Eu Cuido

We are addressing the challenges families face when dealing with rare and/or debilitating chronic diseases and need to coordinate multidisciplinary care. 

Their medical data is spread across multiple providers, which makes it more difficult to track diagnosis journey and treatment progress. 

Many patients have a caregiver involved in their care and keeping consistent communication across patient/caregiver/healthcare providers is a challenge. 

Finally, treatment expectation is affected because there's little discussion about treatment objectives from a patient perspective and how this needs to be aligned with their healthcare providers' objectives. 

Our app, Eu Cuido, is a repository of data for patients that connect them with their caregivers and their healthcare providers, no matter where they are. 

The data is managed by patients and caregivers and they communicate with healthcare providers via app sharing their medical history, test results, and treatment objectives/progress. 

The app is also connected to a bot via WhatsApp to facilitate data entry. 

Eu Cuido has a web version as well. 

Our target populations are family caregivers and people living with rare and/or chronic diseases.

Particularly in rare diseases, these caregivers are mostly women (85%), who gave up on their professional life and/or personal dreams, to care for someone in their family. They spend more than 12 hours/day providing care and are overwhelmed yet find it difficult to ask for help and retain all the information/medical history in their mind. They are afraid of not being there for these patients, and usually feel guilty. They also feel lonely and do not take good care of their own health. Many have been abandoned or got divorced when a diagnosis was given. They need to coordinate care across multiple specialists while also juggling domestic activities and caring for other members of their families. 

Our app is also available for people with rare diseases as many are independent yet struggle to coordinate care and establish good communication with healthcare providers.   

We have a version of our app for healthcare providers to connect with caregivers and patients making sure their medical data is always within reach and accessible by multidisciplinary teams involved in the care of people with rare diseases. 

We are 3 co-founders and one team member. We all are experienced in our areas of expertise with more than 20 years of experience.

Simone (CEO and co-founder): +25 years in healthcare with 20 years working in rare diseases in multiple roles and global responsibilities: commercial, patient services, patient advocacy, humanitarian programs, and public affairs. I am also a chairman of a non-profit (Eco Soap Bank) and a board member of GARDIAN (registry for neuronopathic Gaucher disease - rare disease). I have a strong relationship with rare disease groups in Brazil and WW.

Henk (CBO and co-founder): also brings 25+ years in pharma/biotech with over 20 years in rare diseases with extensive experience in regulatory leadership roles and commercial. Henk has relationships with patient groups as well. 

Eduardo (CIO and co-founder): 25+ years of experience as a computer engineer leading global teams. 

Bia (CFO): +20 years of experience in banking

I have 20 years of experience working with rare diseases (as well as one of our co-founders) and a patient organization from Brazil suggested we apply for this Challenge as they believe in what we are doing and know we could accelerate if we have more funding. 

We are passionate to bring solutions to the rare diseases space because we understand the challenges and their needs and want to bring something that can help people anywhere in the world.

People with rare diseases usually have a long journey, misdiagnosis, lack of treatment alternatives, and feel lonely on their journey.

An important player in this community is the caregiver.

We’ve done market research in Brazil and numbers match what is known around the world: the vast majority of family caregivers are women who will give up on their careers or personal dreams to support a person with a rare disease.

They are also the ones who will make decisions about treatment, yet they are usually overwhelmed, feel lonely, and don’t take good care of themselves.

The overall health of caregivers can have a significant impact on treatment outcomes for those affected by rare diseases or any other chronic condition.

We believe addressing the needs of caregivers and giving them tools to better manage the health of their loved ones will have a positive impact beyond the rare disease communities. This can address the needs of all people living with chronic and debilitating diseases.

Having a platform to help coordinate activities, seek help from other family members, and organize the medical history in one place will remove the burden they have today as they barely have time to ask and explain.

Our platform provides the ability to share information with anyone involved in the care, reach out to and improve communication with healthcare providers and organize medical history in one place.

