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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Biofourmis was founded in Singapore back in 2015. The company’s U.S. offices are headquartered out of Boston.

One of the key segments of Biofourmis’ business is centered around managing post-acute and complex chronic care patients. In order to do this, the company leans on its software and data science capabilities – as well as clinical care teams – to deliver care virtually in the home.

Home Health Care News recently caught up with Ross Armstrong, the chief commercialization officer at Biofourmis. During the conversation, he touched on Biofourmis’ clinical outcome success and where the company sees the most growth opportunity moving forward.

HHCN: Biofourmis has a unique business model. How has that given you legroom to accelerate hospital-at-home?

Armstrong: The technology enablement is critical to this. We’re doing a lot of unique things by having the ability to ingest biometric data, and then using the AI to interpret when patients are decompensating, in order to create unique care pathways for them.

One of the biggest pieces around this is really being able to scale. Obviously, the cost of the technology is one thing, but that is dwarfed by the cost of staffing that is required to be able to provide serviceable programs. Anything that we can do to create staffing efficiency — particularly around virtual nursing and physician care — is really helpful, as we think about creating a truly scalable program. This is where a lot of IP and uniqueness comes into play.

Biofourmis has seen a lot of funding gains in recent months. In August, the company raised $20 million, and four months earlier, $300 million. Are investors more willing to fund at-home care companies, especially considering that in the past we’ve seen kind of a dip in funding in the digital health space?

It’s obviously a space that there’s a lot of interest in. Everybody understands the trends right now and why things are moving into the home. There’s a whole host of reasons around it.

I think what we’re seeing here is that broad applicability across the continuum of care is really important. Us not being a point solution is, I think, one of the key things that’s been allowing us to generate that level of interest in raising capital from the different partners that we have. We’ve created a very flexible platform that is device agnostic, that can incorporate biometric data in a whole host of different site-agnostic ways, and interpret that data, and really create actionable insights and create efficiencies around it.

Biofourmis set out to accomplish a number of goals after it received its latest round of funding. These goals included things like working towards certain digital initiatives, and partnering with more health systems. What progress has been made there?

We’ve had a number of announcements of some really important clients recently, like Orlando Health and Augusta University Health. We’re really excited about that. We have an extremely full pipeline right now and have a lot of announcements coming.

We’ve been really able to demonstrate the value of the post-acute space. We are an outcomes-based company. That’s an area that we have good case studies in. We’ve shown really good results.

There’s kind of this hybrid of the acute and post-acute space that we actually see as a real opportunity for the industry when thinking about all the headwinds that health systems are facing around labor shortages, cost containment, and, quite frankly, capacity issues.

Can we actually help transition patients out in a timely discharge one to two days early, and continue that care plan in the home? Maybe that means delivering that last round of IV antibiotics, or maybe we just need one more round of lab values. We’d have phlebotomists go to the home and we get the lab values there. We can continue that care plan in the home and create significant variable cost savings for the hospital, get the patient in an environment that they want to be in, and help them heal. Then we actually continue to manage them and monitor them through the post-acute. It’s this hybrid model. It’s an area where we see real growth potential, and what we’re focused on now.

The company has also seen some success when it comes to better clinical outcomes. There was one case where your solution was used with a home-hospital program, and it was said that the outcomes were 70% better compared to care received in the hospital.

A lot of it is just real-time access to information through the biometric data that we are streaming in and being able to, through the AI algorithm, really see when patients are decompensating. Before they need that high-cost environment, we can dial-in, and get them tuned up.

We are able to really think about what those patients need and get them to be activated around their care. We can push them to the specific information that’s needed. We get to engage in surveys to understand how they’re feeling. We can make sure that they are doing the things they need to be doing, whether it’s medication adherence or it’s just taking their blood pressure, so that we can see what’s going on with them.

Another standout metric was the company’s ability to lower costs by 38%. Can you provide some context around how your model helps lower costs?

