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Mr. Penn comes to the role at a pivotal time for the organization, as Care Angel works to not only extend its offering to address evolving population health scenarios presented during the COVID-19 pandemic, but also to solidify its position as the next-generation solution for improving health engagement and well-being management at the enterprise level. As the true potential of the company's advanced voice-enabled technology continues to be realized, Mr. Penn will play a collaborative role in helping to shape the roadmap for growth while taking primary responsibility for planning, implementing and managing the organization's financial functions.

"We are thrilled to welcome Steven to the Care Angel executive management team at such a critical inflection point for our company," said Bud Flagstad, Care Angel CEO. "As a healthcare organization, we've already come so far in terms of managing population health, and at scale, with our on demand nurse assistants, but we are really only scratching the surface when it comes to realizing the full potential of AI and voice technology. We look forward to drawing from Steven's extensive financial and operational experience as we continue to evolve our offering to improve medical outcomes at the lowest cost."

Prior to joining Care Angel Mr. Penn served as the senior vice president of finance, technology and operations at U.S. Bank where he provided technology and operational organizations with financial planning, forecasting, budgeting and vendor partnership support. From a healthcare perspective, Mr. Penn brings to the position eight years with UnitedHealth Group where he was senior vice president of Operations - Innovation Research and Development and a member of the innovation senior leadership team that was responsible for planning, reporting, and metrics designed to help their team pursue innovative solutions in a rapid and flexible manner.

"Throughout the course of my career, I've always sought out financial roles that had a component of innovation involved, which is what made this opportunity with Care Angel so incredibly attractive," said Steven Penn. "This includes their game changing approach to population management, fueled by data and analytics to scale patient care at the enterprise level. I look forward to working in collaboration with Bud (Flagstad, CEO) and the rest of the executive management team as we continue to revolutionize the healthcare experience for our clients, partners, members and patients. This includes leveraging the powerful combination of AI, voice, telehealth and other digital services and tools to deliver an exceptional member experience."

Mr. Hahn, holds an MBA and is a 15 year healthcare veteran who brings to the senior business development role a commitment to both innovation and collaboration as well as deep experience with large payer and provider relationships. He previously led the Innovation team for UnitedHealth Group's OptumCare unit where he was responsible for the strategy and implementation of new business opportunities and technology-enabled resources to serve various health care stakeholders spanning consumers, health care providers and practices. Mr. Hahn has also helped lead multiple successful innovations across UnitedHealth Group, including UnitedHealthcare Motion® (wearables for health) and Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) for clinical and care effectiveness as well as new EMR voice technologies that are aimed at reducing provider burnout and physician turnover.

"The past few month have proven to be a pivotal time for Care Angel as we've looked to bolster the executive management structure in order to ensure that we are in the strongest position possible to accelerate revenue growth as well as adoption of our AI and voice-enabled nurse assistant technology," said Bud Flagstad, CEO Care Angel. "We welcome Mike in his new role and look forward to leveraging his deep healthcare experience and especially his background leading the United Health Group's OptumCare Innovation team to help us achieve our 2021-2022 business expansion goals."

“I have full confidence that Pat Byrne’s appointment as Care Angel’s chairman of the board will strengthen the corporate governance and oversight of both our management and investor strategy,” said Bud Flagstad, Care Angel CEO.

A seasoned executive and longstanding Care Angel investor, Mr. Byrne has extensive experience building and growing business services, technology and professional services organizations where he has provided invaluable corporate insights to senior leadership, advising them in business strategy and operations at leading global organizations. He has had a well-established career serving in senior-level roles at billion-dollar companies ranging from Accenture to Ernst and Young to A.T. Kearney, a global management company with thousands of employees worldwide where he served as chief operating officer.

“Care Angel is focused on delivering affordable, accessible, data-driven health engagement and care management solutions and services that will improve the lives of millions of people worldwide” said Mr. Byrne. “I look forward to working closely with the company’s leadership team to make these ambitions a reality.”

Mr. Flagstad is a respected leader in the healthcare technology space where he most recently held the position of senior vice president of UnitedHealth Group Research & Development. In this role, he was responsible for driving consumer and provider engagement to reduce healthcare costs, increase access to high quality care, enhance system efficiency and efficacy, and empower consumers to maintain or improve their health and wellbeing.

“After working with Bud as an investor and advisor to Care Angel for over a year, we are excited to welcome him to the Care Angel family as CEO,” said Wolf Shlagman, Care Angel founder and former CEO. “The timing couldn’t be better to have him lead our revenue acceleration ramp and make sure we have the right partners to help fund our exponential growth. Bud has a proven track record and experience with some of the largest players in the market using transformative healthcare products that have impacted tens of millions of lives. I look forward to scaling the organization in collaboration with him.” 

