GE HealthCare (Nasdaq: GEHC), which spun off of General Electric (NYSE: GE) last year, is making more investments in at-home care.
On Monday, the company announced a partnership with Biofourmis, a home-based care enabler. The partnership aims to enhance care continuity in the post-acute setting with a focus on lowering the cost of care.
GE Healthcare plans to integrate Biofourmis’ care-at-home solutions into its patient monitoring portfolio.
“Biofourmis’ demonstrated success with care-at-home solutions will extend GE HealthCare’s current inpatient monitoring portfolio to support patient care from the hospital to home,” Ashutosh Banerjee, general manager of diagnostic cardiology and RPM for GE Healthcare, told Home Health Care News in an email. “Combining our companies’ demonstrated capabilities will help revolutionize the way we approach the patient care journey.”
Biofourmis was founded in Singapore in 2015. The company’s U.S. offices are headquartered in Boston.
Its business model is centered around managing post-acute and complex chronic care patients through its clinical care teams, which deliver care virtually in the home. It also leverages its own software and data science capabilities to provide that care.
Biofourmis’ tech capabilities include FDA-cleared, AI-guided algorithms and clinical-grade wearable devices, both of which will be utilized in the new partnership.
By offering Biofourmis’ virtual care-at-home solutions to GE Healthcare customers, the idea is to extend the care continuum beyond the hospital, Banerjee said, and for care teams to have a longitudinal patient view beyond the traditional setting.
“Today, hospital systems are experiencing increased cost of care due to workforce shortages, constrained bed capacity and increasing readmission rates,” Banerjee said. “We understand there is a need to address these current challenges faced by our customers and care teams through new technologies and solutions. Enabling care at home has the opportunity to enhance patient care and reduce total costs of care.”
Biofourmis raised $300 million in Series D funding in 2022. Four months later, the company added $20 million to its Series D round.
The company is currently going through leadership changes after cofounder Kuldeep Singh Rajput stepped down as its CEO in August — one month after the company laid off 120 employees worldwide, including 48 U.S.-based workers, according to MobiHealthNews.
Following Rajput’s departure, Ben Wanamaker was appointed to its board of directors and oversees the company’s new “Office of the CEO.”
Wanamaker previously served as the vice president of enterprise strategy at Humana Inc. (NYSE: HUM) and the vice president and general manager of analytics product at Aetna.
“The collaboration between Biofourmis and GE Healthcare will enable health care providers to deliver high-quality, site-agnostic monitoring and connected care across the continuum,” Wanamaker told HHCN in an email. “The aim is to get patients home from the hospital earlier and to provide them with an outstanding care-at-home experience. GE Healthcare has built credibility and trust in the market for more than a century, which creates a massive tailwind in the market for both companies to expand care-at-home exponentially with major benefits to patients, providers and insurers.”
The partnership with Biofourmis isn’t GE Healthcare’s first foray into home-based care. In 2022, the company partnered with AMC Health, a virtual care and remote patient monitoring company based in New York City.
One of GE Healthcare’s main focuses with these types of partnerships, Banerjee said, is to stay on top of the increasing digitization of health care and the growing demand for at-home care.
“The Biofourmis solution aligns well with our strength in the acute care area in the hospital and extends it outside the hospital with care at home and post-acute care,” Banerjee added. “It is also very well positioned to help solve some of the biggest challenges our hospital customers have, including hospital capacity issues and cost challenges.”
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