Suelin Chen, co-founder & CEO of Cake, talks about her motivation for tackling the many challenges in end-of-life care.
By the year 2060, the number of people in the United States aged 65 and older is projected to more than double from 46 million today to over 98 million. As a result, the cost of healthcare continues rising, as providers and insurance companies try to find ways to care for this aging population. Many have been looking to find solutions to the many issues that we're facing in this space.
Cake, a digital health startup based out of Boston, is hoping to become the leader in the space of end-of-life planning and advance care decisions. Their online platform makes it easy for individuals to make these types of decisions and store them in a secure system. The team understands that for many, it’s often difficult to make these types of plans for people they care about. Through their technology, they create a seamless experience for those hoping to make these important life decisions for themselves or a loved one.
After signing up, users are taken through a streamlined process where they’re asked to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to prompts like ‘I want my funeral to be a celebration of my life’ and ‘I have a living will or advance directive.’ Depending on each answer, the platform helps to identify what types of decisions and services each user should pursue. Choosing end-of-life preferences ahead of time can help prevent financial losses, unwanted medical interventions, and conflict between loved ones.
To date, Cake has worked with some of the largest healthcare networks in Massachusetts, including Harvard Pilgrim and Blue Cross Blue Shield of MA. They also recently raised a $1.35 million seed round, with the hopes of expanding their reach and making end-of-life planning more accessible to all.
I sat down with Suelin Chen, co-founder of Cake, to speak about her motivation and experience in starting this company. She explains that she always had an interest in healthcare but didn’t necessarily want to pursue a career as a clinician. She pursued a Ph.D. at MIT in Engineering and focused her work on medical technologies related to the treatment of prostate cancer.
“That was the first time that I was exposed to the fact that more medical interventions are not necessarily better for the patient, yet our healthcare system is not set up in a way for these types of conversations to happen. Patient’s families have to either be extremely proactive advocates, or you have to get lucky and encounter a clinician that will present your options in a clear way. This got me thinking about how to contribute to healthcare more directly.”
After working as Director of The Lab at Harvard University, she went on to become a consultant and transaction advisor to healthcare companies in Boston. As part of her work, she was tasked with defining the financial value of new therapies.
"I had to evaluate what a therapy was worth if it extended someone’s life for three months or six months. I talked to insurance companies and prescribing physicians all the time, and I just kept coming back to the dysfunctional way we do end of life today, especially in the United States. Incentives are very confusing and misaligned. The whole system is just not set up to support what a person would want.”
Soon after, Chen met her soon-to-be co-founder Mark Zhang at a hackathon, where they bonded over their shared interest in end-of-life care. Zhang, a palliative care physician at Dana-Farber and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, brought on his experience in the healthcare space to the team. “Once I met Mark, we had a clear vision of what was needed to make an impact in this space. We ended up winning first place at that hackathon, and that’s kind of how it all started.”
Cake makes it easy for users to evaluate what matters most to them, and what they should be thinking about in preparation for end-of-life planning.
In the beginning, they explored different options as to what their product could look like. Because end-of-life is such a universal topic, Chen and her team had to think through how to target a particular audience. “We had a lot of interest from different types of companies and users, but we couldn’t serve everyone at once. So figuring out our direction has been important but challenging, because there is so much we want to do.”
In this process, they were also tasked with finding a way to make their approach to this subject accessible. They knew they needed to prioritize lowering the barrier to entry to speak about this topic. “This is a challenging topic for most people. One question we asked ourselves was, where can we meet people so that people feel interested enough start? We thought that it was more important to get people in the door rather than pushing people to be totally comprehensive all at once, especially since it can be such an emotional topic for a lot of us.”
Their current platform has made it simple for people to approach this conversation in a way that is simple and accessible. Their easy-to-use online dashboard is made available through healthcare organizations and on their website and can be used to plan end-of-life preferences for yourself and loved ones.
“The biggest success is all of the feedback we’ve gotten from people saying ‘I always wanted to take care of this, it’s given me so much peace of mind’ or people who feel like they’ve wanted to talk to a parent about this. A lot of our users are people who have experienced loss along the way and feel that it could have gone better, and are now motivated to plan for someone they care about. That’s why we do what we do.”
">Suelin Chen, co-founder & CEO of Cake, talks about her motivation for tackling the many challenges in end-of-life care.
