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Inside CarePort, The Female-Founded Company Powering Post-Hospital Care That Sold For $1.35 Billion

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CarePort, a company that millennial Lissy Hu founded while a graduate student at Harvard, has been acquired for the second time—this time by health technology company WellSky for $1.35 billion. The sale, which was first announced at the end of October, closed Thursday. The entire team will join WellSky and become CarePort, powered by WellSky. Hu, who has been the CEO since CarePort’s inception, will remain in that role. She created CarePort in 2012 to improve and expedite the process of coordinating post-hospital care for patients upon discharge. Now 30% of discharges in the United States are processed through CarePort.  

“We live in a time where there’s technology to book hotels halfway around the world, to see restaurants and their menus and book flights,” Hu said. “There had to be a better way to book nursing homes and home healthcare instead of sending a bunch of faxes.” She said the CarePort approach not only tackles an efficiency problem, but a deep-rooted healthcare one surrounding patient outcome. “If people end up in a bad nursing home “they bounce right back to the hospital.” 

Through integration of its software in each hospital or health center’s electronic health record, it allows for significant time reductions in processing each patient’s information and organizing after-hospital care. The 24-minute electronic referral response time is a contrast to the hours and days it previously took hospital staff to coordinate the process over phone calls and faxes. Poor coordination services and inefficient transition of care and discharge planning can result in re-hospitalizations—a burden and risk for patients, as well as an economic loss. Medicare payments can cost more than $17 billion per year for unplanned re-hospitalizations. Hu’s system translates to cost-efficiency, smoother transition of care and less chance of re-hospitalization—which will become more important as the baby boomer population continues to age, according to Hu. The sale to WellSky illustrates Hu’s vision and the potential improvement she saw in the medical field before even obtaining her medical license. Now at over 1,000 hospitals and 100,000 post-hospital programs across 43 states, the sale will likely only improve and add more efficiency to health systems. 

Hu, who emigrated from China at age 7, began her entrepreneurial journey in 2012 as neither a doctor nor a corporate executive. She was in her twenties and a student at Harvard’s dual MD/MBA program. But for Hu, it wasn’t just about learning the basics or preparing to enter a field that thousands of people graduate into each year. She envisioned making a difference in healthcare on a larger scale. She entered the idea into her program’s business plan competition, and she won. 

“I came up with this idea because I was working at the hospital and seeing this happen on a daily basis, and I knew this was going to become a bigger problem over time given everything we know about aging demographic in the U.S. and needing care when they leave the hospital,” she said. “This whole space around post-hospital senior care is going to become more important in the coming years and its one aspect of healthcare that going to be mission critical that we as a society get right.” 

With some money from her win at the competition, she went through TechStars in Boston to find mentors and hire developers to build the prototype. “I had never built a company before,” Hu said. They first did a pilot with Bay State Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts. “The nurses loved the software, the patients loved the software,” she said. She was on her way to revolutionizing the way post-hospital care is handled—from nursing home coordination to at-home dialysis and infusions, general at-home nurse care, behavioral and mental health care and more. 

Hu formed a core team of experienced people in the early days, including a COO who worked at startups that had been acquired and a head of product who had worked at leading Boston companies. This team had a strong network in place, and through that they recruited more employees. 

Hu doesn’t practice medicine, and said one of the things that kept her on this path is its wide reach. “I do think that one of the things I’m able to do at CarePort is impact care at scale—be able to improve care for millions of patients.” She has, however, experienced challenges that come with being a female entrepreneur, but stresses that women should pursue their goals nevertheless. “I always say that there are inherent challenges with being a woman CEO and I think it’s helpful to acknowledge them,” she said. “At the same time, you can’t let that discourage you.” 

She said there are hurdles and challenges that male CEOs typically don’t have to face, but that it’s a worthwhile journey. “Because building a company’s incredibly rewarding,” she added. You can be successful and you can bring other women along with you in your success. Being a part of technology is so important and you can have a big impact.” 

There are approximately 200 people on CarePort’s team, which was acquired once before by Allscripts, a leader in healthcare IT, in 2016. Now, with the new acquisition she sees even more progress for the future. “I personally am very excited about our home in WellSky,” she said. “What we’re seeing is a general trend in the U.S., especially accelerated by Covid—more and more patients choosing at home care.”

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