Having a unique business model is a strength, but it also means dedicating time to explain how the company operates and its overall value add. It’s a position Klein has often found himself in.

“I used to have a boss that referred to that as an ‘evangelical sale,’ because you actually have to evangelize what you’re doing,” he told Home Health Care News on the latest episode of the Disrupt podcast. “People don’t know what it is at first.”

New York-based Vesta Healthcare is a specialized medical group for individuals receiving home-based care services. The company oversees, coordinates and supervises care in the home. It recently raised $65 million in a Series C funding round.

At the center of all of this is the belief that caregivers are an integral part of health care. HHCN recently caught up with Klein, who went into detail on this topic. During the conversation, Klein also talked about where sees home-based care business opportunities and how the company has been able to expand so rapidly.

Below is that conversation, edited for length and clarity.

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HHCN: For the listeners that are unfamiliar with Vesta Healthcare, can you go into detail about your company’s business model and how it works with home care providers?

Klein: We are a specialized medical group for people with long-term home care. We have a highly-integrated network of non-medical providers, particularly personal care agencies, but other provider types as well. We get referred patients from the community and other providers the way that anybody would get referred, and then we work with the agencies that are servicing those folks to integrate the [people] who are providing that care, and their service coordinators and what have you, into the care that’s actually being delivered.

It’s a unique model that allows us to take the insights and access that people in the home have and convert it into actionable events for medical care delivery, in a way that the medical side of the house can reimburse for. I think it’s very effective in engaging the home in terms of improving quality of care.

Let’s take a step back, can you share with listeners what your health care background is, particularly on the home-based care side?

I grew up in a home care family. My dad worked for a health plan. My mom is a social worker. My grandparents worked in health care as well. Health care is kind of in the blood.

I ended up starting my health care career working for a company in New York called Visiting Nurse Service of New York (reporters note: The company is now VNS Health). It’s one of the oldest and largest nonprofit home care companies around.

I had the very weird entry point of implementing an episodic reimbursement program for home care, Medicare, PPS — that I’m sure many people here know. I really started my health care career from the standpoint of value-based home care. Over the past 20 years, I’ve had the ability to work on this from a variety of perspectives. I’ve been an operator of a plan. I’ve been a vendor that’s focused on in-home assessments and care management. I’ve done episodes of care payments, but all of it has been really around this idea that the home is a very important, overlooked and disconnected setting of care. If you can engage the people that are there, as part of the delivery system, you can actually create better outcomes, as well as reduce cost and improve satisfaction.

I’ll give you one quick anecdote. When I was working at VNS, I was on a project for one of their executives. I had the ability to actually go out and do a whole bunch of home care visits studying what happened in the home. I remember being absolutely blown away by what these nurses and aides were doing. I came back, a naive 20 something, talking to my boss about how great all this stuff was, and what a difference it must have made. His comment was something to the effect of, ‘wouldn’t it be great if?’

What came from that was the idea that, ‘Oh, wait a second, this part of the system actually isn’t being used properly.’ Later on, I had another person there refer to home care as the caboose of health care. That’s been one of the things that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about and working on ever since.

Caregivers — whether informal family caregivers or ones with agencies — are such big pieces of Vesta Healthcare’s puzzle. Why is that so?

They’re the ones that have the most access and positions of trust. We got into this with the idea of making health care better, and there’s been a tremendous amount of investment and innovation in the system.

This caboose part of it — if you look from a dollar spend perspective and a population spend perspective, it’s actually a very large caboose. It’s kind of gigantic. It makes up a huge percentage of state Medicaid budgets. If you look at people who are older adults with functional limitations, the likelihood that you end up on Medicaid. You look at the size of the workforce, you’re talking about millions of paid aides, tens of millions of caregivers, it dwarfs almost anything else, but it really doesn’t get a lot of focus. We built a company, and a program, around the idea that the enormous resource — which I’ve come to call the dark matter of the health care system — we can do good things if we engage it. That’s why it’s the center.

