Social Impact Tech: Cecilia Corral Of CareMessage On How Their Technology Will Make An Important Positive Impact
An Interview With Jilea Hemmings
Understand the problem — Too often people step into this work with what I would call a “savior” mindset and without elevating the voices of those who understand the problem. To us, as we’ve built our team, it’s been critical to keep bringing people who share lived experiences and can challenge the way we approach our solutions.
In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Cecilia Corral, Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of CareMessage.
Cecilia Corral is Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of CareMessage — a U.S.-based technology non-profit building the largest patient engagement platform for low-income populations in the United States. She spearheads and owns the CareMessage strategy and vision, and ensures its execution throughout the organization. As a subject matter expert on product development and the healthcare industry, and driven by her experiences growing up in a low-income immigrant household, Cecilia brings an experience-led approach to the work of CareMessage. Cecilia was on the 2019 Forbes 30 under 30 list for Healthcare, Social Entrepreneur of the Year in the 2025 Schwab Foundation Awards, and graduated with a B.S. in Product Design Engineering from Stanford University.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?
My family moved to the United States from Mexico when I was young and I grew up in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, along the U.S.-Mexico border. I loved growing up in that region which enabled me to retain so much of my family’s heritage and culture. However, it wasn’t always easy, and my family faced a number of financial challenges including relying on safety-net programs like food stamps to make ends meet. I was very fortunate to have had teachers as well who nurtured my interest in math and science, which is how I eventually found my way into an early college program focused on engineering and then Stanford University where I studied Product Design Engineering.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
I’m not sure if it’s the most interesting, but one of the things I love the most about the work I do is hearing or reading the stories of patients who are positively impacted by our products — that our messages have helped them transform how they manage their health and improve their outcomes.
CareMessage’s patient engagement platform enables organizations to combine messaging, data, and interoperability to increase access to care, improve clinical outcomes, and address social drivers of health. Building an enterprise product like this makes it difficult for my family and friends to see my work, so anytime someone tells me their clinic is using CareMessage I get very excited!
Another exciting moment in my career journey was my recent recognition by the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship as a 2025 Social Entrepreneur of the Year. I had the opportunity to attend the awards ceremony at this year’s World Economic Forum Annual Meeting and meet dozens of other outstanding social entrepreneurs and innovators driving systemic change around the world. It is a huge honour to be joining a global community of nearly 500 social entrepreneurs and innovators brought together by the Schwab Foundation, that has collectively impacted over 931 million lives!
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
All of the work I do at CareMessage is in honor of my dad. Before coming to the United States, my dad led social impact programs in Mexico. He’d go to rural areas to support communities to grow livestock and take on other farming tasks which would enable them to start generating an income. I grew up seeing photos of my dad at these community events and it always inspired me to want to help others. In later years, also in Mexico, my dad launched his own businesses by purchasing large plots of land and creating affordable housing for low-wage workers. He’s the first social entrepreneur I met and is still my inspiration to find innovative ways to run socially responsible businesses. He overcame a lot of obstacles moving to the United States and starting over, so I remind myself when times are tough that failure is part of the journey.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
Life is not about how many times you fail; it’s about how many times you get back up. As a child, I have a very vivid memory of a time I was working late into the night to try and finish a school project. My dad came into my room to ask me why I was awake, and I told him I was trying to finish my work to get a good grade. Then he told me what most parents these days would probably never say, to let it fail. This lesson has stuck with me, and although I was harder on myself during the earlier years of CareMessage I now give myself grace when I make mistakes. I try to keep a positive attitude, see the joy in failing, and aim to turn those failures into learning opportunities.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
I’d probably attribute our success to perseverance, grit, and flexibility. Our organization is in three industries: technology, healthcare, and non-profit. When we started, we heard over one hundred reasons why this would never work, we would never scale, and we could never hire a technical team when competing with larger and more well-funded tech startups. Over the years, we’ve remained focused on our ultimate goal, and through the near-death experiences of the company we’ve leaned even more into our mission.
One example that best summarizes this was 2020. At the beginning of 2020 we were almost out of cash after the organization had heavily invested in sales and marketing without much success in driving revenue. Early in that year we had the one and only reduction in workforce in the history of our organization. There’s honestly no worse feeling as a founder than making that type of decision. Then, in early March, we started to hear about a thing called COVID. Within a few days and weeks, we were thrown into a whirlwind of chaos within healthcare alongside our diminishing bank account. My co-founder and I then decided if the organization was going under, we’d go under with a bang. We made the product free to any safety-net organization that needed to deliver critical healthcare information to low-income populations, we reworked our onboarding process to get organizations set up within 24 hours, and we took salary cuts to ensure our financial resources went to our remaining staff and the services needed to deliver information to patients. This one decision, made to meet a once-in-a-lifetime moment of a worldwide pandemic, resulted in a large volume of organizations converting to paid customers and essentially supporting our survival. Hindsight is always 20/20, and that time was incredibly stressful trying to rise up to the challenge, but our perseverance, grit, and flexibility ultimately saved the organization.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive social impact on our society. To begin, what problems are you aiming to solve?
