Empowering Cognitive Caregivers: How The Care Hack Is Transforming Family Support in Healthcare
Co-founders Mitul Desai and Eli Shalenberg, MD, are on a mission to bring family caregivers into the center of the healthcare system, starting with those supporting loved ones with complex brain and mental health conditions.
By Nicole Kinsey
The Challenge: A Silent Force Behind Healthcare
More than 30 million Americans serve as family caregivers for loved ones with long-term cognitive conditions such as schizophrenia, dementia, and brain injuries. These individuals, whom The Care Hack calls cognitive caregivers, are the often-overlooked backbone of the U.S. healthcare system. They manage medications, coordinate appointments, fill in systemic gaps, and keep their loved ones out of hospitals. Without them, the system would collapse.
Despite their essential role, these caregivers receive little to no structured support. Their responsibilities stretch over years, sometimes decades, and come with an intense emotional and financial burden. The consequences are profound: caregiver burnout, family crisis, poor patient outcomes, and billions in preventable healthcare costs. While some existing solutions address eldercare or general caregiver needs, cognitive caregivers face a more complex, stigmatized, and isolating reality – and they are often left behind.
Mitul Desai and Dr. Eli Shalenberg created The Care Hack to change that.
Origin Story: From Lived Experience to Shared Mission
For Desai, the work of building The Care Hack is deeply personal. More than twenty years ago, his younger brother came home from college exhibiting signs of a serious mental illness. The family eventually learned it was schizophrenia. That diagnosis changed not only his brother’s life, but the entire family’s. Desai and his parents became full-time caregivers overnight with no guidance or support.
While his brother had access to clinicians, the family had nothing more than Google searches and a few expensive consultations. They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars out-of-pocket and still felt lost. Over time, the chronic stress nearly broke them. The most painful realization for Desai was understanding that families like his, who were doing the bulk of the caregiving work, were excluded from the care team. Their voices were left out of decisions, and their insights ignored.
This experience stayed with him. Over the years, Desai built a diverse professional background across healthcare, law, and technology, working at Mastercard and serving in the Obama administration. Eventually, he reached a breaking point. The quiet frustration he carried turned into a fierce determination, one that demanded action. He left his corporate job and committed himself to solving the caregiver support crisis.
Around that same time, Desai met Dr. Eli Shalenberg, a community psychiatrist who had seen this same problem from inside the healthcare system. Again and again, Dr. Shalenberg witnessed families being excluded from treatment, despite being central to recovery. The two connected at a conference, quickly realized their shared passion, and began building The Care Hack.
Under the Hood: A Platform Built for Families
The Care Hack is a digital platform created specifically for cognitive caregivers – those supporting loved ones with serious mental illness, dementia, stroke, or brain injuries. It acknowledges that caregiving is an incredibly difficult job and provides the structure, tools, and support that families have been missing.
The product is designed to be simple from the start. It takes just two minutes to onboard. Once inside the app, caregivers gain immediate access to expert videos that are personalized to their situation, along with a dedicated human coach who helps apply the lessons and navigate specific challenges. Caregivers can also connect with peers, creating a sense of community that reduces isolation and builds emotional resilience.
Structured programs address common and urgent caregiving scenarios such as medication refusal, navigating new diagnoses, or preparing for hospital discharge. Every element is based on direct input from caregivers, as well as decades of clinical research.
Healthcare providers simply refer families to the app. The Care Hack handles onboarding, engagement, and reporting. It integrates with existing workflows and even enables providers to bill for caregiver training using newly-approved Medicare codes. The platform extends a provider’s care team without adding to their workload.
Importantly, families never pay for the service. The company’s business model focuses on provider and payer partnerships. For behavioral health practices, it offers a way to reduce patient no-shows, increase engagement, and unlock new revenue streams. For payers, the platform provides a clear return on investment by reducing hospitalizations and improving outcomes. The company is also exploring strategic partnerships with specialty pharmacies and employers, using key moments – like a new prescription pickup – as caregiver engagement opportunities in pharmacies.
What’s Next: Scaling a Movement
The Care Hack is at a pivotal moment in its journey. The team has secured early provider contracts and is deep in discussions with regional payers. A newly-announced partnership with McLean Hospital, the top-ranked psychiatric hospital in the U.S. and an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, adds clinical credibility and positions the platform for national scale.
The next phase is all about growth. The company is expanding its engineering, product, and sales teams. It is also raising an angel round to support this momentum. In the next year, Desai and Dr. Shalenberg aim to strengthen their product, sign additional large provider deals, and close their first payer contract. Within three years, they envision The Care Hack as the go-to infrastructure for caregiver support across behavioral health, with expansion into adjacent conditions like stroke, autism, and brain injury.
Beyond business milestones, their larger mission is to change how society sees caregiving. Desai wants to challenge the notion that caregiving is a private, family matter. He wants caregivers to be recognized not only as essential, but as proud contributors to healthcare and society. Caregiving should not be hidden or stigmatized. It should be valued.
As Desai says, “Caregiving cuts across all demographic classes. It's not a private family affair. It impacts everyone to lift up and empower caregivers as contributing core economic activity and as people that deserve respect and recognition – so that in the future someone like me wouldn't have to hide that they were a caregiver, that they would actually feel proud to say that they're caring for a loved one. What more purely selfless activity is there, really? What more important activity is there?”
A Health Moonshot Vision
The Care Hack’s vision aligns with StartUp Health’s Caregiving Moonshot: a world where no caregiver feels alone, where families have the training and confidence to prevent crises and manage complex conditions, and where healthcare truly becomes more human-centered.
Desai describes a future where families are empowered, health systems are more effective, and caregivers are seen as partners, not afterthoughts. He believes that caregivers can be one of the highest-return investments in healthcare – if we finally start treating them like part of the care team.
“This isn’t theory,” Desai says. “It's already working. The science backs it. We’re now enabling it to scale.”
This isn’t just a company. It’s a movement to reimagine caregiving – one that’s already changing lives.
Connect with The Care Hack via email
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Published: Aug 14, 2025