Your company recently raised $65 million in funding. Can you walk listeners through Vesta Healthcare’s funding history, and what this latest round of funding will enable the company to accomplish?

Vesta Healthcare was founded in 2019 and we were founded out of a prior company.

What we did was we raised our initial round of capital from some of the original investors. That would be what you would consider round A. That was really designed to get us proof of concept. Can we demonstrate that we have a business that folks are interested in working with? We did that, and then shortly thereafter, we ended up doing our B round. That was really designed to help us scale, because we had some demonstration that what we were doing was working. The B round was designed to get us to a point where we had essentially unit economics. We knew that our business was working, economically, so it would be viable in the long term.

We hit some pretty rough market conditions over the past few years. The health care innovation landscape has been a very tough place to actually access capital in, and I’m really fortunate to have great investors and partners that have helped us along this journey, and we were able to grow and scale during that time. Then earlier this year, we were able to raise our C round, which is a growth round that’s designed to help us digest all the opportunities that we’ve been developing over these past few years, so we’ve been growing very rapidly. You may have seen that we were on the Inc. 5000 for the fastest growing companies, almost 1,000% growth over the past three years. We have more than that lined up over the next few years.

Growth is expensive. You have to hire, you have to invest. We’ve expanded our footprint geographically. We’ve expanded the programming that we can support. In addition to our present models, there’s a new one called GUIDE coming out that we’re going to participate in. There’s other value-based, aligned programs that we participate in. All that requires investment.

What this round of investment is going to do is twofold. We use debt to help finance some acquisitions that helped us catalyze our growth, so it retires that older debt. The equity portion of it is primary equity that we’re using to grow the company to the next stage.

Let’s talk a little bit about Vesta Healthcare’s expansion. In 2021, the company was in five states, and now it’s in 21 states. How have you expanded so rapidly, and where do you want to go next?

We’re seeing patients in 12 states, and we have 21 we can see patients in. What we’re doing is basically following our referral patterns. We don’t ever enter a state without there being someone that’s bringing us into the state.

The nature of our business is that you’ve got imperfect overlap between payers and providers. We work with home care agencies that cover multiple states. We start with them in one state, and they want to expand with us. We go to the next state with them. When we get to the next state with them, we have to get to scale, so we apply for network participation. I’m really proud that we’re in network with over 100 health plans at this point in time. Then we use the ability to be in that state with a partner as a catalyst to recruit other partners to work with us, which then does the same thing again. It brings us into new geographies, and we repeat it all over. We’re just following where the growth is taking us, and that’s been the reason why it’s happening so quickly.

What are some of the growth barriers that you’re seeing in the market? More importantly, how is Vesta Healthcare navigating these challenges?

First and foremost, for a company like ours, the biggest barrier to growth is understanding what we are. If you go and talk to most participants in the system, they probably say, ‘Hey, we already do care management in some form or another,’ and they do. There’s lots of care management out there. If we’re a different form of current care management, or we’re not care management at all, then what are we?

One of the things we’ve had to learn how to do over the past few years is tell our story, which is why I told it the way I did. We’re a specialized medical group for people with long-term home care. We oversee and coordinate and supervise care in the home, and we engage the aides and caregivers as part of that. When you start to frame it in that sense, many payers will recognize that they don’t have a provider or network that’s doing this. Many providers will recognize that they would benefit from this. This is something that could help them improve their own businesses and improve their own quality. That’s the first part, I used to have a boss that referred to that as an ‘evangelical sale’ because you actually have to evangelize what you’re doing. People don’t know what it is at first.

The second part of it is just the inertia of the delivery system. If you’ve ever tried to get a contract with a payer, get in network, get anything through that stuff, it just takes a long time. We come in through the front door in most places. There’s nothing fast about it. We have to get in network. We have to get credentialed. You have to recruit credentialed providers. You have to get to scale. All of that takes a long time and a lot of resources. Which comes back to having great partners. But once it’s in, it also tends to be pretty durable.

