The people behind growing child-intervention agency CarePros are launching a new company that offers the software they have developed to allow healthcare providers in Alberta and beyond to focus less on paperwork, data encryption, and data insights, and more on actual care.
"The focus is to streamline workflows," CarePros co-founder Alex Gervais told Taproot. "(We want) to give frontline staff, child (and) youth care workers, counsellors, and social workers more time back away from their administrative duties to provide direct care."
The new company and its software are called Nurture. The software, derived from tools CarePros developed for its own work, is based on the web and is targeted at social workers and other professionals.
CarePros, which placed 23rd on The Globe and Mail's list of Canada's top growing companies in 2022, is a service provider for children with complex behavioural needs. It's pre-qualified by Alberta Health Services to serve this population, and its team totals around 300 people, who operate in the Edmonton region, Grande Prairie, and Red Deer. The organization offers in-home care, out-of-home care, foster care, therapy, and more.
Charles Wong, the CEO and co-founder of CarePros and the executive chair and co-founder of Nurture, told Taproot the original company's dedication to efficiency has helped it reduce costs, improve the experience for those providing care, and free up time for client care.
"We always ask ourselves: 'How do we deliver more value to our clients or stakeholders and rights holders?'" Wong said. "Essentially, the question is how do we improve the efficiency and effectiveness of direct care that we're offering to very complex, high-behaviour, highly traumatized children and youth?"
That focus, Wong said, led CarePros to create Nurture. The tool is part of what already powers the main organization. It uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to optimize processes. Its success led Wong and Gervais to realize it had value as a product for others.
"We identified the feedback and the positive experience that our team members within CarePros had, who said that there was nothing like it on the market," Gervais, the vice president of corporate services for CarePros and the CEO of Nurture, said. "As we expanded the feature set within Nurture, that's when we began chatting with other agencies. There's significant interest in doing pilot programs with other (health) agencies across the province and into B.C."
Building Nurture wasn't necessarily Plan A. Instead, the CarePros team found a problem and decided to solve it.
CarePros co-founders Charles Wong (left) and Alex Gervais plan to release the software they built to improve care efficiency, called Nurture, as they expand their reach into B.C. and beyond. (Supplied)
"There were many tech companies that were diving into our space to build products to serve social services or the child-intervention space," Wong said. "While we were buying and being users of these off-the-shelf solutions, our team needed to create lots of workarounds and add a lot of additional workflows."
In August, CarePros announced that Nurture entered a "private pre-launch." This came shortly after the company's Social Impact ScaleUp of the Year Award win at ScaleUp Week in Calgary in June.
Gervais didn't want to name Nurture's first pilot partner without the partner's consent, but offered a few details. "We've partnered with organizations like Alberta Innovates to do our digital traction program," Gervais said. "Part of that allows us to move toward piloting with other agencies to demonstrate that our technology is doing what we say it does: Increasing quality of outcomes for complex kids and use in care."
The company's upcoming plans include a full launch of Nurture planned for around February, and the aforementioned expansion into B.C. Wong said CarePros has signed a similar master agreement with that province's Ministry of Child and Family Development as it has in Alberta. Still, Wong and Gervais need to finalize a few details before they close that deal.
Since healthcare vetting for operators like CarePros varies from province to province, the company will have to tweak Nurture before the software can head west. But Wong has every confidence that B.C. and other markets are within reach.
"B.C., Ontario and Alberta operate relatively similarly when it comes to the accreditation bodies," Wong said "After B.C. — or while or during B.C. — we would also look to expand out east."
Originally focused on elder care upon its founding in 2017, Wong and his team shifted focus and became a child-intervention agency in 2020. Most youth CarePros works with are under temporary or permanent guardianship of the province.
"CarePros's purpose is to enhance lives," Wong said. "Our mission and vision is very dedicated to improving outcomes that are tied to the physical, social, emotional, and cultural well-being of our young people within a trauma-informed context."