Research at The Care Collaborative
Pioneering a multidimensional research framework for systemic innovation,
clinical efficacy and health equity
The research program at The Care Collaborative studies how healthcare systems can improve access, quality and coordination without relying solely on building more clinics, hiring more specialists or expanding physical infrastructure. Instead, our work focuses on how shared expertise, collaborative technology and connected care models can help healthcare teams deliver better care across communities — especially in rural and underserved areas.
By analyzing clinical interactions, treatment patterns and care outcomes across thousands of patient encounters, we identify practical ways to reduce gaps in care, support frontline providers and improve patient outcomes. Our research helps healthcare organizations understand what works, where challenges exist and how systems can be redesigned to deliver the right care, at the right time, in the right setting.
Our goal is to generate evidence that supports a more connected, equitable and efficient healthcare system for providers, patients and communities alike.
Our research into eConsults and other asynchronous care models examine how these modalities reshape the specialty care experience along two primary axes:
Clinical outcomes and non-inferiority. We benchmark asynchronous collaboration against traditional in-person visits to establish rigorous standards of clinical performance, patient safety and evidence-based effectiveness, with attention to the conditions under which asynchronous pathways result in better outcomes.
Value generation and equity. We quantify the economic consequences of reduced travel burden and out-of-pocket costs, with particular emphasis on narrowing access differentials in rural and frontier populations that are historically underserved by today’s specialty care infrastructure.
Beyond patient-level clinical endpoints, our research evaluates the macro-level implications of care redesign for both patients and healthcare infrastructure. Our multidimensional analyses characterize the socioeconomic return on investment of digital integration, with specific measurement of attenuated geographic and financial barriers, including travel-related productivity loss and direct out-of-pocket costs.
This includes measuring the real-world impact on patients, such as reduced travel time, lower out-of-pocket costs and fewer disruptions to work and daily life. By evaluating both clinical and economic outcomes, our research helps demonstrate the broader value of connected, collaborative care models.
We apply a critical analytic lens to resource optimization, examining how collaborative models redistribute specialist capacity toward high-need populations, particularly those in rural and frontier communities. By identifying the structural and operational conditions under which these models achieve peak efficacy, our findings offer an empirical foundation for national policy deliberation across three domains:
- Workforce sustainability: extending specialist reach while mitigating clinician burnout and attrition.
- Value-based care pathways: aligning reimbursement architecture and delivery design with cost-effective, outcome-driven care.
- Equitable access frameworks: advancing a conceptual shift from uniformly standardized care toward equitably distributed care that is calibrated to regional need.
Ultimately, our work provides decision-makers with the evidence required to move beyond proof of concept toward scalable, system-wide integration into Colorado’s connective infrastructure.
By synthesizing patterns from high-volume clinical datasets, our research produces generalizable insights that are applicable to heterogeneous healthcare environments. Our aim is the systematic operationalization of evidence, including closing persistent care gaps and strengthening longitudinal coordination so that patients receive definitive care without the friction imposed by conventional referral and wait-time structures.
As the national healthcare landscape contends with acute workforce shortages and entrenched geographic disparities, our research advances a reframing of the problem itself: collaborative technology as foundational infrastructure rather than supplementary service. We provide the evidentiary basis for a model in which clinical capacity is no longer tethered to physical expansion, but is extended through synchronized, system-wide integration.