Where are you seeing key home-based care business opportunities right now?

I think that the future of care in the home is in the earliest innings right now. The ability for technology to rapidly upskill and scale what can happen, the ability of better information flow will enable much more personalized approaches that do a much better job of using the home setting as an actual setting of care. Payment models have to continue to innovate to support that.

If I were looking at ways to continue to expand what folks do, I would be looking at how to get skilled agencies to the top of their license, how to move end-of-life care into the home on a greater basis, how to upskill the non-skilled, to get them to the top of their ability levels. I would be looking at virtual models that can augment home-based models, so you can get greater scale out of them. I would be looking at personalized approaches for management of medications. I would be looking at ways to really simplify getting things like DME into the home.

I think there’s so many different places here where, in the home, you can do things that will ultimately be higher quality and lower cost. Behind that, I think there’s also a ton of back-end stuff right now. There is a lot of administrative burden that happens around home-based care. As the system gets smarter on this and understands what it’s doing, it will be able to eliminate a lot of the paperwork and back and forth that, frankly, exists because of the complexity of the system, but doesn’t add any value.

As CEO, what goals do you have for the near-term future?

I want us to clearly demonstrate the value that integrated care in the home creates.

There’s still too much evangelizing happening around this. I’ve met some folks who are innovating around similar models, and I cheer for them. We have to get to a place where the notion that care in the home that’s not integrated is an anathema. That you would always expect that care in the home is going to be part of just care in general.

Secondly, to make sure that the business that we’re running is sustainable. I run a business. I have to make sure that what I’m doing works economically. I have to be really careful as we grow, that we don’t take on too much. I have to be really careful that we continue to perform well. The second part, as a CEO, is to run a great company. I would say the third part of it is to make sure that I am a very valuable partner.

If I’m not a valuable partner, I’m going to lose my partners. I need to make sure that the folks that I’m working with on the provider and the payer side are experiencing the value that we set out to create for them, and in my mind, that does extend all the way to the caregivers. Whether you’re a family member, or an aide in this system, I believe there should be a material difference to being supported by someone like us, where you feel greater access, greater support, greater control, greater participation.

The post How Vesta Healthcare Raised Over $60M To ‘Integrate’ Personal Home Care appeared first on Home Health Care News.

New York-based Vesta Healthcare provides medical partnership and supervision to those that already have a presence in the home — home care agencies, family caregivers and others.

“The way that our business model works is that we partner with groups that go into the home,” Vesta Healthcare CEO Randy Klein told Home Health Care News. “They refer patients to us, for whom they’re seeking additional clinical support for. We provide support, supervision, oversight of them, and help them stay medically stable and avoid unnecessary hospitalizations. Then we participate in health plan networks as essentially an internal medicine group.”

Currently, Vesta Healthcare focuses on older adults with chronic conditions and functional limitations, typically supported by formal or informal home care. The company serves over 50,000 people.

The equity round was led by RA Capital Management, with participation from Oak HC/FT, Chrysalis Ventures, CareCentrix/Walgreens, Nationwide, Kaiser Permanente Ventures, Lux Capital, Generator Ventures, Deerfield Management and others.

Meanwhile, the debt financing came from Horizon Technology Finance Corporation, an affiliate of Monroe Capital.

This latest round of funding will be earmarked to accelerate the growth of Vesta Healthcare.

“We’re going to use the primary equity to support the growth of the business, in particular, supporting our expansion of new geographies and new partners that are referring patients to us,” Klein said.

Klein originally started Vesta Healthcare because he felt caregivers were largely overlooked.

“Home care aides and family caregivers are the most important overlooked aspect of the delivery system,” he said. “They spend more time and have more access than almost any other provider. The idea was that if we could engage with home carriers and caregivers, we could unlock a very powerful resource within the delivery system that could, ultimately, help patients, improve caregiving and create triple A savings and outcomes for the system at large.”

With Vesta Healthcare, the goal was to bring together home care and clinical care.

Klein believes that the company’s biggest growth barrier is the speed at which it can onboard support.

