How Avanlee Care Is Helping Medicare Work with Family Caregivers
Building on a successful app and partnerships with Walmart and Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs, Avanlee Care – a member of the StartUp Health community since 2022 – has launched its second product: a platform purpose-built for Medicare Advantage plans. It connects MA plans with the unpaid family caregivers who are directly managing the non-medical care experience, improving outcomes while lowering costs at a time when Medicare Advantage plans are under increasing regulatory and financial pressure.
Written by Logan Plaster
From Passion to Launch
When Avanlee Christine founded Avanlee Care a few years ago, she had no idea that she’d be inking partnerships with Walmart and Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs. She just wanted to make life easier for unpaid family caregivers like her mom. She’d seen the realities of unpaid caregiving up close – the stress, the burdensome paperwork, the constant logistics. The more she dug into the problem, the more she wanted to help others facing the same challenges.
She founded Avanlee Care in 2020 with this focus, targeting caregivers directly with a platform that offered a combination of improving medication adherence, chronic condition management, and ensuring caregivers had the ability to get grocery and supply ordering.
“The number one feature on our platform has always been med management and adherence,” says Christine. Of course, it’s no use remembering your meds if you can’t afford them, so she partnered with Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs for low-cost pharmaceuticals. To make it one-click simple for caregivers to order groceries and supplies for their loved ones, she turned to Walmart—thanks to her co-founder and CTO, Chris Monson, who led the complex integration and successfully built a seamless connection into Walmart’s systems.
For her customers, this was a breath of fresh air. No longer did they have to patch together their own system – Amazon for supplies, a local grocery store for food, a pharmacy app for prescriptions, a medication management app and a WhatsApp group for communications. It was all integrated under one roof.
There was only one problem. Family caregivers weren’t the ones driving the system. If she wanted to have an impact on a larger scale, she was going to need to work directly with health plans.
Discovering a New Product-Market Fit
“We thought that first product was going to be it,” says Christine. “We launched it, saw adoption—but it was slower than we needed to reach real scale. That’s when we identified a critical gap between health plans and caregiving families: the opportunity to leverage the unpaid caregiver—the person already doing the work of a paid care team. What I’ve learned is that what really moves the market are programs like Medicare Advantage.”
And so, Christine and her team decided to build a new platform. It would still keep seniors and caregivers at the center, but it would also address the needs of Medicare Advantage plans. Today, the company is all in on the new strategy, and Avanlee Care is finding a receptive audience among plan managers.
One big reason Avanlee Care resonates with this new audience is because Medicare is already trying to work with family caregivers; so are some insurance brokers who are also a potential market over time. They just don't have an integrated, tech-enabled way to do it. The majority of seniors on a Medicare Advantage plan have a family member helping to coordinate appointments and keep track of meds. For that matter, Christine has found in her conversations that many of the individuals at health plans are caring for themselves and are caring for aging parents.
“These Medicare Advantage plans already have relationships with unpaid caregivers. The problem is that the relationships are informal and under-utilized. By partnering with Avanlee Care they can move at scale to put those essential relationships onto a platform that tracks med adherence, care appointments, wellness visits, and other supporting resources. Now the family caregiver is an actual connected partner rather than a random resource.
Luckily, Avanlee Care built their new platform from a strong foundation of user adoption. With their direct-to-consumer app, they’d proven that they could get unpaid caregivers to help schedule medical appointments. They’d also proven that they could send useful medication prompts, resulting in higher adherence rates, and they could get seniors to more chronic care appointments.
The platform also helps Medicare plans take care of the caregivers themselves. Which is essential, because if the caregiver isn’t healthy, the patient likely won’t thrive either.
Food procurement continues to be a foundation of the platform, through the Walmart integration, but rather than focus only on convenience, Avanlee Care is moving into the world of “Food as Medicine.”
“Food is really important when you think about chronic conditions, as well as what medications they’re on. That conversation is only going to become more important as we move into an era of a healthier older generation. You have to take care of yourself, and a lot of that starts with what you eat so we offer shopping lists that offer suggestions on items for specific conditions.”
It’s still early in the rollout of this new version of Avanlee Care, but Christine is optimistic that they’ll be able to deliver a range of positive outcomes, from improved chronic care appointment scheduling to enhanced medication adherence.
“Our proven track record with our initial product gives us strong confidence that our work with health plans will lead to measurable improvements in patient outcomes, cost reduction, and enhanced plan performance, including Star Ratings.”
What’s Next
In terms of next steps, Christine has identified that 62% of Medicare Advantage health plans in the US fall below a 4-star rating. That gives Avanlee Care a clear target. Their goal over the next five years is to penetrate a meaningful percentage of that group, and help them raise their ratings. Sometimes a small improvement can have a huge impact.
“For example, there’s a health plan in Ohio that we’d like to work with. We ran the numbers and if we simply get 99 of their members to schedule their flu vaccinations for that year, it could lead to a $2.5M bonus for that plan and a likely reduction in harmful, expensive cases of the flu. So these smaller Medicare Advantage plans [some around 50,000 members] are a great starting point for us. It’s also easier to get a contract closed.”
Sales cycles are long and uncertain, but one thing is clear. The needs surrounding senior care and family caregivers aren’t going anywhere. In fact, with technology allowing more people to live well into their 100s, the challenges are growing rapidly and so are the opportunities.
“No matter what happens with technology, I don’t believe we will ever be replacing a human’s interaction with their adult child. Our tech just makes that special connection easier to manage and with less stress.”
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