It’s really about keeping patients out of those high-cost environments. Can we shift even post-acute care from a facility-based, higher cost environment into the home, potentially with home health?

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The past few years have been a time of transformation for the hospital-at-home model. As it cements its popularity, new players have begun to rise with it.

While hospital at home has long been embraced across the globe — in Australia, Canada and across Europe, for example — the model popped up in the U.S. in the 1990s. That’s when Dr. Bruce Leff conducted a successful pilot trial.

Those trials found the total cost of care was 32% lower than brick-and-mortar hospital care. They also found that the mean length of stay of hospital-at-home programs was one-third shorter.

Home Health Care News explores the model further and profiles a few of the key emerging players in this HHCN+ exclusive report.

The case for hospital at home

Over the years, robust evidence has emerged from numerous studies on the effectiveness of the hospital-at-home model – on cost efficiency, medical outcomes and more.

A 2018 study conducted by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai found that hospital at home achieved shorter average lengths of stay compared to traditional in-patient care, at 3.2 days compared to 5.5 days, respectively.

The same study also found that the model significantly lowered rates of hospital readmissions and emergency department visits.

In 2020, another study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that the costs for patients receiving hospital-level care in the home were 38% lower. Researchers also found that these patients were less sedentary and had lower readmission rates within 30 days.

The hospital-at-home model has also shown promising results in the area of cancer care.

Traditionally, cancer care delivery takes place in brick-and-mortar facilities exclusively. This is also slowly beginning to change.

A 2021 study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology found that an in-home cancer care model led to a 55% reduction in unplanned hospitalizations, with 47% lower costs.

Hospital-at-home roadblocks

Despite the evidence of hospital at home’s effectiveness, two major roadblocks have impeded the model’s widespread adoption.

One of these roadblocks is the cultural norms of health care in the U.S., and hospitals and health systems acting as gatekeepers resistant to change.

“It’s sort of the difference between understanding you need to change, knowing how to change and making the change, because some things are just so hardwired into systems,” Leff previously told HHCN. “Rewiring health care, health care delivery and attitudes — all of that is hard.”

In addition to being a pioneer in the U.S. hospital-at-home space, Leff is a geriatrician, a professor of medicine and director of the Center for transformative geriatric research at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

The other major barrier is the lack of a clear path to reimbursement. This is especially notable because, for potential hospital-at-home operators, setting up shop can be a costly and time-consuming endeavor when an organization doesn’t have the right resources or infrastructure in place, according to a recent report by Chilmark, a Boston-based health care research firm.

The path to reimbursement began to open up in 2020. At the time, the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced its Acute Hospital Care At Home program.

The CMS waiver program was a COVID-19 relief measure that allowed operators to receive payment for delivering care in the home when hospital capacity was stretched extremely thin.

The waiver has been a major game changer.

Currently, there are at least 125 health systems and 290 hospitals across 37 states approved to work under the CMS waiver. This doesn’t include the many operators that are providing care outside of the CMS waiver, of course.

Over the years, operators such as Contessa Health, DispatchHealth and Mount Sinai have positioned themselves as stalwarts in the hospital-at-home movement.

Still, the CMS waiver program was never meant to be permanent, which means that reimbursement could again become uncertain in the future.

In May, the public health emergency officially came to an end, taking with it many of the flexibilities that kept providers afloat during the height of the pandemic. However, the Acute Hospital Care At Home waiver has been extended until 2024.

Aside from cultural and reimbursement barriers, there are other challenges as well.

For one, providers need to have a consistent amount of patients admitted at any given time for their programs to remain sustainable.

Plus, internet and cellular connectivity remains an issue in some remote areas, the Chilmark report noted.

It’s sort of the difference between understanding you need to change, knowing how to change and making the change, because some things are just so hardwired into systems.

Dr. Bruce Leff of Johns Hopkins

The market’s big players

In recent years, companies that have been able to help partners implement or improve their hospital-at-home programs have become beneficiaries of the movement.

