When Cecilia Corral got her acceptance letter to Stanford, it looked like a straight line to success. What her LinkedIn doesn’t show is how far that line zigzagged. While earning her degree in product design, she was sending commissary money to a sibling in prison, grieving another lost too young to heart disease, and working part-time to keep her family afloat. Later, in grad school at the University of Texas, she lost her father to prostate cancer and covered his funeral with TA wages and scholarship funds.

Those years taught her what most founders learn the hard way: it’s nearly impossible to focus on your health when life keeps demanding triage. “Low income” doesn’t really capture it—it’s not just less money, it’s fewer options, harder tradeoffs, and the quiet exhaustion of trying to do everything right in a system built for those with margin.

That’s the empathy behind CareMessage, the nonprofit Cecilia co-founded to help safety-net clinics reach patients through simple, human messaging. With a Stanford foundation in human-centered design—and a lived understanding of what gets in the way of care—she’s built technology that feels less like an app and more like accompaniment. Cecilia believes design is most powerful when it begins with proximity, not privilege—when it listens first, and builds for the people living the hardest stories.

About The Series

This is the thirty-second installment in the One Expert, One Topic series, where field experts break down one big idea using Matt Abrahams’ What / So What / Now What format. Written instead of recorded, so you can actually absorb it.

What

CareMessage sits at the intersection of design, empathy, and public health. Cecilia learned human-centered design at Stanford, where she saw both its promise and its blind spots.

“Human-centered design is a great concept,” she says, “but it can be weaponized when people believe ten interviews are enough to understand someone else’s life.”

At CareMessage, she and her team redefined that idea around extreme users—patients with the most complex lives and the fewest resources. If a program works for them, it works for everyone.

That principle shapes everything from product architecture to pricing. The platform delivers conversational health programs via SMS—still the most universal and accessible channel for low-income patients. Each message sequence adapts based on real-time responses and behavioral science models, helping clinics support patients with chronic conditions like diabetes or hypertension.

And while most health tech platforms bill per message, CareMessage doesn’t. Clinics pay about $1–$2 per patient per year for unlimited messaging. The logic is simple: behavior change takes repetition. “If a clinic is optimizing for cost,” Cecilia says, “they’ll limit messages. And when you limit messages, you limit outcomes.” 

So What

Behavior change doesn’t happen through a single reminder. It happens through rhythm—a steady sequence of small, relevant, human moments.

Unlimited messaging removes the ceiling on care. It allows one more check-in, one more encouraging note, one more touchpoint that says someone sees you. For patients juggling housing insecurity, caregiving, or grief, that consistency can be the difference between progress and silence.

Cecilia’s insight reframes the entire design process: empathy isn’t a phase or a feature—it’s the medium. You can’t outsource understanding or call it human-centered after ten interviews. You have to build from the inside out, where the patient’s reality defines the design constraints.

By designing for the hardest lives, CareMessage achieves what most technology misses: relevance. When empathy shapes the infrastructure, the product reaches not just more people—but reaches them more deeply.

Now What

For designers and technologists, Cecilia’s challenge is straightforward: Start with outcomes. Find your extreme users. Build for them first.

For clinics and nonprofits, rethink what you’re optimizing for. If your model discourages sending more messages, you’re saving pennies and losing people. Behavior change depends on reinforcement, not restraint.

And for anyone building in healthcare, Cecilia offers a simple but radical test: build like the people you serve are in the room—because they are.

CareMessage proves that technology can be both rigorous and humane. Unlimited messaging isn’t a marketing feature; it’s a design choice grounded in dignity. When you treat empathy as infrastructure, you don’t just improve healthcare—you keep it human.