Reimagine Care, a tech-enabled platform for oncologists, is ready to become a national provider of cancer care at home. On Tuesday, the private, Nashville-based firm announced it raised $25 million in venture capital funding. That is less than a month before it will begin treating its first cancer patient at home.
“You can’t do (in-home oncology care) as a project out of the side of your desk,” Reimagine Care co-founder and CEO Aaron Gerber, M.D., told McKnight’s Home Care Daily Pulse. “We think that this is a better way for millions of patients to be able to receive their cancer care and we want to help organizations in this country do it at scale.”
Reimagine Care, which launched a little more than a year ago, operates largely like a hospital-at-home program, but the company is laser-focused on cancer treatment. Reimagine provides remote patient monitoring through a virtual care center that is staffed 24/7 by oncology nurses. It also provides supportive therapies to address the side effects of cancer treatment and works with hospital systems to provide supplies of oncology drugs to the home.
Growing trend of cancer care at home
Cancer treatment at home isn’t new but has been mostly done on a relatively small scale. COVID-19 could change that. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Hospital Without Walls program has pushed some hospital-level care into the home since its launch two years ago. Additionally, an increasing number of patients — especially those who are immunocompromised — are embracing telehealth. With 72 million aging baby boomers and cancer treatment costs expected to balloon over the next decade, hospitals are beginning to see the potential of cancer care at home.
Two years ago, Penn Medicine launched Penn Cancer Center at Home and has treated roughly 3,000 cancer patients remotely. The Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah launched Huntsman at Home in 2018. In a study last year, the institute found participants had 55% fewer hospitalizations and 45% fewer emergency room visits 30 days after the study began.
Gerber said Reimagine Care is working not only with hospital systems but with payers to expand coverage of cancer care into the home.
“Fundamentally delivering this care in the home is less costly, so it’s able to deliver to them a significant savings relative to delivery in the hospital. So there is a lot of interest on their part,” Gerber explained.
Potential home health partnerships
There could also be opportunities for home health providers. Gerber said clinicians need to be dispatched to patients’ homes to set up infusions and other services. Reimagine could use hospital staff to do that or look for other options.
“We look to see if we can find a really high-quality partner in the community who we can work with,” Gerber said. “If that is not available, then we are actually going out and hiring the people and getting the required licences to deliver the services.”