One of these companies is Inbound Health — an enablement platform that helps health systems and health plans develop high-acuity at-home care programs, including hospital at home.

“We bring all of the enablement capabilities that health systems need to launch and scale these programs,” Inbound Health CEO Dave Kerwar told HHCN. “That’s the care model, which we’ve now scaled to 6,000 different patients across 350 disease states. It’s a custom developed technology, an analytics platform. A proprietary platform we built specifically for the hospital-at-home and SNF-at-home care models.”

Originally under the Allina Health umbrella, Inbound Health spun off and became a separate entity last year.

For Inbound Health, being a high-acuity care enabler also means bringing supply chain, labor and logistics partners – as well as a machine learning analytics platform and an operations unit – to the table.

The company also helps its partners navigate reimbursement.

“We’ve created contracts with commercial and Medicare Advantage payers, and we have a replicable process we go through to be able to ensure that our health system customers get on contract so that they can be reimbursed for hospital-at-home care episodes,” Kerwar said.

When Inbound Health got started, the company had an average daily census of between five to 10 patients.

“We’ve quintupled that over the last three years,” Kerwar said. “Our average daily census is in the low 50s. We achieved this by creating a care model that was very deeply integrated into the clinical and operating workflow of the health systems we serve.”

More recently, Inbound Health expanded its services to include post-surgical care for general surgery, including orthopedics, bariatrics and hernia. This was a move to address hospitals and health systems’ capacity constraints.

In Kerwar’s view, the biggest question that remains is what the future of reimbursement looks like.

“We fully expect, given the excitement regulators have about this care model, that this will become a permanent payment model under the CMS benefit structure,” he said. “What we don’t know is exactly what it will look like, in terms of rates and requirements.”

Hospital-at-home unicorns

Biofourmis made waves when it surpassed what’s known in the startup world as unicorn status — a valuation at over $1 billion — last year when it raised a $300 million funding round.

The recent evolution of the company has been drastic, according to Kuldeep Singh Rajput, the CEO and founder of Biofourmis.

“We have truly evolved the company into a technology-enabled care delivery company,” he told HHCN. “Our focus is around how we deliver virtual care using a command center. How do we coordinate and deliver enhanced services — phlebotomy, DEM, infusion — all delivered into the patient’s home?”

Biofourmis was founded in Singapore back in 2015. The company’s U.S. offices are headquartered out of Boston.

As a company, Biofourmis has two main verticals. There’s Biofourmis Care, which is focused on care delivery across the continuum — managing post-acute and complex chronic care patients. The company leverages software and data science, along with clinical care teams, to deliver care virtually in the home.

The other segment of the company is focused on the pharmaceutical sector.

In its first year as a company, Biofourmis had seven health system partnerships under its belt. Today, that count is at roughly 60.

Rajput believes that Biofourmis’ value-add is helping its partners streamline their clinical workflows and reduce the fragmentation of point-of-care solutions.

“One of the biggest pain points for health systems is that with all of these digital tools and technologies, there’s a lot of fragmentation in the marketplace,” he said. “Hospital systems are certainly frustrated because of all these point-of-care solutions. They want to work with a partner that enables configuration of different care pathways, configuration of care continuum and acuity on a single platform.”

Infrastructure is still needed

Current Health has also gained strong momentum over the years as more health systems made moves to provide hospital at home, eventually catching the eye of Best Buy (NYSE: BBY). The electronics retail giant purchased the company in 2021.

“Current Health had our best commercial year ever after the acquisition,” Current Health CEO and co-founder Chris McGhee told HHCN. “Best Buy, through Geek Squad, has an entirely unique capability in the market to cross that final mile and go across the threshold into the patient’s home and support that individual with the technology, ensuring that the nurse or the doctor isn’t becoming IT support.”

Based in Boston, Current Health offers a platform equipped with remote care management, telehealth and patient engagement tools to help health care providers conduct at-home care, including hospital-at-home care.