In the United States, low-income populations live 10–15 years less than higher income populations. The top reasons driving mortality are preventable including heart disease, stroke, and cancer. Our goal is to combat these inequities through increasing access to care, improving clinical outcomes, and addressing social drivers of health.
How do you think your technology can address this?
With the broad adoption of tools like smartphones, access to the internet, and more, we have the ability to scale education and the monitoring of entire patient populations. When we started CareMessage people were still paying per text, whereas now the cost to the consumer is almost negligible. This accessible technology has given us an avenue to prompt behavior change and build upon other available tools to direct people to additional resources when needed. Within minutes, an organization can deploy information about cancer prevention to thousands of patients at a pace they would never be able to do if they were making phone calls.
Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?
In 2013 my dad passed away after battling prostate cancer for a few years. At the time I was in graduate school pursuing a PhD in Mechanical Engineering with a focus on engineering/STEM education in K-12. I always believed in the power of technology to help people create solutions for and within their own communities, but I struggled with seeing my own place in the tech industry. That summer I decided to join my co-founder who had been working for about a year on CareMessage, trying to find some purpose in everything that had happened. What I thought would be a summer project quickly snowballed as it opened up my eyes to how my story was not unique, it was a part of a national statistic on healthcare disparities. I then decided to shift my personal purpose to providing opportunities for families like mine, so they could have the years back with their loved ones.
How do you think this might change the world?
I think it already has! Every year we receive data analysis from our own customers showing improvements in cancer screenings, reduction in a1c (blood sugar) levels for patients with diabetes, and more. We’re helping people catch cancer early when it is treatable, we are coaching patients to better health which will impact their long-term outcomes, and at a very basic level we support delivering basic needs like food. I’m very grateful for the opportunity we’ve had to reach over 20 million people in the last decade.
Keeping “Black Mirror” and the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?
Absolutely! Oftentimes we have people approach us who think what we do is “just texting” and that anyone can do it. However, the reality is that technology is simply a tool, and for us, the algorithms that dictate who gets what messages paired with intentionally designed content are all created with an end goal in mind.
There is such a thing as a bad text message in healthcare, and we’ve seen plenty of those examples ourselves. One recent pushback we’ve seen is organizations trying to use this same communication to push out billing reminders, but we believe this actually breaks down the trust that can be built through this technology. A recent response from a patient reiterated for me why this continues to be the wrong avenue for this population. The patient cited they were not going to attend their appointment because the last time they were in, the staff refused to see them unless they paid a copay the patient could not afford. This is one of many stories we’ve heard in the past where people are made to feel ashamed because of their financial situation rather than extending a helping hand or solution. We instead encourage our organizations to let patients know about sliding-fee or financial assistance programs that can ensure cost of care is not a barrier to accessing healthcare services.
Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”?
- Understand the problem — Too often people step into this work with what I would call a “savior” mindset and without elevating the voices of those who understand the problem. To us, as we’ve built our team, it’s been critical to keep bringing people who share lived experiences and can challenge the way we approach our solutions.
- Fall in love with the problem and not the solution — Finding a problem for a solution is how most companies die. For us, we’ve remained focused on iterating our solutions when they are no longer solving our problems but not simply for the sake of trying something new for no reason.
- Validate your impact — To the point above, it is important to measure and validate if your solution is the right one and is driving the impact you want to see for the problem you are trying to solve. For us, this means looking at the impact our messaging interventions are having, and since we work in healthcare this goes all the way to clinical research like randomized controlled trials.
- Be honest about what is and is not working — As you look at the data and how you are or are not driving the social impact you hope to have, be honest with yourself. Transparency can help you grow and learn so you iterate your way to the best solutions for the problems that keep you up at night.
- Remain persistent, it’s a long road — Driving social change is no longer about a one-and-done. For the space we work in we sometimes see organizations citing the same data for a single project done years before. Deploying one pilot and seeing some success data is relatively easy, the hard work comes in sustaining and scaling that social impact. That work will take time, especially for those of us working within systems and inequities that took centuries to be built. We may never see the full realization for the seeds we planted, but hopefully we do enough work that those seeds one day become trees even if it is long after we are gone.
If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?
The optimist in me likes to believe we can all leave the world a bit better than we found it. Sometimes we can get disillusioned by the size of these problems, but if we all make small changes over an extended period of time, we can drive real change. You don’t lose weight by going to the gym for five hours every month, you get there by small improvements like reducing portion sizes or taking short daily walks. If we all do our small part, the change we want to see can have ripple effects through time. Start with one small action you can take, and if we all take those small actions, we can make improvements for all of society.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
Michelle Obama, not only because of her understanding of the importance of prevention in healthcare, but because she’s had the opportunity to step into rooms she likely never expected to be in. I have found myself in many of those rooms throughout my life, going from my low-income neighborhood in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas to the halls of Stanford, or attending Y Combinator’s Demo Day in front of the top investors in Silicon Valley, to recently presenting our work at the World Economic Forum. The 5-year-old Cecilia never thought she’d ever be here and there’s probably so much to learn about the experiences of stepping into spaces never designed for people like us.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
On our LinkedIn and Instagram profile or on our website: www.caremessage.org
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.
Social Impact Tech: Cecilia Corral Of CareMessage On How Their Technology Will Make An Important… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.