CareZone makes looking after loved ones much easier

Across the globe there are so many individuals who either spend some or all of their time looking after a loved one, whether you care for an elderly relative once a week or have a small child yourself with a serious illness.

Sorting out hospital appointments, doctor’s visits, collecting together important information and co-ordinating care with your other relatives is often really hard to do and can lead to confusion, arguments stress and even the patient missing important appointments or tests.

This week a new solution for care givers has been launched in the US called CareZone. The online hub will act as a place to store important information and a kind of meeting place for sharing notes and keeping in contact with friends, relatives and medical professionals all in one central place.

All kinds of data can be stored on CareZone, like medical details, contact information, legal documents, schedules and to-do lists, which can then be accessed by any of the care givers anytime and anywhere they happen to be. To begin with you sign up a ‘beloved’ (the name given to the person needing care) and then create a ‘group’, which you can add as many ‘members’ to as you like, from your relatives to your beloved’s nurse.

As you’d expect, the CareZone team is dedicated to privacy and security. People need to know sensitive information is 100% secure, which is why many wouldn’t turn to the likes of email or an already existing social network to converse about medical problems. Because of this, there’s no advertising or profiling on CareZone, the company aims to make money by asking members to part with $5 a month as they sign up – even though you can sign up free before March the 17th according to the website.

One of the site’s cofounders, Jonathan Schwartz, tells Fast Company, “we wanted to reduce the anxiety and burden associated with caring for people,” which explains why CareZone doesn’t have a flashy website with lots of functionality, it’s just about making things a little easier to handle.

There are lots of plans to expand CareZone in 2012, including adding in expenses tools, calendars and (most importantly to us) spreading to other countries outside the US.

[Via Fast Company]