Currently, the company holds upwards of a quarter of the U.S. hospital market, according to McGhee. 

The extra layer of support that Best Buy and Geek Squad offer the company has helped more patients receive care under hospital-at-home programs.

Looking ahead, McGhee believes the infrastructure around hospital at home will need to continue to grow in order for the model to continue progressing. 

“We as a society have spent trillions of dollars building up the infrastructure around the hospital, ​​making it possible within the electronic health record for us to admit a patient to the hospital with one click,” he said. “That is not the case today within the hospital-at-home market. We – as enablers, technology companies, hospitals, health systems and other partners in the space – have to collectively build up that infrastructure and make it easier to enroll and manage patients in these programs.”

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One of these challenges is clinician comfort with the model, according to Ross Armstrong, chief commercial officer at Biofourmis.

“‘Am I going to put my license at risk, if I refer a patient into this model?’” he said during a panel discussion at the Hi2 conference earlier this month. “‘Is somebody going to be there to accept the patient whenever they arrive?’ From a patient perspective, I think conditioning them around this as a high-quality model of care isn’t something we’ve done a good job in.”

The Boston-based Biofourmis is a technology-focused at-home care enabler.

Ross also pointed out that the hospital-at-home space requires advancements in reimbursement mechanisms.

“This was part of the public health emergency, that’s where the waiver came from,” he said. “Yes, it’s been extended to the end of 2024, but the reality is there’s still a lot of uncertainty around it. It hasn’t been extended past that.”

Outside of traditional Medicare, health plans are all over the map when it comes to where they land on reimbursing the model.

Additionally, there are many moving parts when operating a hospital-at-home program.

“The logistics piece isn’t easy,” Armstrong said. “There are 15 different services that have to be delivered in the home. The reality is that the core services of a hospital are not necessarily logistical services. Typically, a hospital doesn’t do all 15 of these services, so you’re creating an ecosystem where you have to manage vendors, and that’s not easy to do.”

Dr. Jared Conley — the assistant director of the health care transformation lab at Massachusetts General Hospital — thinks that the goal should be to reach a point where a home-centered acute health care system is the norm.

“That’s kind of what we’re aiming for,” Conley said during the discussion. “How do you build out those payment models? The Australians have been [doing it] for over a decade. It does make sense to think at least about a payment parity when you see a lot less spent potentially on the post-acute side.”

Boston-based Massachusetts General Hospital is the largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School.

Looking ahead, Lisa Fry, president of value-based care at SCP Health, believes that hospital at home will be a key space to invest in.

“There’s a very large addressable market, it’s largely untapped, so there’s a huge growth potential for that,” she said. “Roughly 30% of the admissions in America could be done as a hospital at home-based admission.”

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Those providers did so, and now they’re wondering what comes next. With regulatory uncertainty moving forward, the hospital-at-home momentum has been put on pause – but not because of patient preference or provider enthusiasm.

“There is over 250 hospitals and 100 health systems across 30-plus states that have now been granted CMS waivers,” Biofourmis CMO and co-founder Maulik Majmudar said on a Moving Health Home webinar Tuesday. “However, it is also clear that a sizable part of the country does not have any offerings today. And more importantly, the number of CMS waivers granted in the last few months has been on a decline.”

The Boston-based Biofourmis is a tech-enabled at-home care enabler. The startup recently reached unicorn status.

Indeed, there are plenty of hospitals that have been approved to provide hospital-level care in the home under the CMS waiver. But many have not begun to do so given the regulatory cliff they face. The Acute Hospital Care at Home waiver is tied to the PHE, which could be ending by the end of this year.

Some health systems have found other mechanisms to provide hospital-at-home care independent from the waiver. There is also introduced legislation that would extend the Acute Hospital Care at Home waiver by two years past the PHE. But nothing yet has been set in stone.

