Written By: Vineet Singal, CEO & Co-Founder of CareMessage

A little more than a year ago, I was sitting in Manhattan’s Koreatown browsing Twitter while waiting to have dinner with my sister, who had just moved to New York a few weeks before. Suddenly, the tweet from Adrian Wojnarowski (Woj) was unambiguously direct and melancholy: “The NBA has suspended the season.” Later, I remember telling my sister that it might be the last time in a while that we’ll get a chance to eat together.

As a diehard NBA fan (as my Twitter feed undoubtedly gives away), this was the first time I can remember COVID-19 having an impact on me personally. I remember walking back to my hotel after dinner feeling a sense of dejection, as I had been looking forward to watching basketball that evening after a long day of meetings.

Little did I know that my personal world and our world collectively would flip upside down over the next 12 months (and counting). In the past year, I have lost a family member (my maternal grandfather) to COVID-19, and have experienced the emotional trauma that comes with the death of a loved one compounded by not being able to properly say goodbye. My physician parents have been on the frontlines of this pandemic in a state with one of the highest surges in the country; my constant worry about their health only subsided when they were finally vaccinated in December. At the same time, my wife and I had a healthy baby in the middle of the pandemic, and he has brought enormous light and joy into our lives.

While it’s been an up and down year for me personally, it’s been even harder for my team. Several members of our team have been diagnosed with COVID-19, and while they have recovered, it’s been harrowing to learn of their experiences. Others on the team are parents who have been performing the herculean task of managing their kids’ education while working remotely full-time. Several team members have lost multiple family members to COVID-19. And finally, many on the team who rely on outdoor activities and socialization for positive energy have been denied those experiences for months on end.

And finally, and perhaps most glaringly, has been the impact to our customers and the millions of mostly low-income patients they serve. The pandemic has taken the biggest toll on those in low-wage jobs — many of whom are our patient users — who are not lucky enough to work from home and were forced to be exposed to this virus in order to survive.

It’s taken a toll on the frontline healthcare workers — many of whom are our customers — who have been doing heroic work every single day for the past year, literally putting their lives on the line for the greater good of this country.

Registered nurse Mariah Perry of Whittier Street Health Center administers the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine to Roxbury native Nazaleem Smith at the Pleasant Hill Missionary Baptist Church. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)

The last year has been an unfortunate reminder of the inequities that exist in our world that will last way beyond this pandemic. It is up to all of us to recognize the impact these inequities have had on our response to this pandemic, and the disproportionate impact on the poor and vulnerable amongst us. At CareMessage, we remain committed to playing a part in the fight against economic inequality, historical (and current) racism and other factors that have created disparities that were no more clearly visible than in the last 12 months.

Here, I hope to outline our vision for the future and how the experience of the past year has shaped this vision, and invite you to join us as we strive towards a world where all people regardless of income or background achieve equitable health outcomes.

A Renewed Vision Shaped by COVID-19

As soon as I landed back home in Austin after the NY trip, I saw emails from our product and engineering team regarding the challenges they were experiencing with usage, which had grown multiple-fold almost overnight due to our customers reaching out to patients about COVID-19.

We did not build CareMessage with the explicit goal of being a communications platform in the middle of a global pandemic, but at the same time, our messaging platform was proving to be essential for disseminating critical COVID-19 information nonetheless.

Over the weekend, I authorized our team to purchase additional servers and scale up our infrastructure. Our engineering team moved with urgency, working weekends to scale our infrastructure in a matter of days. Within a couple of weeks, we were supporting 10x the typical volume with one of our features, and I am proud to say that we successfully delivered every single one of those messages.

Within the last year, we have facilitated nearly 30 million messages around COVID-19, everything from helping clinics reach out to patients to get them tested, communicating COVID-19 test results, reinforcing the importance of preventive measures such as wearing a mask, coordinating telehealth appointments, providing mental health support, and much more. In late March 2020, we began to offer CMLight (a donor-funded lightweight version of our platform) at no cost to any safety-net organization not already using CareMessage.

In a few months, we nearly doubled our customer base and more than doubled our active users to more than 8 million patients, making us the largest patient engagement platform for underserved populations nationally.

Perhaps the messaging trend that surprised us the most was the focus on access to resources and social services, which became critically important as the economic impact of the pandemic grew. In total, our clinics sent millions of messages to patients around food distribution (including EBT), medication access, rental assistance, other financial assistance programs, health insurance (especially Medicaid) enrollment, and other resources.

Going forward, we remain committed to seeing our COVID-19 work through, with a targeted focus on driving vaccinations in underserved communities. At the same time, we are excited to build upon the learnings from the past year, especially as it relates to the role we can play in helping address the essential needs of our patient population. For instance, rather than just focusing on providing diabetic-friendly recipes, could we directly connect patients in food deserts to low- or no-cost healthy food options? Rather than just reminding patients about scheduling a cancer screening, could we help address some of the upstream causes of cancer, such as suboptimal housing?

I am very excited for us to answer these questions.

Join Us

By expanding our overall vision beyond a focus on healthcare needs to a wider focus on all basic needs, we hope to be able to broaden and deepen the overall impact of CareMessage. I am thrilled about the opportunity to build the future of technology for underserved populations, and given our scale, be able to disseminate these innovations to millions of people.

We are in the midst of one of the most aggressive hiring surges for us as an organization, recruiting for as many as a dozen roles across the organization this year, the vast majority of which we will hire in the next quarter.

When you join CareMessage, you are joining a team that fundamentally cares about its people. Last spring, after witnessing team members persevere through some of the most critical times of our lives and of CareMessage history, we doubled down on our support of overall wellness of our members by introducing a new company-wide program we named ‘Friday Lights’. ‘Friday Lights’ is a coordinated effort that provides a reprieve in the form of staggered every other Friday company-wide holiday for all members. The aim of this program was to provide company wide support when clearly so many needed it. This new program welded universal positive feedback from the team at large. Members reported diminished overall stress and anxiety, increased time with loved ones, and a general increase in morale during a very trying time in all of our lives.

The CareMessage team during our company-wide virtual summit expressing gratitude to healthcare workers across the country.

When many of our colleagues were slashing salaries and conducting mass layoffs, as an executive team, we deferred our salaries for several months in order to make sure that none of our team members had to suffer a salary reduction; more recently, we reset everyone’s salaries at the 75th percentile for tech salaries in Los Angeles as our benchmark. We postponed performance reviews for several months to provide the entire team with the mental space to rally behind our COVID-19 response without having to constantly worry about their pre-pandemic performance goals. We implemented career ladders on a companywide basis in order to ensure parity in performance management and promotions across departments, and are proud to have promoted many women and people of color in the recent past. At the suggestion of a board member, we instituted a ‘No-Fire’ policy for several months, providing our team with the security of steady employment during a global pandemic. We had already embraced remote work in 2018, way before it became the norm in the industry.

If you are ready to solve challenging problems at scale that have a direct impact on society at large, join us. If you are ready to sell and/or implement a product that will directly impact millions of people’s lives, join us. If you are ready to build the future of technology for underserved populations, join us.

Learn more about open positions at CareMessage here.