Five Questions With: Nick T. Adams

NICK T. ADAMS, president and co-founder of Care Thread / COURTESY CARE THREAD
NICK T. ADAMS, president and co-founder of Care Thread / COURTESY CARE THREAD

Nick T. Adams founded Care Thread with Chief Technology Officer Andrew Shearer three years ago. The company provides secure mobile care coordination to health care providers. Adams, the company president, talked about the business with Providence Business News.

PBN:How did you get the idea for Care Thread and can you tell me about the business?
ADAMS:
The idea for Care Thread came about through years of observing the challenges healthcare providers face trying to communicate with other providers about a patient at the emergency room (ER) or in the hospital.
Because current communications solutions like pagers, phones, emails and unsecure/secure text messages are not connected to patient data systems, providers have to actively seek out patient information about patient ER/hospital encounters and events before communicating about it. It became evident that there was no effective way for providers to be connected with other providers around patient data – on mobile – as patient-specific data was being generated. This inability to be “kept in the loop” about relevant patient-specific ER/hospital data harms people and contributes to over $100 billion in unnecessary or preventable care.

We built Care Thread to solve this problem and move patient data to providers in real time on mobile, through our Care Team Mapping™ engine, keeping everyone up-to-date so care can be coordinated as it happens. We sell our mobile care coordination solutions to healthcare organizations so providers can communicate better about their patients and healthcare organizations can avoid the costs of unnecessary and preventable care associated with ER/hospital visits. Prior to Care Thread we spent our careers in healthcare IT and biopharmaceutical account management and sales.
PBN:Who are your customers and how do they benefit from this kind of technology?
ADAMS:
Our clients include Partners Healthcare System and Tenet Yale New Haven’s Eastern CT Health Network.

Our clients benefit from Care Thread mobile care coordination solutions by staying informed about their patients. Through our proprietary Care Team Mapping™ technology, our clients can connect with the right person at the right time to avert unnecessary costs of miscommunication.
PBN:How helpful has the seed money from the Slater technology Fund been? Have you received any other funding to help the business?
ADAMS:
Slater Technology Fund’s investment is Care Thread has been essential to our survival and growth. Thorne Sparkman, our lead investor at Slater, has been instrumental in helping us sort through all types of issues, including our business model, go-to-market strategy, future investment strategy, etc. He is great to work with and we look forward to a long and prosperous relationship with him and Slater. We’ve also been funded by friends and family, Betaspring, the City of Providence’s PEDP and our strategic partnership with Beacon Partners, Inc., one of North America’s premier healthcare strategy and consulting firms.
PBN:How many employees do you have, and is there a lot of competition for this type of business?
ADAMS:
Currently, we have 2 founders, our CTO Andrew Shearer, and me. We rely on a network of part-timers and the resources of Beacon Partners to accomplish what needs to get done to deliver value to our clients. There is fierce competition between mobile messaging companies, as well as between large EMR vendors such as Epic and Cerner.

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Care Thread distinguishes itself by meeting an underserved market need that neither messaging nor EMR companies address.
PBN:Where do you see Care Thread in five years?
ADAMS:
In five years, we see Care Thread as an emerging leader in the mobile care coordination space of digital healthcare. We are making clinical data a part of the provider conversation about each patient, so that knowledge is shared and care is coordinated as it happens.

As real-time, interactive mobile technologies become more common in healthcare, Care Thread looks forward to becoming the mobile bridge between people and the clinical data generated by patients, within enterprises and across them as well. Healthcare is a human endeavor involving people working with others to take care of people. And they need to know what’s going on and have the ability to communicate about it. Seamlessly. On mobile. In real time. That’s what Care Thread does.

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