Industry: Digital Health
Management Team:
- Founder and Chief Executive Officer: Christian Elliott
- Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer: Matthew Zuraw
- Research Advisor: Nicole Werner, Ph.D.
- Industry Advisor: Martin Kleckner, Ph.D.
Point of Contact:
Christian Elliott
christian@carevirtue.com
(800) 484-0048