Jonathan Schwartz announced his new venture, CareZone, on Wednesday.
The startup is a private, cloud-based information hub for caretakers of children, parents or spouses. It puts key contact details, profile information such as blood type, medication instructions, to-dos and caretaker notes in one place. Users can also upload legal documents, medical records or anything else they would like to have on-hand in an emergency to the platform.
One of CareZone's stand-out features is the $5 fee that users pay each month. The promise, Schwartz says, is that the information won't be shared with advertisers -- the usual tradeoff for free web services such as Facebook or Google.
"When you’re responsible for someone else’s data," Schwartz says, "your calculus changes a little bit."
Google's free platform for tracking personal health information failed to take off and was shut down on January 1, 2012. CareZone stores information about users' loved ones, not necessarily users themselves, but its bet is that a private version of Google's platform would have been more appealing.
CareZone users can give access to anyone they want -- siblings, professional caregivers or other caretakers -- for no extra charge, but nobody who hasn't been invited has access to their data.
"Others may be around [the person you care for], and you want them to have access to the same information that you have," Schwartz says, "but when it comes to a child's information or information about your parents, the tradeoff [of using free services] doesn’t work."