And thus leads to the halted momentum: only two hospitals in the country have treated more than 2,000 patients under the hospital-at-home waiver, according to Majmudar.

“The key point is that there’s a lot of opportunity and room for technology to drive both safe and effective deployment of these programs, but especially in a way that allows us to achieve scale,” he said.

The resulting hesitation from the regulatory holdup has spurned innovation, and also providers’ ability to learn from their mistakes on the fly as they scale.

At the same time, there are health systems – like Advocate Aurora Health, for example – that love the opportunity to provide this care in the home, but not exactly as its allowed right now under the waiver.

“We certainly support the continuation of the waiver,” Dawn Doe, the VP of value-based programs and continuing health at Advocate Aurora Health, also said on the webinar. “But we ask for more flexibility on the structure, and the entities that can provide the program, for us as an integrated health system.”

For instance, as currently constituted, the waiver makes it so Advocate Aurora Health is forced to have its 27 hospitals all have different hospital-at-home programs.

That, Doe said, just doesn’t make sense for Advocate Aurora based on how it’s structured.

“We would like to see reimbursement models that really provide patients the ability to stay in their home while avoiding expensive institutional care,” Doe said. “And that the waivers for telehealth and remote monitoring reimbursement be made permanent. This not only improves patient outcomes, but will also address the strain on staffing resources.”

Home health providers’ involvement

New reimbursement models for hospital at home and staffing elements of the programs are top of mind for all providers.

In order for a new reimbursement vehicle to come out of CMS, the next step would be a demonstration project, which Moving Health Home and others are advocating for.

On the staffing front, there have actually been encouraging signs that employees enjoy working in the confines of a hospital-at-home program.

“These types of models really help us lean into those needs for our nursing staff,” Jordan Holland, the VP of value-based contracting at Compassus, also said on the webinar. “We’re able to attract and engage nurses – to keep them from potentially leaving the industry – through new innovative models like this.”

The Brentwood, Tennessee-based Compassus offers home health care services, plus infusion therapy, palliative care and hospice care. Its network includes about 200 locations across 30 states.

Compassus is an example of a traditional home-based care provider that’s gotten its hands on the hospital-at-home business, a good sign for others that may want to do the same.

To date, the company has cared for over 600 patients in a hospital-at-home model.

“What really keeps me up at night, in particular, is making sure that there’s an appropriate reimbursement model to support this level of staffing and this level of comparative productivity to a typical home health model,” Holland said.

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In total, the company has amassed a $320 million Series D. Intel Capital, the strategic investment arm of chipmaker Intel Corporation, joined the round.

In addition to Intel Capital’s involvement, this funding is especially notable at a time when there’s been a dip in digital health investment. Specifically, there were 329 digital health funding deals in the first half of 2022, compared to 372 deals in the first half of 2021, according to a recent Rock Health report.

“Receiving this additional funding during a downturn in digital health investment is a validation of Biofourmis’ market strength and validates that we are solving pain points for our customers — including health systems and hospitals, payers and providers, and pharma,” Sheeza Hussain, chief commercial officer at Biofourmis, told Home Health Care News in an email.“One of the ways that we differentiate ourselves is through clinical validation; for example, when our solution was used in a major home hospital program, costs were 38% lower and outcomes were 70% better compared with usual care in the hospital.”

Biofourmis was originally founded in Singapore, and the company’s U.S. offices are headquartered out of Boston. The company leverages software and data science, along with clinical care teams, to deliver care virtually in the home.

“Biofourmis is laser-focused on delivering real-time patient insight to clinicians to improve the home-based care experience,” Mark Rostick, vice president and senior managing director at Intel Capital, said in a press statement. “Through edge computing and edge-to-cloud processing capabilities, Biofourmis is redefining the patient and provider journey by leveraging advanced technology.”

Back in April, Biofourmis allocated the $300 million in funds to go toward a number of areas, including fueling its next growth phase, scaling its virtual care offerings and funding clinical trials.

