On August 15th, CellTrak celebrated its golden birthday! For the last 15 years, CellTrak has been an innovator in Home and Community-Based Services. Founded in 2006 by Andrew Kaboff, CRO, and Steven Wegner, CISO, CellTrak has grown to offer solutions for personal care providers in three countries, serving 1 million patients. CellTrak’s mobile solutions have helped businesses increase caregiver productivity, improve communication in the field, cut down costs, and ensure EVV compliance with 21st-century cures act mandates. 15 years of personal care solutions don’t just happen overnight. It takes an exceptional team and a commitment to providing better outcomes for home and community-based care.
Co-Founder and CRO Andrew Kaboff comments, saying “CellTrak was founded to bring home-care aides to the present day. At the time, technology was moving at break-neck speeds but seemingly left home care and hospice aides in the dust. Providers were facing several problems: They could not locate caregivers while they were in the field, they could not ensure the safety of caregivers, and they struggled to communicate with their staff. Using bar code scanning and patented GPS technology, CellTrak became the first complete point-of-care and field force management solution to bring home care aides to the present day.”
Through the CellTrak app, aides were able to view staff schedule and patient care plans, document patient notes, and send their timesheets electronically. This automated travel reimbursements, improved real-time communication between home care aides and their agencies, and ensured the safety of caregivers while on visits.
While our CellTrak team has grown, the team came from humble beginnings. Co-Founder and CISO Steven Wegner reminisces on the original start-up team, saying,
"Andy Kaboff was working out of an office of another start-up, and I was working from home. Andy and I worked with two friends of mine, Ken Evanchik, a Mobile Developer, and Mark Hammontree, a PHP developer. This team built the first demonstration applications that helped us land our first couple of Customers and helped get us funded. Once we had some working capital, we were able to hire CellTrak’s first employee outside our small start-up group."
Steven continues, "Ken, Mark, and I met Rohini Naragajan (who would also become a PHP developer) at a Starbucks in Schaumburg. I cannot imagine what she must have been thinking when she met the three of us. Rohini joined and became an excellent addition to the team. Rohini was the first of many people who joined CellTrak over the years. Our hiring mantra at that time was always to seek out people who were better than we were, who had better skillsets, more experience, whatever would raise the bar of excellence at CellTrak.” This hiring mantra would one day become one of CellTrak’s five virtues – exceptional team / exceptional people.
From what once was a team of 4 became a team of 100 who has kept its values at the company’s core – to empower better outcomes for home and community-based care. CellTrak now offers its original mobile solution and has since expanded into the Self-Direction Market. Though 15 years have passed, we have continually kept providing better outcomes for home care at the center of our values, continuing to improve our solutions to improve care for our users.
Celltrak gave caregivers the confidence that agencies were aware of their whereabouts during the time they were working to improve safety concerns. Since our founding, CellTrak has continued to expand to provide more solutions and for home care aides. From our first customer, we gained industry attention and easily integrated into the Homecare market.
CellTrak began looking to integrate into different EMRs (electronic medical records). Within the first 12 months, we integrated into 4 different EMR solutions. We continued to grow our product offering to include professional staff documentation and eventually expanded our offering across the US, Canada, and later, the UK.
As we move into the future, we reminisce on how we got to this point and look to the future. We welcome CareAttend into our family of solutions, entering the self-direction space, and look forward to working with Homecare Homebase on the industry’s first enterprise-level solution for all types of home-based care. We look forward to offering a home care aide scholarship with NAHC for a second year, but most of all, we look forward to empowering care in the home.
The best is yet to come – here’s to CellTrak’s 15th Birthday and many more!