Reduce burnout on family caregivers allowing them to better care for their family members

Centralize medical information allowing families to share their journey with multidisciplinary teams

Increase treatment adherence with notifications to take medication, reminders to appointments, and engagement tools.

Become the platform for people who live with chronic and debilitating diseases.

Coming from 20 years of experience working with rare diseases, we know how lengthy and complex their journey is, as well as how slow adoption can be due to the “lack of urgency” they perceive throughout their journey.

These people have been told so many times things like “Come back next year to see if symptoms still persist”, “There’s no treatment available and will just manage symptoms”, and “There’s nothing we can do” that their own sense of urgency slows down.

We’ve been targeting family caregivers and rare disease patient groups yet not limited to rare diseases. Those caregivers who provide long-term care for the aging population also require more support and attention.

We are in the early phases of our platform and for now, we are tracking adoption (number of users) and engagement with the platform (amount of data entered).

We will track burdens on caregivers such as quality of life (QoL), and mental health and want to track the number of hospitalizations to see how improving support to caregivers can improve the overall health of those who they care for.   

Back in 2021, we ran a pilot in Brazil with oncology patients who were receiving oral chemotherapy at home. They could order their medication using our platform, track the progress of their order, and then would be reminded when to order their medication again. We saw an increase in patient engagement from 45% to 62% in 3 weeks (we processed over 600 orders) and got positive feedback about the process.

This helped us to understand how removing the need to talk on the phone (patients and caregivers didn’t want to answer their phones when the health insurance company was calling them) and offering one place where they could send all the required information (test results, prescriptions, explanations from their doctors) can increase their engagement and expedite the ordering process.

Our overall theory is that if we provide tools to optimize care such as ordering medication, sending documents (Brazil requires a lot of paperwork to get approval for certain medications), allowing patients and/or caregivers to share their medical history with their providers and creating a space to coordinate care, the stress caregivers and patients deal with on regular basis will reduce, which will have a positive impact on treatment outcomes and quality of life.

There are several articles supporting the need to remove the burden on caregivers and a recent survey published in Brazil at Veja Saude, as well as the survey led by Merck on caregivers (across multiple countries) support the need for better care and potential impact if addressed.

Here is the link to these two publications (only in Portuguese): https://drive.google.com/drive...

Eu Cuido is an app (and web version) available for iOs and Android, utilizing cloud services (AWS), SQL in RDS (serveless) with QA and QP in VPC.

Our app is also connected via API to a bot on WhatsApp to facilitate data entry. 

I am very passionate about diversity, equity and inclusion because of how I was raised, my beliefs, and my experience in multiple global roles.

I am a female, immigrant, Latina, and above 50yo CEO with the majority of shares and want to bring people who can add different points of view, have different life-experience, and are passionate about changing the world and providing better access to care. 

We are 3 co-founders: 2 are immigrants, all above 50yo, our CFO is a female who is an immigrant and lives in South Africa.

We are committed to bringing individuals with different backgrounds and cultures.

This is personal to me in many different ways (my mother was a leader in politics, I have a transgender daughter and I am an immigrant married to an immigrant). 

Love the idea to have more women as we are the decision-makers in healthcare and understand the pain and needs in this space.   

We also want to have an environment that reflects what we do: our team must aim for good health, will have flexible hours, and can work remotely and anywhere in the world.  

Our business model in B2B2C. Our main focus is the family caregivers in rare or chronic/long-term care.

We offer our app to them for free and we sell subscriptions to patient groups and healthcare providers.

We also plan to partner with pharma and health insurance companies to offer our app to their patient service programs.

Monthly subscription to healthcare providers, patient organizations, pharma, and health insurance companies. 

We are evaluating selling aggregated/de-identifiable data to partners focused on bringing new treatments to rare diseases. 

We’ve been bootstrapping and have won 2 prizes in a startup contest last year in Brazil (a total of R$70K from FSFX – Fundacao Sao Francisco Xavier).