Chicago-based PreparedHealth, which makes a care coordination platform focused on aging-in-place populations, has raised $4 million in seed funding in a round led by Chicago Ventures. Pritzker Group Venture Capital, Beverly Capital and Meridian Street Capital also contributed.

PreparedHealth, which launched in January of 2015, offers an app called enTouch that works like a social network platform to connect caregivers, allowing them to share information on a patient to enable evidence-based care transitions, updates and an overall awareness among the different providers.

"The funding allows us to invest in R&D and enter five to seven markets that are really struggling with a rapidly aging population and find a way to bend the cost curve," PreparedHealth CEO and cofounder Ashish Shah told Crain’s Chicago Business. "We could have continued to bootstrap but would have had to make choices that would take us off our mission."

Additionally, the company will use the new capital to hire more staff, which is currently 13 employees.

The company launched four years after Shah had a personal experience that illuminated the difficulty of coordinating care for an aging relative. Shah, the former chief technology officer at Medicity (later acquired by Aetna), was struck by the disconnection between patients, personal caregivers, providers and payers following the death of his father. In collaboration with fellow Medicity executive David Coyle, Shah set out to develop a tool to make life easier for those “4 Ps” which they now call core to their mission.

Since launching, PreparedHealth has found traction with a few customers. When tested at New Jersey-based Bayada Home Health Care, the app helped cut readmission rates by half, an outcome that prompted Bayada to implement the tool in over 300 locations around the country. The company also works with Centegra Health System in Illinois, and plans to expand their partnerships to include all aspects of healthcare, including to payers, and device companies.

“Each day, 10,000 people turn 65 years old, 90 percent of whom prefer to age and receive care in their homes,” Shah and Coyle wrote on their company blog. “That, combined with a rapidly shrinking workforce, lead us to conclude something needed to be done.”