Chris Caulfield is a seasoned Advanced Practice Registered Nurse with a combination of clinical, technology, and labor-management experience. He is a co-founder and Chief Nursing Officer of IntelyCare, an on-demand mobile-based Nurse staffing platform that serves post-acute care facilities throughout the US.
Chris, welcome onboard the team as our Digital Health Today Ambassador!
- Tell us a bit more about yourself, your background and what you’re doing now.
I’ve been passionate about entrepreneurship, technology, and healthcare since my early childhood. Before becoming a Nurse, I earned a biology degree and worked in the Biotech space for several years. After realizing that being stuck in a lab all day wasn’t as fulfilling as expected, I joined an evening Nursing program at Roxbury Community College to train to become a Registered Nurse. Throughout my Nursing career, I have had many great opportunities to explore different types of Nursing roles, including skilled nursing facilities, rehab hospitals, nursing informatics, labor relations, psychiatric home visits, and care management. I decided to continue my education and train as a Family Nurse Practitioner at Frontier Nursing Universities hybrid MSN program that allowed me to complete my didactic portion via the web while having my clinical placements with Physicians and Nurse Practitioners in my local area. I worked as an urgent care / primary care Nurse Practitioner for a short period before transitioning to a full-time Chief Nursing Officers after obtaining traction at my startup.
- How did you get involved with digital health?
I first transitioned to the Digital Health space when an opportunity to switch out of working on a psych unit into a Nursing Informatics role was presented to me. As I had a lot of experience with ‘short-staffing’ and nursing burnout with representing my fellow nurses as a Union rep, I was in a unique spot as being a Nurse and actively collaborating with my Director of IT at a Rehab Hospital in Boston. We soon decided to branch off on our own and began developing mobile technology to more efficiently operationalize the struggles faced with Nurse Staffing.
- Tell us about where you come from and some of the health and technology innovation that’s happening there.
My home base is Boston, Massachusetts. We have a fantastic culture of health-tech innovation sprouting out from many groups, including academic institutions, large corporations, and startup organizations. We are home to a great early-stage accelerator program called the MassChallenge Healthtech which supports partnering young Health Tech startups with larger healthcare institutions to develop, test, and scale their products.
- What are some of your top interests and what should people contact you about?
My niche is the Nursing space. It’s an under-represented field when it comes to Health Tech, so I’m super excited to help push forward innovations that somehow push forward processes and experiences relating to nursing care. In particular, I do have additional interests in workforce optimization, predictive analytics, interactive education, and reducing hospital readmission. I also love the ocean. I traveled the world during my undergrad studies on “Semester at Sea” and continue to try to re-create this experience as often as I can by participating in ocean-based activities such as Sailing, Scuba Diving, and volunteering rehabilitating stranded marine wildlife (seals and sea turtles) at the National Marine Life Center.
- Tell us a bit more about yourself, your background and what you’re doing now.
