On September 1st, 2026, we launched the beta of the Minimum Viable Product of TheCareWeNeed.com: a free whole-person care professional directory in which pros are tagged by the symptoms they most likely treat.

What do those technical terms mean?

A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is the version 1.0.0 of a new technology. It has the least amount of features that are needed to make the technology usable by the public.

A beta is the milestone of that version that is ready for outsider testing. It has already gone through internal testing (that’s an alpha), but is not yet ready for marketing (that would be a gamma), nor quiet release (that’s an epsilon), and certainly not a public, live launch party (that’s a zeta).

(Hint: At the end of this post, we are going to ask you to be a beta-tester.)

What’s in the beta?

We created a test data set that beta-testers will be able to use over the next few months.

We decided to start in our home state of Colorado, where there are around 300,000 whole-person care professionals. We pulled data for several professional codes from among all care professionals (mental health professionals, acupuncturists, chiropractors, naturopathic doctors, and massage therapists) to build 50,000 “golden profiles” in the Denver Metro Area. We started with these pros on purpose. Many of them don’t work with insurance, which makes them harder for patients to find — and makes it harder for them to get clients through the door.

None of these 50,000 professionals have claimed or manually enriched their profiles. (Not yet!) We took a data science approach instead. Every care professional has a digital footprint somewhere, so we pulled their information from multiple national and state-level databases and combined it into profiles we can trust. Each profile shows what that specialty generally treats, clearly marked as general information until the professional claims the profile and personalizes it.

How did we get here?

• October 2025: We showed videos of website wireframes for seven features to 114 people across the U.S. and asked which would be most useful on a complex illness healing journey.
• January 1st, 2026: We developed a prototype using Bolt.new (such a great platform for newbies like Tenay!)
• February 24th, 2026: We opened sign-ups for user testing.
• April 16th, 2026: We shared the survey results, analyzed by the University of Colorado Boulder’s Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Statistical Analysis. Experience with complex illness was the only thing that predicted which features people wanted — and a directory of care professionals across every care model was where to start.
• June 15th, 2026: We opened up our summer internship program and received our first batch of interns to help migrate our stack from Bolt.new (which is not HIPAA-compliant) to Microsoft Azure (which is).
• September 1st, 2026: Beta launch with 50,000 golden profiles.

Why does this matter?

Today, finding the next right care professional usually goes like this: figure out what your symptoms mean, figure out which specialists treat them, call your insurance to find out who’s in your network, call each one to ask who’s accepting patients, attend your first appointment to see if they’re actually a good fit, and (in 5-30% of cases) never return for a second appointment. It takes one to three months to connect with the right next care professional. Every single time. And people with complex illnesses don’t need just one care professional; they need several.

The directories that exist today mostly list one kind of specialty at a time, one kind of care model at a time, or one kind of payer at a time, which only propagates the problem. When our MVP goes fully live on January 12, 2027, we want someone with a complex condition to find care professionals who say they treat their symptoms — across conventional, complementary, integrative, and holistic care — and connect with the next right one in 30 minutes instead of three months.

How can you help?

We’re looking for beta testers — patients, caregivers, and providers — to tell us what the experience feels like. Sign up at TheCareWeNeed.com by selecting “BT” in the list of locations where you receive service, and tell us what you think by submitting feedback through the floating comment button.