The funds will also go towards driving “high-quality care-at-home across the continuum as well as digital medicine initiatives,” according to a press release.

The company is also growing its care-at home engagements with health systems for hospital-at-home, post-discharge car, and chronic condition management.

Currently, Biofourmis works with all sorts of health systems, including Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Mass General and UCI. The company will be looking at inorganic growth, with an eye towards M&A activity, in the near-term future.

In addition to the funding news, Biofourmis added two new members to its board of directors.

Trevor Fetter — senior lecturer on the faculty of Harvard Business School — has been named to the board. Fetter also led for-profit health system Tenet Healthcare until 2017.

Dr. Sachin H. Jain — president and CEO of SCAN Group and Health Plan — has also been named to the board.

“As we continue to scale, our new board members will be pivotal to our success,” Hussain said. “Our newest board members Trevor Fetter … and Dr. Sachin H. Jain bring deep expertise focused on value-based care, health systems, health plans and value-based care.”

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The company announced Tuesday that it has raised $300 million in Series D.

The news runs counter to CB Insights’ recent findings that health tech funding, mega-round funding and unicorn valuations are down. One takeaway is that technology companies working in the home-based care space are still able to defy recent funding trends.

The investment round was led by growth equity firm General Atlantic. CVS Health (NYSE: CVS) and existing investors also participated in the round. CVS Health’s participation was particularly significant because of the experience the company brings to the table, Kuldeep Singh Rajput, CEO of Biofourmis, told Home Health Care News.

“We always are looking for partners who will enable us to get more access to patients. CVS Health does that,” he said. “Also, so far, we have been focused on hospitals, health systems and pharmas as our customers. We want to go after payers next — and CVS is an entry point.”

Biofourmis was originally founded in Singapore, and the company’s U.S. offices are headquartered out of Boston. The company leverages software and data science, along with clinical care teams, to deliver care virtually in the home.

Currently, the company has roughly 500 employees, including clinicians and data scientists.

Overall, Biofourmis plans to use the new funds to propel its next growth phase. The company plans to spread the funding towards a number of key areas.

A portion of the funds will be earmarked for scaling Biofourmis’ virtual care offerings.

“If you look at the entire continuum, from acute to post-acute to long-term chronic care — the long-term chronic care, or managing complex chronically ill patients virtually, is going to be the next scale and growth for us,” Rajput said. “Our strategy is going to be focusing on becoming a provider. This means moving away from being a turnkey solution provider, or just a technology platform, to being a true provider.”

Rajput noted that Biofourmis is currently licensed in six states and is an in-network provider with a number of health plans. The company is also creating referral networks with Medicare Advantage (MA) plans, risk-bearing primary care entities and health systems in order to co-manage patients and get them referred to its virtual specialty care.

Some of the $300 million will also go toward funding clinical trials.

“One of the differentiators of Biofourmis has been our strong clinical rigor, regulatory rigor and evidence generation,” Rajput said. “We will continue to bolster our position there by focusing on more clinical evidence, ROI generation, within our care-at-home business, as well as, fund clinical trials to advance our digital therapies.”

Again, most of all, the funding would help fuel the company’s growth efforts.

“The reason we have raised $300 million is that part of the capital would be utilized to form strategic partnerships or [advance] M&A efforts with companies that have access to patients, are nationally deployed and can enable us to penetrate more customers faster,” Rajput said.

Aside from advancing partnerships and M&A, the funding will strengthen Biofourmis’ position in the value-based care market.

“With this virtual specialty care, which we are building, for the first 12 to 18 months, we are really focusing on generating baseline data,” Rajput said. “This baseline data would enable us to start building risk-sharing models to eventually get into value-based care. General Atlantic has deep experience backing companies in value-based primary care.” 

Ultimately, Rajput believes Biofourmis’ value-add is its ability to leverage data analytics, drive clinical efficiency and improve clinical outcomes.

