Reimagine Care, an in-home cancer care enabler, has raised $25 million. The funding round was led by Santé Ventures, Martin Ventures and LRVHealth.
The money will help Reimagine expand its patient care team, launch a virtual care center and enhance its platform. But ultimately, the company hopes to be a trailblazer of the next frontier in home-based care, CEO and co-founder Aaron Gerber told Home Health Care News.
“We think the the level of capital that we raised – and the quality of the investors – would suggest that there is a strong belief … that now is the time for this to happen,” Gerber said. “There have been really good programs that do supportive cancer therapy both virtually and in the home. Huntsman [Cancer Institute] is a good example. But nobody has done this at scale. And that’s really what we’re here to do.”
Nashville, Tennessee-based Reimagine provides technology-enabled services to health systems and oncologists to deliver home-centered, value-based cancer care.
The company’s goal is to take in-home cancer care from being a niche service offering in the U.S. to ubiquitous.
Outside of the U.S., in-home cancer care is quite common – particularly in Europe and Australia. But certain barriers have kept it from growing in popularity domestically. Organizations like Reimagine are trying to hurdle those barriers, especially since COVID-19 has disrupted care and screenings for patients.
Announced this past July, another example is a Children’s Oncology Group and Signify Health (NYSE: SGFY) partnership that aims to take care of adolescent cancer patients in the home.
Gerber and his co-founder had the idea for Reimagine dating back eight years. But certain tools, such as virtual care, were not advanced enough at the time for the idea to come to fruition.
“Some of those pieces that make it possible today include [the adoption] of virtual care, patient and provider adoption of hospital at home and value-based care models,” Gerber said. “It’s never been a question of if this was going to happen, it was just a question of when. And we think a number of the pieces that are necessary to make this successful are now in place.”
Other strategic investors joined in on the funding round as well, including: the CU Healthcare Innovation Fund, a strategic healthcare fund affiliated with the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, and City of Hope, a National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center.
Close to 70% of health care executives agree that home-centered oncology care is gaining traction and represents a “real opportunity for growth,” according to the press release. But more than anything, it’s a better experience for the patients, Gerber said.
Cancer care outside of the home often includes long and regular commutes. It also results in a lot of indirect costs to patients, according to Gerber, including parking and paying for a caregiver to make the trip with them. Additionally, going to the hospital exposes immunocompromised individuals to viruses they could avoid in the home.
“It also enhances our ability to proactively manage some of the expected symptoms from treatment,” Gerber said. “For example, chemotherapy patients will frequently experience nausea, diarrhea and vomiting. … If we can anticipate those issues early, and then use the technology of our virtual care center, we can send resources to the home to start an IV to hydrate the patient and provide antibiotics for subsequent infections. We can keep them from going to the emergency room. Because when a cancer patient shows up in the emergency room, more often than not, they end up being admitted.”
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