Slater Invests $250,000 in Healthcare Mobile Messaging Startup

Providence-Based Care Thread Seeks to Improve Communication Among Hospital Teams

PROVIDENCE, RI, January 8, 2013-- The Slater Technology Fund today announced that it has committed $250,000 in funding to a $750,000 seed round for Care Thread, a provider of secure mobile messaging and team-based collaboration solutions that empower hospital providers to maximize communications and productivity across care teams. Care Thread, which was recently named "App of the Month" by Nuance Healthcare, will use this new investment to advance the development and commercialization of its mobile messaging solution.

Founded by a management team with extensive healthcare and IT experience, Care Thread delivers a HIPAA-compliant mobile messaging solution that provides every member of the care team with real-time information detailing a patient's status and treatment. In addition to its core messaging solution, Care Thread's suite of collaboration tools foster best practices through hand-off summaries for care transitions and task lists that can be shared with a patient's care team. Care Thread helps promote improved teamwork, care coordination and patient safety while reducing time to discharge.

A former software consultant and medical doctor, Care Thread's co-founder and CEO Dr. Scott Guelich's career has spanned both technology and medicine. Guelich pursued his medical training at Dartmouth College and Brown University, where he also created clinical iPhone apps used by tens of thousands of physicians. Going from Silicon Valley to working in a hospital, he was struck by the challenges healthcare providers face when communicating and coordinating care. He founded Care Thread to give them the tools they need to better serve their patients.

"Care Thread is solving a really important problem in a mission-critical setting. Teams of doctors and nurses are collaborating twenty-four hours a day to save lives, and they're trying to reach each other with pagers!" said Thorne Sparkman, managing director of the Slater Technology Fund. "Now that many members of care teams are carrying sophisticated mobile devices in their pockets, the time for the messaging paradigm to change is here -- but it's a nuanced task. Scott's experience bridges diverse domains and technologies, and we're excited to work with the talented team he has built."

About Care Thread

Care Thread provides secure mobile messaging and team-based collaboration solutions that empower hospital providers to maximize communications and productivity across care teams. Founded by a management team with extensive healthcare and IT experience, Care Thread delivers a HIPAA-compliant mobile messaging solution that provides every member of the care team with real-time information detailing a patient's status and treatment. Care Thread's suite of collaboration tools fosters best practices through hand-off summaries for care transitions and task lists that can be shared with a patient's care team, and help promote improved teamwork, care coordination and patient safety while reducing time to discharge. For more information, visit http://www.carethread.com or follow Care Thread on Twitter: https://twitter.com/carethread.

About Slater Technology Fund

The Slater Technology Fund is an independently chartered economic development fund that operates in accord with best practices of venture capital investing, backing new ventures committed to basing and building businesses in Rhode Island. Leveraging state and federal funding, Slater focuses its resources on the support of entrepreneurs who have the vision, leadership and commitment to build substantial commercial enterprises. Slater typically invests at the inception stage in the development of a new venture, often based upon ideas and technologies originating in academic institutions and/or government research laboratories located within the region. In most cases, investments are premised upon the possibility of raising substantial follow-on financing, from venture capital investors or from strategic partners, with a view toward accelerating the generation of significant numbers of high-value, high-wage jobs over the intermediate to longer-term. For more information, visit www.slaterfund.com.

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