“Part of that growth is making sure that we have the ability to support the referral volume that we have — investing in staff, systems, technologies, processes,” he said.

However, the company has been experiencing positive momentum.

“We’re in the fortunate position that, as people increasingly understand what we do, they’re like, ‘Oh, that would actually be really helpful,’” Klein said. “We’re getting a pretty good referral volume. I’m very pleased to say that we’re getting pretty good partnership interest. Now we have to scale it up.”

Scaling up means becoming a nationally capable partner for providers, health plans and others, Klein noted.

The post Vesta Healthcare Raises $65 Million To Augment Home Care Services Across US appeared first on Home Health Care News.

Katie Davis, senior vice president of clinical operations at Vesta Healthcare, has been named a 2023 Future Leader by Home Health Care News.

To become a Future Leader, an individual is nominated by their peers. The candidate must be a high-performing employee who is 40-years-old or younger, a passionate worker who knows how to put vision into action, and an advocate for seniors, and the committed professionals who ensure their well-being.

Davis sat down with HHCN to talk about moving care upstream via new home-based care models as well as making the U.S. health care system easier for patients and caregivers to navigate. During the conversation, Davis also touched on the emerging role of virtual services and artificial intelligence in home-based care.

HHCN: What drew you to this industry?

Davis: I worked in emergency medicine early in my career and saw patients that should have never needed to come into the emergency department but had to due to circumstances often out of their control.

I also conversely saw patients that really did need to come into the emergency department but arrived too late.

I was presented with an opportunity to move upstream to help solve some of this in the post-acute space, and I realized there was even more to be done as care was moving into the home. I’ve always loved taking on challenging problems to solve, and I felt contributing to new models of care within home care would drive high value for patients and caregivers, including my family.

What’s your biggest lesson learned since starting to work in this industry?

One of my biggest lessons is really a confirmation of what many of us already know; health care is incredibly confusing to navigate, especially for those that are medically complex and/or rely on caregivers for support.

There is not enough support for caregivers or a consistent way for all of the fragmented pieces of health care to come together in service of the patient. That’s what we’ve set out to change at Vesta Healthcare.

If you could change one thing with an eye toward the future of home-based care, what would it be?

If I could change one thing, it would be to continue to enhance support systems and resources for patients and caregivers when navigating health care. Too many organizations are continuing with business as usual, and adding to the stress and complexity of care delivery for patients and caregivers.

We all need to take a minute to pause on a regular basis and re-evaluate our processes, workflows and support provided to our patients and caregivers. If we are not providing high-quality and connected care for patients and caregivers, we need to ask why – and rapidly adjust.

What do you foresee as being different about the home-based care space looking ahead to 2024?

Looking ahead, I anticipate continued growth in virtual services and AI use in the home care industry. Many home care groups do not have the systems, processes or bandwidth to support the use of new technologies – and neither do PCPs. That is why groups like Vesta Healthcare’s affiliated medical groups are specializing in this area and providing support through our network of home care services.

New technologies will enable more personalized and convenient care, allowing health care professionals to monitor patients remotely and provide timely interventions. Integration of AI-driven platforms and predictive analytics will lead to better decision-making, resource allocation and overall improved patient outcomes.

In a word, how would you describe the future of home-based care?

Integrated.

What quality must all Future Leaders possess?

Grit. Changing health care is not easy work. There will always be challenges in doing this very important work. We need folks with the courage, conscientiousness, perseverance, resilience and passion to make a difference.

To learn more about the Future Leaders program, visit https://futureleaders.agingmedia.com/.

The post Future Leader: Katie Davis, Senior Vice President, Clinical Operations, Vesta Healthcare appeared first on Home Health Care News.

Help at Home’s latest move

Chicago-based Help at Home has acquired Prime Home Care, an in-home care provider that offers both home health and home care services across nine Ohio locations, including the large markets of Columbus, Toledo and Cincinnati.

