Blackbird invests in Carepatron’s “radically accessible” healthcare management platform

When TechCrunch covered Carepatron pre-seed last year, it was focused on serving individual practitioners and small healthcare practices. Now, the healthcare management system has evolved with its customers and works with medical practices with between five and 100 practitioners. The platform is now used in around fifty countries and was recently launched in Spanish. To support its expansion, Carepatron raised $4 million in seed funding from Blackbird and TQ Ventures.

The New Zealand-based startup says the number of users of its product is growing 21% month-over-month to tens of thousands of care teams. Its main markets are the United States, where half of Carepatron’s customers are based, and Europe. Although many of its clients are physicians, they also include a wide range of providers, such as psychologists, physical therapists, health coaches, life coaches and dietitians.

Carepatron was founded in 2021 by David Pene and Jamie Frew, both of whom have strong ties to the healthcare industry. Frew’s family ran a community hospital, while Pene’s partner is a doctor.

The Carepatron platform has tools that allow providers to manage their entire practice, including appointments, telehealth consultations, patient records, payments, and communication with other providers in a secure environment . It also has a patient app that allows users to view their health records and speak with their providers who use Carepatron.

Over the past twelve months, Carepatron has released many new features, Frew tells TechCrunch, including comprehensive customization.

Frew says that while practitioners around the world work in different ways, traditional healthcare software is typically designed for a very specific vertical, such as for psychologists in California. But Carepatron’s goal is that any provider in the world can use it. An example of its customization 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 types of suppliers around the world and use it to create personalized workspaces for them.

Carepatron Team Members

“Imagine you are starting a new business as a health coach in the Philippines region. You come to Carepatron, you register. We know what health coaches look like in the Philippines region,” says Frew. “We know their domain types and the structure of their workspace. Imagine being able to answer a few questions and then create an entire workspace.

Carepatron has also released note-taking functionality in the form of a block-style editor, meaning 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 there 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-driven, Pene says, and the majority of their users came to Carepatron through word of mouth. Another part of its growth is its user community features, which Pene and Frew compare to Sigma, Canva and Notion. Practitioners can create resources and tools within the platform, including assessments, forms and templates, and share them publicly, generating more engagement as other practitioners use them.

Pene says about 70 percent of Carepatron’s new customers are moving away from spreadsheet software like Excel or Google Sheets, or a combination of single-feature products. For example, they can use Zoom for telehealth calls, a calendar for online scheduling, and Google Workspace for client notes and records. Carepatron’s features can replace all of that. The remaining 30% used older practice management platforms like Practice or Jane App.

Carepatron’s competitive advantages include more affordable pricing and features designed to make new healthcare practices work, Pene says. “If you’re a modern healthcare professional, you’re using things like video calls, modern technology and their workflows really don’t work that way. The way systems are architected presents a high degree of friction with today’s services and, ultimately, [clients] hack these solutions or use workarounds. Or they stay in Excel and have people do manual work to convey the information.

The new funding will be used to grow Carepatron’s user community. It will also expand its AI and automation capabilities, with plans to hire additional staff to support this plan.

“Carepatron’s vision is to build a radically accessible platform that moves out of this era of digitization of the work done by healthcare practitioners and into an era where their system is able to automate or perform this work for practitioners,” explains Frew. “For a long time in healthcare, we took events that were happening in the real world and transferred them to digital format. But we haven’t really added value or fundamentally reinvented the things people do every day. The vision behind Carepatron is to create building blocks for practitioners to achieve this goal at the local level.