“We have shown a reduction in care cost of almost 40% and a 70% reduction in 30-day hospital readmissions,” he said. “We continue to use our advances in data to really focus on driving better outcomes.”

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Now, it feels like just any other part of the at-home care ecosystem.

That means there are a lot more home-based care players by nature, including tech-enabled companies like Biofourmis and Luna, which are trying to help enable hospital-at-home models as part of their business plans.

“We’ve built a foundation of data science, and there’s a lot of interest in the market and need in the market for data scientists, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning,” Sheeza Hussain, the chief commercial officer at Biofourmis, told Home Health Care News. “And Biofourmis has been doing that for six years. During COVID, we’ve ramped up solutions pretty quickly to help address COVID challenges in regards to providing care.”

Originally founded in Singapore, Biofourmis’ U.S. offices are headquartered out of Boston. It uses predictive analytics to provide “end-to-end” solutions for patients in nearly any location, “harnessing the power of hospital-grade wearables and patient-centric tools.”

The company currently has about 400 employees, including clinicians and 35 data scientists.

Biofourmis has been working with governments across the world to address COVID-19-related health care challenges, Hussain said. But in the U.S, it has made its mark through partnerships with the likes of the Boston-based Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Minnesota-based Mayo Clinic to help ramp up their remote patient monitoring and hospital-at-home efforts.

“The CMS reimbursement for hospital-at-home has certainly been a catalyst for interest, but we have meetings with multiple hospitals and health systems everyday that are looking at hospital-at-home and remote patient monitoring,” Hussain said. “Some of them are going after the CMS waiver, of course. But what continues to be a theme is that they’re looking for a partner who can help them in a number of areas. Yes, acute-level care and hospital-at-home, but also post-discharge and even chronic care, an area that we’ve gotten into most recently.”

CMS’ “Acute Hospital Care at Home” waiver increased the model’s prevalence, with the underlying accelerator being the short-term need for hospital-bed availability.

But the second underlying accelerator was a more long-term one: the recognition that the home would be an increasingly important site of care.

“We have customers saying to us, we’re absolutely going to go after the CMS waiver and take advantage of that opportunity,” Hussain said. “But they see this as something that they’re going to have to invest in to be able to continue to provide care for the populations they serve moving forward.”

Biofourmis has other partnerships with health systems and hospitals across the country as well, though Hussain didn’t give an exact client number. The company believes its continuous monitoring capabilities – as well as its tech, AI and data foundation – give it a leg up.

“I think that’s where you need to look out for us,” Hussain said.

Other providers in the mix

The Rocklin, California-based Luna is a physical therapy provider that partners with health systems and physician groups. Its tech-enabled model is live in 31 markets today, and it’s hoping to expand to 16 or 17 more in the near future.

That expansion is being driven by interest from health systems looking to reach patients in their homes.

“It’s our goal at some point over the course of the next several quarters to be aligned with a health system partner in each of the markets in which we operate,” Ryan Lewis, the head of health system sales at Luna, told HHCN. “Then, we can really build upon this moniker of hospital-at-home [to also include] rehab at home. … Our focus is being a leader in on-demand, at-home physical therapy.”

After conducting an analysis, Luna identified that 70% of patients do not end up completing their plans of care when they’re going to a clinic. In other words, they’re not getting the proper benefits from physical therapy.

The second part of the analysis revealed that nearly 90% of those patients could be served in the home.

“When they don’t get that care, it leads to a lot of downstream, ineffective costs for the health systems and for the health care industry as a whole,” Lewis said.

Luna’s platform allows it to match patients with all sorts of needs – in all sorts of places – with the right physical therapist. The “Uber” or “DoorDash” of physical therapy, as the company puts it.

“The pandemic has been an accelerant for health systems to explore creative and innovative ways to deliver care outside of the health systems,” Lewis said. “So what I think we’ve seen is this intersection of health systems who are recognizing the need to expand outside of the proverbial four walls of the health systems, especially as they close facilities for things like elective procedures.”

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