Headquartered in Maineville, Ohio, Prime has been delivering home-based care to clients since 2006. The company currently serves about 900 individuals, according to a Help at Home press release.

“We’re pleased to bring our unique home care service value proposition into Ohio as we welcome Prime Home Care to the Help at Home family,” Help at Home President Tim O’Rourke said in the release. “We believe we can add value in the Ohio market, enabling more individuals to age in place in their homes.”

On its end, Help at Home and its 30,000 caregivers offer in-home and community-based care in 13 states. The provider serves about 45,000 clients on a monthly basis.

The purchase of Prime comes less than a month after Help at Home made two other acquisitions: Pennsylvania-based Meridius Health and the non-clinical business of Georgia-based Altamaha HomeCare.

Strategically, Help at Home is looking to build density in its existing markets while expanding into new ones as well.

“As we expand into new markets like Ohio, Help at Home is well-positioned to deliver growth through strong organic and inorganic capabilities,” Help at Home Chief Growth and Strategy Officer Elina Onitskansky said in the release. “Our differentiated platform supported by a scaled, national presence and coupled with our commitment to local presence brings a unique service offering to states, caregivers and clients.”

New Day Healthcare lands $55.5 million in financing

New Day Healthcare has secured $55.5 million in financing from CIT Group Inc. (NYSE: CIT) and its Healthcare Finance business.

New Day Healthcare is a company that partners with home health and hospice providers to care for 7,500 patients across Missouri, Kansas, Illinois and Texas. Businesses include the operations of Texas-based AssistCare, Home Care Partners of Texas and New Age Hospice, as well as Midwest-based Phoenix Home Care and Hospice.

G. Scott Herman — a home health veteran and the former CEO of Elara Caring — is the founder and CEO of New Day Healthcare.

“Our team has had a long-term relationship with CIT, who has been one of our instrumental partners building some of the industry’s most significant organizations,” he said in a statement. “We are excited to continue our growth, partnered with CIT, as we seek multiple acquisition opportunities.”

The financing consists of a senior secured loan, a delayed draw term loan and a revolving line of credit.

“Post-acute care is a vital part of the overall health care system,” William Douglass, managing director and group head for CIT’s Healthcare Finance business, said. “We were pleased to support New Day Healthcare as it expands its portfolio of businesses that serve the market for home care and hospice services.”

Peterson Partners backs Ennoble Care

Investment firm Peterson Partners has invested in Ennoble Care. The investment was made in partnership with Trilogy Search Partners, Maven Equity and additional undisclosed stakeholders.

Health care entrepreneur Kush Das, founder of the investment firm Circa Health, will take the helm as chairman and CEO of Ennoble.

“Ennoble Care provides high-quality patient care to frail seniors, with thousands served during the pandemic through tens of thousands of community-based patient encounters,” Das said in a press release. “Our value-based care and growth-operations toolkit, along with Ennoble’s tech-enabled, clinical operation, will provide tremendous value for our patients and their communities.”

Ennoble Care provides hospice, home health, palliative care and home-based primary care throughout the Northeastern U.S. The infusion of capital from its new investors will help accelerate growth.

A key component of the company’s growth plans involves capitalizing on emerging value-based payment models, Das told Hospice News.

“We are a part of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation’s (CMMI) Direct Contracting Model, which will allow us to take a value-based care approach that is inclusive of primary, palliative and hospice care,” he said. “And develop preferred-provider partnerships that support that approach across the continuum.”

Peterson Partners holds more than $1 billion in assets, including 64 portfolio companies. The firm’s investments focus on real assets, private equity, seed-stage ventures and search funds.

Abramson Senior Care, Vesta Healthcare team up

Vesta Healthcare, an in-home care technology and clinical services organization, is partnering with Abramson Senior Care.

The partnership incorporates Abramson Senior Care’s connected continuum of home- and community-based services with Vesta’s technology, enabling real-time data sharing and notification of changes in health status and other services.

The goal, according to the new partners, is to catch early warning signs of changing health conditions, prompting preventative interventions and, in turn, better health outcomes.

