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An AgeTech Collaborative™ startup participant, CareCo believes that technology should amplify, not replace, the human connection at the heart of healthcare. Acting as an AI-powered “copilot” for care teams, CareCo’s centralized solution turns phone and video-check-ins with patients into coordinated workflows, including real-time call guidance and action plans, so that older adults get the timely support they need to avoid preventable ER visits and live independently longer.

We chatted with CEO Mendel Erlenwein about the way CareCo is helping care management teams work more effectively, the difficulties of successful patient outreach, and the importance of having candid — even uncomfortable — conversations between innovators and policymakers.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Please tell us about CareCo.

CareCo is an AI platform for care teams: Our tools are designed to support and enhance their capabilities by automating routine tasks, improving documentation accuracy and providing helpful insights. This allows them to focus more on what matters most — meaningful patient interactions and care management. 

How does your platform work?

Technology is better at what we like to call the “brain” of care — processing data, generating reports and so on — but humans are better at the “heart” of care, which are those things that actually impact the individual patient. When we set out to build the CareCo platform, our mantra became: “We want to build the ‘brain’ to amplify the ‘heart.’” So our AI tools collapse the administrative burden of tasks such as pre-conversation prep, post-conversation workflow and customized documentation. It also pulls intelligent insights out of the conversations that are happening with patients.

The whole thing is built on a communications stack: We have a phone system, a video system, texting and an ambient recorder that enables all the communication with patients to go through one “brain.” This both syncs all the communications with a given patient and also allows the system to learn about them. It can then guide the care team to provide that “heart” of care by offering recommendations like, “You should talk to this patient about their blood pressure in order to achieve the outcome we’re looking for.”

Streamlining workflows and saving time are excellent benefits, but your solution also helps deliver deeper overall patient engagement.

There’s a fundamental difference between what I call inbound and outbound patient interaction. With inbound, patients are actively trying to engage with the healthcare system. They’re calling their provider and they already know what they want, which is probably something transactional — to make an appointment or get a prescription refilled, for example. A lot of the technology being built is for patients in this group. That tech is valuable, but it’s not solving the larger problem.

At the national level, the big problem we have is on the outbound side — reaching people who tend not to engage with the healthcare system, unless it’s to use the ER as their primary care, which drives up costs. Maybe they don’t have easy access to good healthcare. Maybe they have more pressing concerns, like getting access to healthy food; or maybe they’re not even sure how they’re going to put the next meal on the table. Either way, their “health plan goals” are low on their list of priorities.

These patient populations are high cost and need to be managed, whether it’s through an accountable healthcare organization, a value-based care organization or some other healthcare system. These systems reach out to those patients on a regular cadence to try to create better health outcomes by encouraging things like healthier eating, more exercise and medication adherence. Right now, that outbound work is being done manually, often not very well, and there is no visibility into the actual quality of those conversations.

CareCo offers the intelligent “brain” that not only reduces care team members’ admin burden, but that also moves the needle on the “heart” of healthcare by providing at-scale insights into exactly what’s happening at the conversation level, pulling out intelligent insights as needed to steer every single conversation toward success.

What was the inspiration behind founding CareCo?

I’ve been in the care management space for about eight years, which has given me a deep understanding of what actually goes into making all this work. When the generative AI boom hit at the end of 2022, I jumped in immediately and started using it to augment my own workflows.

Then, in February of 2023, the idea hit me: What we need is a full-blown AI-powered tool for care management and documentation that could listen to calls with patients, pick up on patient problems that the care manager might miss and prompt the care manager on the direction of the care plan — all while live on the call. That was the kernel that has blossomed into what CareCo is today.

Back in March, you organized and hosted an event called CareConference in Washington, D.C. What was your vision for the conference?

I’ve spoken at conferences both large and small, and I got to a point where I stopped enjoying them. First, they tend to be very bland, even boring. Second, organizers often aim to sell tickets by recruiting as many leaders in the field as possible to come and speak. In turn, that leads to having multiple tracks that people can follow, but that means there are many sessions going on at the same time, and people have to choose from among them. Third, most conferences include panels comprised of four or five experts, which can make it hard for these leaders to speak freely because they don’t want to openly disagree with each other or make one another look bad.

I wanted to change all that. So we made CareConference exciting, like a concert. We had entrance music, flashing lights and even a smoke machine! We also kept it focused: one day, in one room, on one stage, and no panel discussions — only fireside chats with exceptional leaders, each followed by a robust Q&A session.

How did you create the space for more honest dialogue — and did people respond?

Having everybody together in one room the entire day really allowed people to get super engaged: When the Q&A for the very first session began, the line of people waiting to ask questions for just that speaker was longer than I’ve seen at entire conferences.

Our format also allowed the speakers to be more candid and engage in genuine, even difficult conversations. For example, we invited Jacob Shiff, who is the Chief AI and Technology officer at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), to speak about the ACCESS model and its outcome-aligned payments process. In my field, many people have genuine concerns about the ACCESS model, and I told him ahead of time, “I would like to ask you some hard questions. If you can be comfortable being a little bit uncomfortable, I think we can have an excellent conversation.” And he said, “Sure, go for it.”

So during our conversation I started pushing back against his talking points — and it got really uncomfortable in the room! You could see people thinking, “This is the kind of conversation that belongs behind closed doors.” As we were going back and forth, I got to the point where I felt like pushing harder would cross a line, so I stopped. But he could tell that I wasn’t buying his answer, and he said, right there on stage, “Come on, Mendel, amp it up!”

What’s more, rather than leaving after his talk, he stayed for lunch, welcoming conversation and debating with people. I think that demonstrates CMS’s genuine openness to dialogue and to innovation, and shows that if you actually are trying to innovate, and you have an idea, their ears and doors are wide open.

What’s ahead for CareCo in 2026?

It’s an exciting time at CareCo. We just finished our first year, and we’ve got about 100,00 patients on the platform. We bootstrapped to become profitable, and now we’re kicking off a round of fundraising. We have a robust product roadmap to develop so there’s a lot of work to be done, and we are excited to keep forging ahead.

Learn more about Careco at their website, and check out our Startup Directory to discover more startup participants in the AgeTech Collaborative.