The emergency announces itself with the small, dreadful ping of an ordinary message. The sitter cannot make it. School is closed. A parent in another city suddenly needs company. In one instant, a neat workday turns into a kitchen-table command center. Sharon Lurtsema has spent more than three decades studying that instant, not from a spreadsheet at first, but from inside the work itself.
Her career has taken her through nearly every seat in the care system. She has been a nanny, a staffing coordinator, an agency owner and a technology developer. Each role offered a different view of the same fragile arrangement: care works beautifully until it does not, and when it breaks, the shock travels. A family improvises. An employee misses work. A manager reshuffles a team. Everyone pays for an event no one scheduled.
Lurtsema's answer became CorporateCARE Solutions, the Tucson company she founded and leads. It supplies employer-sponsored backup care across the United States, combining a national network of care providers with software that handles requests, updates, reporting and reimbursement. The ambition is practical. Make it possible to ask for help quickly, see what is happening and pay for the care that actually gets used.
Chapter oneThe apprenticeship nobody called an apprenticeship
Before the platform, there was New York. Lurtsema left a job at the University of Arizona and became a nanny for a family there. It was an education in the intimate logistics of care: schedules that do not respect office hours, trust that cannot be rushed and the thousand quiet decisions that keep another household moving.
In 1992, she returned to Tucson and started Choice Options from a bedroom in her father's house. The company placed nannies, adult companions and domestic help. The setting was modest; the operating challenge was not. A care agency sits at the junction of urgency and judgment. It must match people, verify them, communicate clearly and remember that every open shift belongs to a real household waiting for an answer.
That phrase is both a product philosophy and an accurate description of families. One employee needs a caregiver at home. Another is traveling with a child. Someone else is coordinating help for an adult relative states away. A standard package may look elegant in procurement and clumsy in a living room. Lurtsema's long apprenticeship taught her to prefer useful flexibility over tidy sameness.
Chapter twoWhen a service business learns to speak software
CorporateCARE Solutions launched its national model in 2014. The leap was not from ignorance to invention; it was from repeated manual work to a system. Lurtsema and her team developed what the company calls its Human Touch platform, linking employers, employees and providers around the care request. Workers can submit a request on a phone or computer. Employers can see usage and costs. Providers receive the information needed to respond.
Software matters here because time matters. Backup care is unlike a wellness newsletter or a discount people can browse next Thursday. Its value is revealed under pressure. The request needs to move while the user is still deciding whether the day can be saved.
The ordinary-day rescue loop
The company's services have expanded beyond backup child and adult care to include pet care, tutoring and concierge support. That breadth follows the same logic: work can be interrupted by responsibilities that refuse to fit into the official definition of a benefit. A dog walker, a tutor or help with an everyday errand may seem peripheral from the conference room. At 8:10 on a chaotic morning, peripheral becomes central rather quickly.
Location had to become flexible too. The company arranges care in an employee's home, at a hotel during business travel or where a loved one lives elsewhere in the country. Its MyChoice program also lets employees select a caregiver or care center they already know. These details are less glamorous than a launch announcement, but they reveal Lurtsema's method. Begin with how families actually behave, including the preferences and improvisations that make neat systems untidy. Then let the system bend. A backup plan earns trust by meeting people where the disruption happened, not by asking the disruption to become more convenient.
Chapter threeThe arithmetic of not wasting the benefit
Lurtsema also challenged how employers buy backup care. CorporateCARE's pay-as-you-go model charges for care when employees use it, rather than asking an organization to prepay for an estimated block. The distinction sounds like procurement housekeeping. It is actually a view of who should be allowed to offer the benefit.
A prepaid model can be easier for a large company to absorb. Smaller organizations may hesitate at buying uncertain usage in advance. Pay-as-you-go reframes the decision around access and actual demand. It also gives Lurtsema's team an incentive to make the program legible: utilization, spending and fulfillment are visible rather than hiding in an annual promise.
The model carries a broader lesson for founders. Domain expertise is not merely knowing the nouns. It is knowing which friction is tolerable, which delay is fatal and which feature looks clever but makes a frantic user work harder. Lurtsema had watched requests move through phones and calendars long before she watched them move through a platform. The interface inherits that memory.
Chapter fourA founder measured in handoffs
Awards mark the public timeline. In 2014, the Society for Human Resource Management of Greater Tucson gave Lurtsema its Celebrating Innovation in the Workplace Leadership Award. The next year, she placed second for Outstanding Entrepreneur in the Women of Influence Awards hosted by Inside Tucson Business. In 2025, CorporateCARE Solutions was named Employer Backup Care Benefit of the Year by Manage HR Magazine.
Nanny work and a return to Tucson turn care into a profession.
Choice Options starts in a bedroom at her father's home.
CorporateCARE launches its national backup-care model and Lurtsema receives a Tucson SHRM leadership award.
The company receives an industry award and reports that first-half business nearly doubled.
The more revealing measure, however, is the handoff. Can an employee make a request without telling the story five times? Can a provider see enough to act? Can an HR team understand what it bought? Can a caregiver arrive with the details that turn an appointment into reassurance? Each handoff is a chance for information to vanish or confidence to wobble.
Lurtsema's public comments return repeatedly to responsiveness, transparency and treating employers as she would want to be treated. They are not exotic management doctrines. They are the manners of a good care coordinator applied to a technology company: answer, update, adapt, remember the person waiting.
Chapter fiveThe small problem that was never small
Backup care occupies an odd place in corporate language. It is filed under benefits, a word that can make it sound decorative. Yet its consequences are operational. When care collapses, attendance, concentration and retention can follow. CorporateCARE reported that one client associated the program with recruiting 20 nurses during a difficult hiring period. Candidates had noticed the difference between an employer that acknowledged the care problem and one that left it private.
Lurtsema's career is a study in taking a supposedly domestic inconvenience seriously enough to see the system inside it. The family scrambling for help and the employer watching a shift go uncovered are not living in separate worlds. They are experiencing the same broken link from opposite ends.
Her advantage was proximity. She knew what care felt like before she knew what a national platform required. She had made the calls, staffed the requests and run the agency. When it came time to automate, she was not trying to erase the human part. She was trying to remove the administrative drag around it.
There is something pleasingly literal about care sitting in the middle of the company name. The software may coordinate the request, and the pricing model may persuade the employer, but the product arrives as a person. Someone crosses a threshold, learns the routine and makes an unstable day usable again.
That is the quiet scale of Lurtsema's project. A national network, an employer dashboard and a mobile request all exist to improve one small scene: a family receives help, an employee exhales and the day continues. The backup plan has done its work. Ideally, it almost disappears.