As the Care Angel model evolves, Mr. Shlagman will continue to play the vital role of developing the product vision as the chief product and innovation officer. “Wolf is well known for his heavy innovation experience, and his early contributions to building the framework of what the telemedicine industry is today,” said Care Angel chairman of the board, Patrick Byrne. Mr. Shlagman is a lifelong entrepreneur with 20+ years’ experience designing products and leading teams, is the founder of Consult A Doctor, which was acquired by Teladoc Health in 2013. “In his new role, Wolf will continue to leverage his deep technology knowledge as we deliver on the vision to deploy care at scale to the most at-risk populations globally.”

Over his prominent 30+ year career, Mr. Flagstad has held executive leadership roles across the health insurance, private equity, medical startup and financial services industries. During his time at UnitedHealth Group specifically, a prestigious Fortune 50 company, he also spearheaded numerous projects, strategic partnerships and acquisitions. Mr. Flagstad earned his Bachelor of Science in computer science and business administration at Minnesota State University.

“Working with Care Angel for over a year as both an investor and an advisor made it very apparent to me the potential impact the company can have on helping to build a better healthcare system with their solutions, supporting improved outcomes, reducing costs and expanding accessibility,” said Mr. Flagstad. “I truly look forward to joining such an incredible team.”

MIAMI, Sept. 2, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Care Angel, the industry leader in automation and scalable Augmented Intelligence (AI)-powered Virtual Nurse Assistants, today announced the availability of a new "HEALS" (Help Early Awareness Logistics and Surveillance) program designed to address the dire need for smart, safe and quick to deploy return to school solutions amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.

HEALS Back2School (Safely) ™ was launched to offer powerful COVID-19 screening and self-assessment tools to detect, identify and protect students, faculty, staff and communities from the risk of virus spread. The program is an extension of the company's award-winning SmartCare Platform and HEALS programs for health plans, employers and government that handle the continuous engagement, management, triage, navigation and care support of millions of at-risk populations. Leveraging the ANGEL platform, schools and communities are now empowered to perform proactive clinical intake continuously through phone calls and texts and at massive scale. With this approach, large populations can check-in virtually with ANGEL, completing COVID-19 screenings and be notified of risk in real-time.

As administrations across the country struggle to find a way to ensure a successful, staged return to classrooms and reduce education disruption - while minimizing student, staff and faculty health risks - technology solutions are increasingly being evaluated as a means to continuously engage, manage, monitor, and care for these at-risk populations. The ANGEL offering provides access to live resources for testing and contact tracing, while real time analytics are delivered securely to the schools and universities to maintain the highest level of safety protocols at the lowest cost.  

Care Angel's HEALS Back2School (Safely) Program can be deployed in as little as five days and its unlimited workforce of Virtual Nurse Assistants will offer screening capabilities that make the process streamlined, efficient and effective with the ability to:

• Enable users to self-screen for COVID-19 symptoms often (daily or 2x day, automatically covering hundreds of thousands of people across large geographic areas)
• Gather critical information and clinical input for staff, students and families to be alerted in real time if they are cleared to go to work/school
• Detect who requires medical intervention, testing, isolation and/or contract tracing
• Reinforce and update safety protocols to make the environment safe
• Inform and remind staff, students and families of policies and PPE recommendations by school administration
• Deploy a seamless, intelligent, efficient process to maintain continuity and safety
• Track, alert and report on virus detection and other clinical and non-clinical findings in a robust analytics-driven dashboard

"As society looks towards the '20-'21 academic year, parents, teachers and kids are afraid. It is imperative that we find smart, scalable solutions to help protect schools, students and faculty to enable a safe return to the classroom," said Wolf Shlagman, CEO, Care Angel. "With the introduction of the Care Angel HEALS Back2School (Safely) program, we are able to harness the power of our Augmented Intelligence-powered, on-demand Virtual Nurse Assistants who can continuously and proactively monitor, screen and evaluate the health and well-being of an entire school district or university population as a means to identify COVID-19 risk quickly and at scale."

was launched to scale the availability of ANGEL, the company's on-demand workforce of Virtual Nurse Assistants, designed to facilitate clinical conversations via secure phone calls or text communication.

