how I want to live my life or do I want to go and do something new?'” Khare says. “Bliss, in a way for us, it’s an outlet for all the skills that we have learned so far in our lives.”
Bliss’s team includes some Boston-area healthcare veterans too. The company’s chief medical officer, Harold Picken, is a physician who has held senior posts at Blue Cross Blue Shield affiliates in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. And Karen Wetmore, Bliss’s executive director, is a former assistant dean at Harvard Medical School, according to the company.
While there are many companies that offer home care services, few of them appear to provide the Web tools that Bliss gives its customers. Time will tell how much of a selling point Bliss’s technology is to people shopping for such services.
“A technology-enabled solution is appropriate, but much of the aged population is not technology savvy, unlike their technophile baby boomer children,” Eugene Hill, a partner who leads healthcare services investing at the venture firm SV Life Sciences, said in an e-mail yesterday.
Still, investors and entrepreneurs seem hopeful that the Internet is going to play a greater role in how we take care of granny. In October, Waltham, MA-based Care.com said it raised $20 million from New Enterprise Associates, Matrix Partners, and Trinity Ventures to support the growth of its online service for finding and rating “family care services,” which includes senior care providers as well as babysitters, housekeepers, and dog walkers. Last summer I also wrote about a growing number of startups developing Web software for home care agencies and their customers to use for scheduling and coordinating care for patients.
It’s tough to lump in Bliss with these companies, because its own Web software appears to be a means to deliver and coordinate care for people in their homes.
“It’s not the technology,” Khare says. “IT is just one enabler. But the real innovation is how you deliver care.”