“Vesta Healthcare and Abramson Senior Care are committed to supporting not just the seniors in the Philadelphia region, but those who care for them as well,” Randy Klein, CEO of Vesta Healthcare, said in a statement. “Through this partnership, we’re proud to provide the connections seniors need to remain as safe and healthy as possible, and create a model for delivery of the highest quality care when and where people need it most.”

The New York City-based Vesta raised $65 million in growth capital in April, led by Deerfield Management Company, with participation from existing investors Oak HC/FT, Kaiser Permanente Ventures, Lux Capital and others.

Vesta Healthcare was formerly known as HT Health, the developer of Hometeam.

The post Transactions: Help at Home Acquires Prime Home Care; New Day Healthcare Secures $55.5M appeared first on Home Health Care News.

The New York City-based Vesta is a clinical provider and technology services organization that connects caregiver insights to the rest of an individual’s care team. As part of its business model, the company partners with home care agencies, health plans and other providers to create value-based population health programs that emphasize clinical quality, improved health outcomes and personalized engagement.

“Our physicians, nurses and entire clinical team, backed by innovative technology, are truly changing the way care is delivered in the home every day,” Vesta CEO Randy Klein said in a statement. “Through this additional investment, we will be able to rapidly expand our presence as well as continue building novel care models and data-driven technology solutions for the home.”

Founded under the “Vesta Healthcare” name in 2018, the company’s fundraising total now climbs to $95 million. Vesta previously raised $30 million in 2019.

The most recent fundraising round was led by Deerfield Management Company, with participation from existing investors Oak HC/FT, Kaiser Permanente Ventures, Lux Capital and others.

“The past year has highlighted the critical nature of engaging caregivers in their homes as they work to keep members and loved ones safe and healthy at home,” Dr. Julian Harris, a partner at Deerfield, said. “Vesta’s ‘homecareist’ model and technology-enabled caregiver engagement have resulted in differentiated health outcomes and care for Vesta’s members.”

Vesta has expanded its footprint to a total of five states in the past year, with additional expansion planned for 2021.

The company plans to use the newly announced funding to expand its sales, marketing, operations and technology teams as it grows. Vesta likewise plans to use the growth capital to expand partnerships with home care agencies “as it takes increasing clinical and financial risk” for the populations it serves.

All sorts of companies that coordinate services in the home and share information across care teams have achieved similar success over the past several months. As payers and health systems aggressively shift care into the home, they’ve become increasingly in need of “care traffic control” partners that ensure smooth transitions and in-home support.

Vesta Healthcare was formerly known as HT Health, the developer of Hometeam.

In 2018, Vesta Healthcare transitioned from a direct-to-consumer business model to one where it partners with other agencies and insurers. The company also went from a private-pay and Medicaid focus to a payment structure largely based on Medicare-Medicaid dual eligibles.

“We are clearly defining our position within the at-home care space — one that exists to support at-home caregivers in delivering better care, improving quality of life, and reducing unnecessary costs and stress,” the company stated as part of its rebranding.

The post ‘Homecareist’ Vesta Raises $65M to Support Pop Health Programs, Risk-Based Contracts appeared first on Home Health Care News.

In the release announcing the investment, Nationwide asserted its desire to improve in-home care, saying it wanted “to make sure patients and in-home health care providers are getting the support they need.”

New York-based Vesta, the developer of Hometeam and formerly known as HT Health, is a technology and clinical services company that connects caregivers and care teams through its platforms.

In 2018, Vesta Healthcare transitioned away from a direct-to-consumer model. Now, the company’s model is based around partnering with other agencies and insurers. The other transition the company made was moving from private pay and Medicaid to a structure based on Medicare-Medicaid dual eligibles.

Erik Ross, Nationwide’s managing partner of venture capital and open innovation spoke with Home Health Care News about the future of in-home care and his company’s investment in Vesta. During the interview, he was joined by Kristi Rodriguez, Nationwide’s vice president of financial thought leadership.