By the year 2060, the number of people in the United States aged 65 and older is projected to more than double from 46 million today to over 98 million. As a result, the cost of healthcare continues rising, as providers and insurance companies try to find ways to care for this aging population. Many have been looking to find solutions to the many issues that we're facing in this space.
Cake, a digital health startup based out of Boston, is hoping to become the leader in the space of end-of-life planning and advance care decisions. Their online platform makes it easy for individuals to make these types of decisions and store them in a secure system. The team understands that for many, it’s often difficult to make these types of plans for people they care about. Through their technology, they create a seamless experience for those hoping to make these important life decisions for themselves or a loved one.
After signing up, users are taken through a streamlined process where they’re asked to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to prompts like ‘I want my funeral to be a celebration of my life’ and ‘I have a living will or advance directive.’ Depending on each answer, the platform helps to identify what types of decisions and services each user should pursue. Choosing end-of-life preferences ahead of time can help prevent financial losses, unwanted medical interventions, and conflict between loved ones.
To date, Cake has worked with some of the largest healthcare networks in Massachusetts, including Harvard Pilgrim and Blue Cross Blue Shield of MA. They also recently raised a $1.35 million seed round, with the hopes of expanding their reach and making end-of-life planning more accessible to all.
I sat down with Suelin Chen, co-founder of Cake, to speak about her motivation and experience in starting this company. She explains that she always had an interest in healthcare but didn’t necessarily want to pursue a career as a clinician. She pursued a Ph.D. at MIT in Engineering and focused her work on medical technologies related to the treatment of prostate cancer.
“That was the first time that I was exposed to the fact that more medical interventions are not necessarily better for the patient, yet our healthcare system is not set up in a way for these types of conversations to happen. Patient’s families have to either be extremely proactive advocates, or you have to get lucky and encounter a clinician that will present your options in a clear way. This got me thinking about how to contribute to healthcare more directly.”
After working as Director of The Lab at Harvard University, she went on to become a consultant and transaction advisor to healthcare companies in Boston. As part of her work, she was tasked with defining the financial value of new therapies.
"I had to evaluate what a therapy was worth if it extended someone’s life for three months or six months. I talked to insurance companies and prescribing physicians all the time, and I just kept coming back to the dysfunctional way we do end of life today, especially in the United States. Incentives are very confusing and misaligned. The whole system is just not set up to support what a person would want.”
Soon after, Chen met her soon-to-be co-founder Mark Zhang at a hackathon, where they bonded over their shared interest in end-of-life care. Zhang, a palliative care physician at Dana-Farber and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, brought on his experience in the healthcare space to the team. “Once I met Mark, we had a clear vision of what was needed to make an impact in this space. We ended up winning first place at that hackathon, and that’s kind of how it all started.”
Cake makes it easy for users to evaluate what matters most to them, and what they should be thinking about in preparation for end-of-life planning.
In the beginning, they explored different options as to what their product could look like. Because end-of-life is such a universal topic, Chen and her team had to think through how to target a particular audience. “We had a lot of interest from different types of companies and users, but we couldn’t serve everyone at once. So figuring out our direction has been important but challenging, because there is so much we want to do.”
In this process, they were also tasked with finding a way to make their approach to this subject accessible. They knew they needed to prioritize lowering the barrier to entry to speak about this topic. “This is a challenging topic for most people. One question we asked ourselves was, where can we meet people so that people feel interested enough start? We thought that it was more important to get people in the door rather than pushing people to be totally comprehensive all at once, especially since it can be such an emotional topic for a lot of us.”
Their current platform has made it simple for people to approach this conversation in a way that is simple and accessible. Their easy-to-use online dashboard is made available through healthcare organizations and on their website and can be used to plan end-of-life preferences for yourself and loved ones.
“The biggest success is all of the feedback we’ve gotten from people saying ‘I always wanted to take care of this, it’s given me so much peace of mind’ or people who feel like they’ve wanted to talk to a parent about this. A lot of our users are people who have experienced loss along the way and feel that it could have gone better, and are now motivated to plan for someone they care about. That’s why we do what we do.”
Read Again https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanamatos/2018/02/07/this-startup-makes-end-of-life-planning-a-piece-of-cake/Bagikan Berita Ini
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