CareFlash.com

CareFlash was founded by Jay Drayer out of an experience he had within his family when a member was diagnosed with a chronic heart disorder. Testifying to how positive transformation can be driven by a tragic event, the experience that motivated Jay to depart his career path in corporate finance surrounded the 9/11 tragedies in which he witnessed the second plane's impact on the World Trade Center while on his way to a 9:00 meeting that morning at 60 Wall St. Jay calls himself a recovering CFO who was inspired to create a service that filled-in the gaps delivering rich features and content, lacking in other providers that offer thinly featured online "care communities". CareFlash is headquartered in Houston.

What does CareFlash do?

CareFlash provides patients and their loved ones with a centralized, private, secure web community, featuring plainly narrated 3-D patient education resources, and rich features for engaging help from friends to assist through a health crisis or in eldercare. Features are bundled into an easy-to-use, integrated web community that requires no technical knowledge and can be setup in minutes while accomplishing the following.

• Improve patient experience while bridging language barriers
• Improve the productivity and effectiveness of healthcare practitioners
• Multi-faceted iHelp calendar facilitates meals, transportation, errands and scheduling
• Centralized communication and support relieves anxiety in patients and family care providers
• Branded care communities provide powerful, exponential marketing reach
• Enhance patient satisfaction while driving performance ratings
• This video explains how care communities help patients and their families and friend

Jay Drayer (CEO):
Jay calls himself a "recovering CFO" and continually refers to the lessons he's learned from his 20 years of experience, the most recent 7 years of which have involved starting and developing growth-oriented companies in San Francisco and Houston in the capacities of COO, CFO, board member and investor.
From 1995-2000, Jay served as CFO at ZEH Software, a Houston-based software company with offices in London and Singapore. ZEH is a 25-year-old company with 3,000 enterprise installations in 63 countries, and a clientele that includes energy companies, engineering firms, and aircraft and automobile manufacturers. Previous to 1995, he held positions with: Western Atlas (NYSE:WAI), now Baker Hughes (NYSE:BHI); Enterra (NYSE:EN), now Weatherford (NYSE:WFT); and BOVAR (TSE:BVR), now Ametek (NYSE:AME)
Jay has extensive hands-on experience with M&A, international business, business development and fundraising. Despite the difficult prevailing conditions in the post 9/11 economy, he successfully engineered and closed several financings (debt as well as equity) in early-stage companies. He is a registered CPA in the State of Texas and is currently a board member of the Financial Executives International's (FEI) - Houston Chapter and the University of Houston's Bauer Business School's Alumni Association. Formerly, he served on the boards of the University of Houston MBA Alumni Association and the Texas Society of CPA's - Houston Chapter where he was named outstanding committee chair in 2000. He received his BBA from the University of Texas at Austin in 1986, and his MBA from the University of Houston in 1994.

Austin Faught (VP, Business Development):
Austin brings a unique combination of experience and leadership to the management team. He has firsthand experience involving the challenges encompassing caregiving where, as an 11 year old, he supported his father's battle with colon cancer. From his perspective comes a passion for the value CareFlash delivers. This is apparent in the ways that Austin goes about developing relationships for CareFlash.
Before CareFlash, Austin was in the pharmaceutical industry where he obtained an in-depth understanding of patient care and healthcare practices. He and his colleagues managed four products and 100+ practices in the Houston area. He has extensive experience in identifying needs and delivering a solution that maximizes value for everyone.
Austin spends his time away from work serving in a local church ministry. He directs a class of singles in one of the largest singles ministries in the nation. This position has given him the chance to connect with others who are seeking truth and rest in difficult times. Austin graduated from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette where he obtained a Bachelor's in Business Management. Beyond being co-captain of the ULL baseball team and a Collegiate All-American, he was selected three times in the Major League Baseball draft.

Aaron Poffenberger (CTO):
Aaron has worked 8 of the past 10 years designing and developing secure multi tier architectures for commercial applications in the security space and systems management space. He joined PentaSafe Security Technologies, Inc., now NetIQ Corp., in 1998 and was a member of the team that architected the award winning VigilEnt Security Manager product, now Vulnerability Manager. As development manager of VSM, Aaron managed teams in Oklahoma City and Houston. He later managed PentaSafe's EMEA engineering program from the company's London offices where he put together teams in Houston and Delft (Holland) to develop a product tie-in from VSM to IBM's zSeries mainframes.
Aaron has helped to start or found several companies where he has worked as VP of Development and President. In addition to startups he has worked for large enterprises, including Boeing Aerospace where he worked in systems management. As a developer, Aaron has designed and developed many database solutions around Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL, Microsoft .NET and Java.
Aaron is a member of the IEEE and the ACM and has earned the CISSP accreditation for security professionals. He graduated magna cum laude from the University of Oklahoma and was later accepted in to OU's prestigious History of Science program where he completed his MA.

3-D animations directly pertinent to that particular circumstance automatically and dynamically load into each community to benefit members.  Our animations, of which there are thousands, explain illnesses, treatments and anatomy at a cellular level and are plainly narrated in English, Spanish, Arabic, Dutch, Hungarian... and Japanese is in process.

The iHelp calendar provides an effortless, unobtrusive way for people to request, engage and organize help from within their personal community.  Assistance can be very easily engaged along with meals, errands and the like, without putting anyone on the spot.  CareFlash eliminates the redundancy that so commonly accompanies such circumstances, as well as the awkwardness of asking for help.  This allows users to engage assistance from their entire community versus the normal tendency to rely on the next-door neighbors for 99% of needed assistance. 

Each community features a secure blog for updates, explanations, prayers and well wishes.  Since this process is email-enabled, when someone posts a recovery status update, an explanation, or a request through the iHelp calendar, everyone in the invited community receives a personalized email with a link to the post.  This can as easily involve friends and family, as well as associates and members of their clergy.

Communities are private, secure, and encrypted to ensure that no one knows what is transpiring with a family and their community, unless the members want them to know.

The bottom line?  We provide people with a private framework to get things done when they need to be done, flexibility when they need to focus on their own sanity, and priority when all their well-meaning loved ones are wanting to be engaged and involved… allowing the caretakers to focus on the most important person – the patient.

And throughout all this, the employer is consistently but unobtrusively acknowledged as the soft sponsor that goes above-and-beyond most other employers.  And in today’s world, the implications CareFlash represents for retention, hiring, attendance, productivity and quality all speak for themselves.