When TechCrunch covered Carepatron’s pre-seed last year, the startup was focused on serving solo practitioners and small health practices. Now the healthcare management system has scaled along with its clients, and works with medical practices that range in size from five to 100 practitioners. The platform is now used in about 50 countries and recently launched in Spanish. To support its expansion, Carepatron has raised $4 million in seed funding from Blackbird and TQ Ventures.
The New Zealand-based startup says its product’s users are growing 21% month-over-month to tens of thousands of healthcare teams. Its main markets include the United States, where half of Carepatron’s clients are based, and Europe. While many of its clients are physicians, they also include a wide range of providers, like psychologists, physiotherapists, health coaches, life coaches and dietitians.
Carepatron was founded in 2021 by David Pene and Jamie Frew, who both have close connections to the healthcare industry. Frew’s family ran a community hospital, while Pene’s partner is a doctor.
Carepatron’s platform has tools for providers to manage their entire practice, including appointments, telehealth consultations, patient records, payments and communicating with other providers in a secure environment. It also has a patient app that lets users see their health records and talk with their providers who use Carepatron.
Over the last 12 months, Carepatron released a lot of new features, Frew tells TechCrunch, including full customization.
Frew says that even though practitioners around the world work in different ways, traditional healthcare software is usually built with a very specific vertical in mind — for example, for psychologists in California. But Carepatron’s goal is for any provider in the world to be able to use it. One example of its customizability is the ability to create different fields, labels and categories for patient-client records. The next step for the startup is to aggregate data from different kinds of providers around the world and use that to create customized workspaces for them.
“Imagine you’re starting a new business as a health coach in regional Philippines. You come onto Carepatron, you sign up. We know what health coaches look like in the regional Philippines,” says Frew. “We know the kinds of fields and workspace structure they have. Imagine being able to answer a couple of questions and then spinning up a whole workspace.”
Carepatron also released a note-taking feature in the form of a block-style editor, which means practitioners can embed videos, prescriptions and anything else they want into their notes. Another feature is automated workflows. For example, if a client visits a practitioner’s website, they can book an appointment on it and all appointment reminders, invoices and payment processes are automatically generated from there, reducing administrative work.
The startup’s user acquisition strategy is entirely product-led, says Pene, and the majority of their users came to Carepatron through word-of-mouth referrals. Another part of its growth is its user community features, which Pene and Frew compare to Sigma, Canva and Notion. Practitioners can build resources and tools inside the platform, including assessments, forms and templates, and share them publicly, generating more engagement as other practitioners use them.
Pene says about 70% of Carepatron’s new clients switch over from spreadsheet software like Excel or Google Sheets, or a combination of single-feature products. For example, they might use Zoom for telehealth calls, a calendar for online scheduling and Google Workspace for notes and client records. Carepatron’s features can replace all of those. The other 30% used older practice management platforms like Practice or Jane App.
Carepatron’s competitive advantages include more affordable pricing and features designed for how new healthcare practices work, Pene says. “If you’re a modern healthcare professional, you’re utilizing things like video calling, utilizing modern technology and their workflows really don’t work that way. The way the systems are architected have a high degree of friction with today’s services and ultimately, [clients] hack those solutions or use workarounds. Or they stay in Excel and have people doing manual work to hand off information.”
The new funding will be used on growing Carepatron’s user community. It will also develop its AI and automation capabilities, with plans to hire additional staff to support that plan.
“The vision for Carepatron is to build a radically accessible platform that moves from this era of digitalizing the work that healthcare practitioners do, and moves into an era where their system is able to automate or do that work for practitioners,” says Frew. “For a long time in healthcare, we’ve taken stuff that happened in the real world and moved it into a digital format. But we haven’t really added value or fundamentally reimagined the things that people are doing on a daily basis. The vision behind Carepatron is to create building blocks for practitioners to achieve that on a local level.”
10 years since the term ‘unicorn’ was coined, we’ve almost come full circle
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