Enhancing Virtual Health Care With Carium

Rich Steinle, CEO of Carium, shares Carium's unique care experience platform and its award-winning methods of enhancing patient and provider user experiences.

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My name is Rich Steinle and I have the great privilege of serving as the CEO of Carium. Carium is an engagement platform for patients and care teams to really cement that sacred relationship in health care. My background is a mix of technology services in the health tech space as well as the provision of care. I spent a lot of years building primary care networks and then managed care companies, helping physicians move into the value-based world, and then connecting them with the right payer contracts and those sorts of things. And then to me, it comes full circle in Carium, as I get to put a technology platform in place for folks that brings that all together, and again, connects them directly to the people that they serve. 

Can you provide an overview of Carium's virtual care platform and what tools or features make it stand out from other virtual care solutions?

Carium's engagement platform has 3 main components. There's a patient element to it that is smartphone-based, generally. There's a care team piece that is a web dashboard of sorts. And then what really is the secret sauce in the middle is what we call our orchestration engine, or the Carium Pathways engine. And what it really does is it scripts complex clinical workflows. It enables those so that you can take a ton of the work off the backs of the care teams and the administrative folks in any sort of care setting, whether it's payer, provider, or health system. It rapidly deploys and really increases their productivity and the ability and the volume in which they can deal with their patients.

And then on the patient side, it really just puts the health care in their hands and it puts it in their daily life. So how it stands out really is Carium allows people to interact with their health in the way that they've become used to dealing with every other facet of their life. If you think about the way that we deal with our retail environments, with our banking and financial environments, with our entertainment choices, with our communication in our daily life, there's a construct to that that we're all pretty comfortable with. And a lot of it is online, a lot of it is on the smartphone, and yet health care has lagged so far behind that. The ability to not just log into a portal or log into a website, but really have everything going on in your whole health. Your health, your nutrition, your weight, your medication, any kind of protocol you're in from a care perspective. And then be able to touch the folks that are providing that care in real time, in a multitude of ways. That's really what we provide for the patient.

On the provider’s side, we let them extend their care out into these journeys with their patients. It isn't just “What happened this time and when's the next time I'm going to see you?” And the orchestration engine in the middle, really what it does is it takes the way that care teams want to care for their patients and pushes that all out right into their daily life. And then we quickly script that, bringing solutions like that to market in a matter of weeks instead of months or years which is a typical health tech implementation. 

How can this platform enhance the experiences and outcomes of patients?

I think one of the things that it does, and that frankly our clients have really called out, is it dramatically increases the touchpoints with the patient. Someone that you're used to dealing with maybe for their diabetes, and maybe they come in four times a year, which is a fairly typical schedule for someone either to see primary care or endocrinology. Now all of a sudden, you may have connected continuous glucose monitoring, scales, blood pressure, mental health check-ins, diet, exercise, anything like that. And all of a sudden now, literally, you're getting hundreds of data touchpoints on a patient on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. Not all of that requires direct interaction, but you're getting a complete, holistic look at that patient and everything going on in their life. Because again, one of the things Carium believes is that we are not our disease state. A patient isn't just a diabetic, they're a whole person. And so what's going on in that person's life? The ability to know that, the ability for them to share that with you, is very, very powerful. It dramatically changes the experience. 

All of those things put together are what are driving amazing results. We have patient satisfaction and patient engagement rates that are almost unheard of, in the 90 percentile. People never want to use these tools. They don't want to talk to their doctor or their health plan. And yet we're really seeing that dramatically improve.

And then also, we also measure all of those health measures. So how soon is a person's glucose under control? How soon has their blood pressure dropped to within controlled measures? And one of the things that we're really proud of is those real clinical results. How fast we're getting folks out of the hospital and reducing readmissions and making sure they know exactly how to take care of themselves. Those are real fiscal results for health systems, providers, and health plans, and they're real life health results for patients. We've seen all of that. We're really careful to track those measures from the beginning of all of our contracts. And that, we believe, is a lot of what's made the difference. And a lot of, in this case of this MedTech award, what that's about. 

In what ways does the platform address the challenges faced by health care providers? 

I think our founders came to this and said, “Why have all of these technologies impacted health care so little?” And they came from the perspective of, “Shouldn't the person be at the center of their health care?” Now, that sounds intuitive. But in the US health care system at the moment, it's not at all. As we all know you have to get down through the layers of the infrastructure before you can really get at the patient. 

How it helps the provider side of things is it puts them in direct relationship, and an ongoing relationship, with their patients. And it puts them in the context of their real life. It does so on a very engaging platform that actually has people get excited about their health. We've had people get put on programs in a particular site of care, a particular health system, they've been put on Carium. They send us feedback that say, “I'm going to use this forever, regardless of if I stay on this provider's plan.” 

That's really what it's about, is getting people excited. Having people believe that they really can impact and make a difference in their health care, so that on the provider side, you have this willing participant in that relationship. In all my years in primary care and on the provider side, one of the biggest challenges with any kind of program was, are people going to buy in? Are people going to participate? You can't have one-sided health. And so I think the biggest thing that it does on the provider’s side is it engages their patient in them, and they don't have to just chase them out of the site of care.

I frequently say about the pandemic that we just went through, that in health care, it was not a strategic event. It was a catastrophic event. And a lot of the digital technologies or the remote technologies that came up during the pandemic were not strategic in nature. They were simply to chase a patient out of a setting because if you couldn't catch them, you couldn't bill for anything. Now, that's not a great way to take care of people. And what we believe is you’ve got to connect those two in a meaningful relationship. Get them both invested, equally, in the health of the whole person. And in that, then you can really achieve those outcomes that I was talking about. 

We find that in typical provider workflows, we're able to automate and take out about 70 to 80% of the work and have Carium do that work for them. And so they're able to really focus on the core elements of what they do, who they should take care of in priority, and then let Carium help do the rest. 

Winning the 7th Annual Medtech Breakthrough Award for the "Patient Innovation Experience" category is a significant achievement. Could you elaborate on the specific reasons that Carium’s platform was recognized?

Obviously, we're a little beholden to what they share with us on that. But I think the things that stood out in their review of Carium was one, as you said, the overall holistic experience of the patient. That's actually the substrata of the award that we won. I think the ease of the navigation, how it prioritizes the things from their particular provider, and how it puts it in a framework that they're super used to. It almost looks like a Facebook feed. And the ease with which it incorporates into their daily life was a huge part of it.

I think also about the comprehensiveness of the solution. So one of the things that Carium set out to do was to have all of those tools to be able to reach out and connect a patient with a care team, we wanted to have all of those in one toolbox. A lot of the proliferation of health tech solutions in the last couple of years have been to do one thing, right? To do a televisit. To do a care plan. To do a particular disease state.

And what Carium believes is, again, the average health system provider or health plan is dealing with a myriad of folks, a myriad of solutions, a myriad of problems, and then individualistic ways in which they can best be connected about their health. And so Carium set out to build a platform that could deliver all of those things in the context of what serves the patient and the care team best. And the breadth of that solution, I would say is the second major piece that they referenced in terms of us winning this award.