A Short Introduction

September, 2008

CareCyte is a Seattle-based company founded in 2007 from the work of a group of doctors, builders, and architects who asked themselves whether it might be possible to develop radically improved facilities for healthcare all over the planet. CareCyte is committed to catalyze positive changes in the way that healthcare facilities and services are delivered around the world.

The work of designing, building, and expanding hospitals happens, more or less universally, at an excruciatingly slow pace. The resulting facilities have shown themselves to be expensive, inflexible, and more often than not, extremely dangerous places to visit or work in. A large part of this comes as a consequence of the difficulty of designing and building in the traditional ways, and because essentially no one has yet thought of the process of constructing a healthcare facility as a critical factor in healthcare quality or as a catalyst to improving healthcare service delivery. We are committed to change these interpretations.

The simplest way of pointing at what CareCyte contributes to the process of improving access to and the quality of healthcare is with economics. We eliminate roughly a third of the costs of design and construction, roughly 40% of the cost of operating healthcare facilities (new facilities and expansions), and we radically reduce the danger of airborne infections in the facilities. CareCyte is focused upon facilities ranging in size from 6,400 to over 100,000 square feet. In most circumstances we can deliver facilities in under a year. (In two years we expect to be able to deliver them in a few months.) While our designs and technology is new, all of the elements of our designs have been tested in other buildings.

CareCyte’s architects are CollinsWoerman of Seattle (http://www.collinswoerman.com).

The study group in which the company was born was sponsored by the Seattle Science Foundation. The SSF Board of Directors includes Dr. Robert Franza (SSF Vice President and Research Director), Lee Hartwell, Ph. D. (President and Director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center), Thomas N. Hansen, MD (CEO, Seattle Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center), and other leaders of Seattle’s major academic medical institutions.

Over the years our four principals have worked with many healthcare systems around the world.

CEO Chris Raftery has a stellar reputation as an engineer, developer, and builder in the US Pacific Northwest. He has managed some of the most complex construction projects in the Pacific Northwest including The Experience Music Project, the $1.3 billion Fujitsu semiconductor manufacturing plant in Gresham, Oregon, and the first laboratory in the world to cultivate and work with live HIV.  He was a founding member of the Virtual Builder’s Roundtable and is known as one of the most creative and innovative leaders in the construction business today. With degrees in both engineering and construction management, and a background that includes working as a major project superintendent, he has been instrumental in the delivery of a number of hospitals, research laboratories, and biotech facilities.

Chief Architect David Chambers also serves as the Director of Planning, Architecture, and Design for the Sutter Health Group of hospitals in Northern California. He has been a consultant to the Department of Defense, the governments of Canada and the United Kingdom, and other large healthcare providers. A healthcare and hospital architect, he has for many years designed facilities with greatly improved coordination among patients and caregivers. His designs include distinctive integrated-intervention-service units programmed for maximum throughput, single-stop patient-intake centers, and decentralized bedside care configurations. His facilities use staff and resources more efficiently, get patients through procedures faster, and produce higher patient satisfaction. Chambers was named one of “Twenty who are making a difference” in 2007 by the Center for Health Design.

Chief Operating Officer Chauncey Bell has led successful design and development programs producing historic changes in a number of industries. Better-known examples include CEMEX’s capacity to deliver concrete on time in Mexico City, Guadalajara, and other cities around the world; the invention of an innovative and important new bank, Intelligent Finance, in the United Kingdom; dramatically shortened delivery times for power plants built in India and China; and equivalent innovations in the computer, telecommunications, and chemical industries.

Chief Strategist Stanley Stein also serves as CEO of ONI BioPharma, Inc., a publicly held biopharmaceutical company with important public health products that trades on the American Stock Exchange under the symbol ONI. Previously he worked for many years as an investment banker specializing in healthcare. Early in his career he was a young Managing Director at Drexel Burnham Lambert. Most recently he was associated with Scarsdale Equities and SRS Capital in New York City.