The highlights from HHCN’s conversation with Ross and Rodriguez are below, edited for length and clarity.

HHCN: What is the goal of Nationwide’s venture capital fund?

Ross: We make investments in early-to-late stage companies that are strategically aligned with Nationwide. We look for opportunities where we can either accelerate a current business that we’re working in or to position ourselves somewhere for the future. And with those portfolio companies, we look to partner with them as well as a way to provide insights to Nationwide and co-create solutions. That’s our main goal.

Why is Nationwide paying attention to the in-home care industry?

Rodriguez: As a part of thought leadership, we have a team called the Nationwide Retirement Institute. For the last 11 years, we’ve been curating data and insights from consumers and our advisor community. One of the most compelling surveys that we have is correlated to health and wealth in long-term care.

Some of the aspects we found were startling. One of the major components that came out of that survey is that 54% of those individuals over the age of 50 — when asked if they’d go to a nursing home — said that they would rather die than go to one. That’s astonishing. Over 74% said that they would prefer to stay in their home. This sentiment is also echoed by their caregivers.

We’re uniquely focused on this because we want to address the need that we’re seeing with longevity, and also with where individuals want to receive care during their most vulnerable years.

[We’re thinking about] how can we really address this issue and be at the forefront.

Why is this idea of people wanting to stay at home such an urgent concern?

Rodriguez: We’re in a sandwiched generation. Not only are the caregivers at a point where they have to care for those individuals who are aging, they also are preparing for retirement themselves.

We saw this as a unique opportunity to curate conversations as people are going through this change, so they can make their wishes known to their family and also start financially preparing. And then, also, to give them the assistance they need as they’re caring for those aging adults.

I think that the need now has never been more compelling. At some point in the 1900s, the average age individuals were living to was 47. Now, children born today have a 70% chance of living to 100. To me, that is really the crux of the conversation, and Nationwide is in a unique position to take a position on that and also offer solutions.

According to worldbank.org, a child born in the United States in 2017 has a life expectancy of 79.

Ross: The only thing I would add is some macro trends. Right now, we know that the population of those 65 and older is going to be skyrocketing over the next 20 years. And we know there’s a caregiver shortage. About 95% of family members that are unpaid caregivers provide an estimated $500 billion worth of free care to their families. On top of that, employers lose around $33 billion per year due to employee caregiving responsibilities.

We’re at a nexus in time where this is going to continue to become a challenge. We’re trying to look for opportunities to ease that burden on our members and look for opportunities that can help them age in place.

The caregiver issue seems very central to the mission in this partnership. Why is that?

Ross: Technology is going to have to play a big role in how this continues to develop. The reason that we liked the Vesta platform is because it gets all of the different parties looking at one version of the truth — between the provider, the plan, the patient, the family members and the caregiver. It’s a central point that enables that care for acute conditions that has everybody looking again at the same place. We believe that more technology-enabled solutions like this are going to be needed as the future continues to unfold.

What was it about Vesta’s capabilities that intrigued you?

Ross: They have domain expertise in the space. The investor syndicate is very much behind this as well. We look for strong founders and management teams that have the domain expertise and understand the ecosystem, as well as the technology that’s needed to serve them.

The Kaiser Permanente folks are also investors on the board. They’re very much interested in this space. We’ve had a number of conversations with them about how we can continue to build this partnership.

Where do you guys picture nationwide in the future of home care?

Rodriguez: We really have three opportunities or places, I think, where we could do more. For one, it’s really starting that conversation. So helping individuals to think about and identify their long-term care options and letting them know that home health care is a viable option.

From Nationwide’s standpoint, it’s about getting patients to understand what options they have. For instance, we have a CareMatters program that has a cash indemnity that will allow individuals to pay their caregivers. We know that 62% of caregivers spend their own money on this, and so we are looking for solutions to allow those individuals to pay their loved ones for giving them care that they desperately need and want to reward them for.

