If you have followed me in this blog you will have noticed that over the last year I have been somewhere else! I and my colleagues dove deeply into our commitment to grow CareCyte.

In June/July of this year, after two years of continuous effort, Shirah and I, and my partners in the company, decided to stop investing in CareCyte. The company was not moving. We have not closed the company; we are continuing in conversations with possible customers. Our website is still active; we continue to think that the company represents a historic opportunity, and we look forward to bringing it forward at some moment in the future, but the timing is off and we don’t have the millions that would be required to alter the readiness of the country and the industry for this innovation.

To all who supported us in this effort, I extend my heartfelt thanks. The challenge of reforming healthcare is unmet and will become more and more difficult as time goes on and it is not addressed. For now, however, it will no longer be at the center of my attention.

I am returning to consulting and constructing another business that fits with the consulting. Stanley Stein, Chris Majer, and I are forging a new offer to customers who need capital to grow their businesses but are having trouble finding it through traditional sources. The new company, PNW Financial Services, will be the subject of forthcoming postings. I will tell you here when we complete an initial website for the company. For those who talk to me directly, my new email address there is cbell@pnwfs.com.

A brief diagnosis of what happened with CareCyte is that we were stopped by paralysis in the healthcare industry combined with structural weaknesses in our own plans. It was obvious in 2008 that there would be a significant challenge in raising money for the company. However, we received almost universal approval for the ideas involved. We thought that the desperate trouble in the healthcare industry, combined with the big commitment of Barack Obama to address the healthcare disaster in the US, would combine to give the company a place to stand given its vast potential impact on healthcare costs and care quality. Obama declared that the ‘…only real danger to the economy is the rising cost of healthcare,’ and he is right. Spending on healthcare in the US is approaching 20% of GDP, at the same time that we will soon will have the largest aging population ever encountered in the country. It seemed a good bet that our offerings, with their systemic effect on the industry, would attract customers and broad support. No such luck, even with good support from the Washington State Congressional Delegation.

I plan to say more about the situation with healthcare in the country as well, in later postings.

I’m glad to be back.