With support from a PATCHES Pilot Award, Assistant Professor Paula Voorheis partners with a local Madison company to refine its digital care-coordination app
How can a digital app better meet the needs of family caregivers?
That question is at the heart of assistant professor Paula Voorheis’ grant-funded research project, “Community-Driven, Iterative Refinement of an Older Adult Caregiver Coordination App: Testing and Improving the Usability, Feasibility, and Acceptability of CuroNow.”
It’s also exactly the kind of question Voorheis came to Madison to answer. An expert in using behavioral science and human-centered design to build digital health tools that work better for patients and health care providers, Voorheis joined the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Pharmacy in 2025, launched the BUILD (Behavioral and User-Informed Learning for Digital Health Innovation) Lab, and quickly began connecting with fellow academics, industry leaders, and local innovators.
Through StartingBlock Madison, Inc., a community of entrepreneurs and startups, she met Rukmini Banerjee and Pat Setji, the co-founders of CuroNow, a digital app intended to help family caregivers coordinate and communicate.
“The point of my research is to understand users’ needs and then map that against the functions of the app. We want to understand what needs to happen with this innovation in order for it to really meet users’ needs.”
–Paula Voorheis
“I was interested in seeing how I could be of service to the local Madison digital health community, and they are trying to build a company around their app,” Voorheis says.
Shortly after their meeting, Voorheis learned of a new research funding opportunity from UW–Madison’s Community-Academic Aging Research Network (CAARN). The PATCHES (Prototyping Assistive Technology with Community & Health Partners) Pilot Award offered up to $50,000 to researchers working with community partners to refine and test assistive technology prototypes designed to improve older adults’ health, function and independence.
Voorheis immediately thought of CuroNow and proposed a collaborative, iterative research project. The project received a PATCHES grant in July.
The unmet need for care coordination
Sixty-three million Americans — one in four adults — currently serve as caregivers for a family member or friend, according to research from AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving.
They’re managing medications, assisting with activities of daily living, and coordinating care coverage, often with little training and while also juggling employment and other family responsibilities. Some care for more than one person, and many share caregiving tasks with other paid and unpaid caregivers. Some provide daily, hands-on care; others monitor and contribute from afar, rotating in as schedules allow.
Keeping track of who’s doing what — as well as what’s been done and still needs to happen — is a challenge for caregivers whose time, attention, and skills are spread thin.
“There’s clearly a need in this space for caregiving coordination,” Voorheis says.
The CuroNow app, which was released to consumers in October 2025, allows caregivers to collectively access and share information like medication lists, upcoming appointments, tasks, and responsibilities. Voorheis’ PATCHES project — with collaborators Beth Fields, of the Aging and Disability Resource Center; Aimee Arnoldussen, BUILD Lab innovation scientist; and Suman Banerjee, of the Department of Computer Sciences — will study how caregivers use the app.
“The point of my research is to understand users’ needs and then map that against the functions of the app,” she says. “We want to understand what needs to happen with this innovation in order for it to really meet users’ needs.”
Learning from caregivers
The project will unfold over three stages. First, researchers in Voorheis’ BUILD lab will interview people who have downloaded the app to better understand users’ experiences, as well as barriers and facilitators to application usage. Then, they will conduct usability walkthroughs with people who have never used the app.
“We’ll have people open the app for the first time and give them hypothetical scenarios — such as managing your mom’s medications and sharing it with your brother — and observe as they try to do that,” Voorheis says.
The research team will share their findings with the CuroNow team, who will iteratively improve the app.
In the third phase, family caregivers recruited through CAARN’s network of community partners will pilot the improved app for four weeks, using it to coordinate care in their everyday lives. Afterward, Voorheis’ team will use surveys and interviews to assess participants’ experiences and determine whether the app improved care coordination.
That information will also be shared with CuroNow, so the company can continue refining the app after the one-year project ends.
“I think the award officers really liked that this will go beyond the one-year grant,” Voorheis says. “I’m not simply building something in my lab and testing it. CuroNow is invested for the long term, and the results of our work will help transform caregivers’ experiences.”
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