It’s about starting the dialogue and identifying solutions that we can use to assist in home health care. And then really starting to have an advisor conversation and help them by offering our solutions as well as others to understand what long term goals are and how to make them a reality. That includes home health care.

Ross: From a [venture investment] perspective, there’s a handful of places that we think about this from a thesis perspective. One would be holistic planning services that combine health, finance, lifestyle and aging-in-place technology — similar to Vesta’s other technology that would help people live and age in place. Also, fraud solutions that would help protect our members as they continue to age.

And also other financial solutions that are sort of novel. Most people do not have enough money as [they live longer]. What novel solutions are being created that could help people age in place? Those are a handful of places that we look at from the investing side.

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With guidance from former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and other well-known operators, CareBridge launched Monday by announcing an initial $40 million funding round. On the same day, the business that runs Hometeam announced it had raised $30 million in Series A and was rebranding to Vesta Healthcare.

Both companies received funding from Oak HC/FT, a venture capital and private equity firm that focuses on health care.

Nashville, Tennessee-based CareBridge is a technology company that leverages electronic visit verification (EVV), data aggregation and predictive analytics in connection to long-term support services (LTSS). CareBridge was formed following the strategic acquisition of HealthStar and Sinq Technologies.

“CareBridge is bringing a unique approach to the long-term services and supports space,” Dr. Tunde Sotunde, Anthem’s president of Medicaid, said in a statement. “By combining EVV and data aggregation technology with more comprehensive member and decision support services, CareBridge will allow states and health plans to deliver whole-person health solutions for their LTSS members in a more effective manner, helping improve health and well-being.”

CareBridge is far from Frist’s first foray into the health care arena. He co-founded home- and outpatient-based palliative care provider Aspire Health in 2013 with Brad Smith, who now serves as head of the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation (CMMI).

“As I look to the coming months and years, I think the biggest tailwind is this whole concept of moving the hospital to the home,” Frist previously told Home Health Care News. “I see this massive movement away from hospitals. There are always going to be hospitals, but with telemedicine, with better outreach, technology and the engagement of individual patients, that will be accelerated over time.”

Although Anthem acquired Aspire in 2018, Frist has remained active in the health care space, particularly with in-home care. Those activities include his role as a partner in VC firm Frist Cressey Ventures.

Mike Tudeen will serve as CEO of CareBridge. Tudeen previously served as CEO of PopHealthcare, a risk-adjustment and complex care company that sold to Guidewell in 2017; he also served as CEO of INSPIRIS, an in-home complex care company that sold to Optum in 2011.

David Baiada — CEO of Bayada Home Health Care, one of the largest home health providers in the U.S. — will serve as one of CareBridge’s board members. Along with Oak HC/FT, GV is also an investor.

While CareBridge is new on the home-based care scene, HHCN readers should be somewhat familiar with Vesta Healthcare — or, at least, its Hometeam ties.

Vesta Healthcare — formerly known as HT Health, the developer of Hometeam — is a New York-based technology and clinical services company that connects caregivers and care teams through its platforms.

“Caregivers are in the home supporting patients with high needs every day,” Randy Klein, CEO of Vesta Healthcare, said in a statement. “They are on the front lines and the first to notice changes in the health of their loved ones or care recipients, but too often, their insights are not connected back to the care team to take timely action that could prevent unnecessary ED visits, hospitalizations and readmissions.”

In 2018, Vesta Healthcare transitioned from a direct-to-consumer business model to one where it partners with other agencies and insurers. The company also went from private pay and Medicaid to a payment structure based on Medicare-Medicaid dual eligibles.

In addition to Oak HC/FT, investors include Deerfield Management Company, Lux Capital, Kaiser Permanente Ventures, Generator Ventures, CareCentrix, Epstein Partners and Nationwide Ventures.

Vesta Healthcare plans to deploy its new capital to expand product development, engineering and its sales and marketing departments. Vesta is currently growing in Massachusetts, with live programs with Commonwealth Care Alliance and Element Care PACE and plans for 2020 growth into new markets.

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