In its role, ANGEL automates and scales 10x outbound and inbound engagement of potentially at-risk individuals encompassing Medicare Advantage, Medicaid, commercial health plans, health systems, providers, government health emergency operations, employers and pharma. By leveraging the power of AI, Virtual Care Assistants are able to perform the clinical intake and continuous and periodic check-ins through phone calls and texts, freeing up call centers and valuable clinical resources to care for the neediest first. Key capabilities of ANGEL's AI offering include the ability to remotely:

• Assess COVID-19 clinical symptoms
• Manage chronic conditions
• Identify social determinants of health needs such as food, assistance with social isolation
• Support behavioral health, medication adherence and other needs
• Help calm anxiety and the sense of powerlessness
• Monitor, discover changes in condition, prevent spread, deliver important information and direct people to appropriate resources continuously  

ANGEL has already proven that she is capable of engaging, informing, educating, triaging and managing populations at scale during national emergencies, disasters and pandemics. The offering currently conducts outreach and remote monitoring, identifying and helping to close gaps in care for millions of patients per month through secure, multi-modal communications, including talk and text. The executive team has successfully operated within the remote healthcare space during hurricanes, floods and fires, as well as during the H1N1 pandemic response, making them particularly well suited to tackle needs presented by COVID-19.

"Care Angel was launched to support the mission of extending the human touch of care teams and families in order to care for millions in need, which remains more critical than ever during the COVID-19 pandemic," said Wolf Shlagman, Care Angel's CEO. "With HEALS we are leveraging the power of ANGEL, our Artificial Intelligent Virtual Care Assistants to take over many repetitive, redundant tasks associated with finding, engaging and triaging high-risk populations. This approach allows us to eliminate the burden put on the healthcare system, the frontline and first responders and as a result, care teams can focus on the important initiatives of attending to those that need it most, improving clinical outcomes while saving lives."

Care Angel’s innovative patient engagement, monitoring and management platform, SmartCare 3.0, brings Angel to life through a simple phone call on any voice-driven device, like a landline, cell phone or smart phone allowing providers to actively engage and manage their patient population in real time. Care Angel’s Virtual Nurse Assistant, Angel, conversationally checks-in with at-risk patient populations leveraging AI technology to enable scalable engagement with a focus on condition specific health communication. Recent studies of at risk populations have demonstrated patient engagement rates of 83 percent, readmission reduction of 63 percent and a $41 per patient per month net savings, by leveraging the Care Angel solution.   Care Angel closes gaps in care between visits for the highest risk, highest cost patients while reducing hospitalization and readmissions.

Under the agreement, Care Angel will work with FLAACOs and its ACO members to take a proactive approach to implementing Care Angel’s patient engagement, monitoring and management solution, to support FLAACOs members’ patient care and financial goals.

Nicole Bradberry, CEO of FLAACOs, states “Florida’s ACOs are leading the way in the shift toward fee for value supported by FLAACOs’ focus on leveraging collaborative digital health solutions. Care Angel’s innovative approach to active management of at risk populations to drive better health and financial outcomes for our members, aligns perfectly with our mandate as an organization.”

Through the partnership, Care Angel and FLAACO will provide Florida’s 40+ ACOs with pre-negotiated access to the Care Angel solution, ensuring their patients get the care they need, when they need it, without over-burdening existing clinical and administrative staff.

Care Angel’s CEO, Wolf Shlagman, added “Meeting patients where they are, technologically, is one of the keys to scaling active patient engagement, the second critical element is the human touch, an empathetic voice that offers a better experience for the patient. And finally, for sustainably achieving high engagement and improved outcomes between visits, the interaction must be intelligent. Angel acts as an extension of the care team, proactively triaging those that are in need of intervention to a clinician, in real-time. Provider’s success in a value-based care delivery arrangement depends on bringing these three things together. ACO physicians can consistently engage with their patients proactively using technology that their patients already have, allowing them to manage large patient populations much more effectively and efficiently at a dramatically lower cost.”

Care Angel’s AI and voice solution is in use by major health systems, health plans, ACOs, MSOs and IPAs throughout the state of Florida and nationally.

ABOUT FLAACOs

FLAACOs, also known as the Florida Association of Accountable Care Organization, mission is to provide members a vehicle to collaborate, ensuring that each healthcare organization grows and thrives. The Florida-based association aligns goals to help member ACOs shift physician incentives and improve health-care outcomes across the state. FLAACOs provides a voice for the accountable care marketplace and its participating providers, payers, and individual physicians. The goal of FLAACOs is to provide advocacy and support to all Florida accountable care organizations so that together they can become the health-care models of the future. To learn more visit www.flaacos.com

 ABOUT CARE ANGEL

Care Angel offers the world’s first voice AI, Virtual Nurse Assistant, Angel. Angel empowers the most effective, efficient and scalable way to engage monitor and manage large, at-risk populations with complex and chronic conditions, at the lowest cost starting with a simple phone call. Care Angel’s multi-modal engagement platform helps providers and payers to close gaps in care by automating conversational, outbound check-in care calls, capturing regular updates on vitals and well-being and inform real-time interventions. The platform can also push personalized notifications to remote family and friends, strengthening the communication between patients, care teams and their family caregivers. Our solution is proven to reduce administrative and operational costs, reduce readmissions and improve medical and financial outcomes. For more information about Care Angel’s solutions, please visit www.careangel.com