In the meantime, Canopy – a manufacturer of wearable safety technology for health care workers – has announced an expansion of its platform to help with those plans and to keep home-based caregivers safe.

Specifically, the company has launched Canopy Go, which is geared toward direct care workers visiting client or patient homes. 

Founded in 2019 and based in Palo Alto, California, Canopy designs technology to maintain the safety and security of health care workers.

“For the last five years, we have focused primarily on protecting staff inside the four walls of a hospital,” Canopy Founder and CEO Shan Sinha told Home Health Care News. “Canopy Protect works with a complete package of hardware and software that we deploy as part of an end-to-end service that includes all the work required to roll this program out to all staff.”

According to Sinha, the company is expanding rapidly. In the last four and a half years, it has grown to protect 200,000 people nationwide.

“We’ve learned, in working with our customers, that there is a huge amount of anxiety when caregivers go outside the four walls of an organization,” Sinha said. “People feel disconnected when entering environments where they have little to no control and are out of their organization’s security range.”.

Finding a need to expand outside the confines of the hospital building, the company introduced Canopy Go for home care workers.

“Canopy Go is a set of capabilities built on top of the Canopy Protect platform and deployed at a scale that gives home care workers a way to use a wearable button to gain access to support if they encounter a dangerous situation,” Sinha said.

Pressing the safety button puts caregivers in touch with a network of dispatchers who connect them to local law enforcement and facilitate a coordinated response with organization security.

“With a click of the button, the staff member’s ID and exact GPS location are discretely shared with the security team, enabling timely and effective intervention,” he explained.

Sinha sees an indirect benefit of caregiver retention for those using technology like Canopy Go.

“It becomes a strategic tool for leaders to invest in their workforce and to use in recruiting efforts,” he said. “It’s a symbol of all the ways that health care organizations are protecting and supporting staff and gives them a reason to believe in the organization they work for.”

Further, Sinha sees wearable technology as enhancing patient care by reassuring caregivers that their organization is always in contact and monitoring their safety and security.

“Wearable safety is almost like another level of personal protective equipment (PPE),” Sinha said. “Every health care worker will wear something like this in the future. Individuals will show up to work with much less anxiety that they might encounter an incident, and by reducing this stress, they can focus on caring for their patient.”

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This time it’s Canopy Health, which launched out of stealth Thursday, having already raised $13 million. The funding round was led by GSR Ventures, with Samsung, Next and UpWest also contributing. 

An “intelligent care platform” for oncology, Canopy works with oncology practices to care for patients when they are outside of the hospital. The company is already working with over 50,000 cancer patients in the U.S., according to founder and CEO Lavi Kwiatkowsky. 

The Palo Alto, California-based company enables physicians to interact with their patients continuously and proactively. Its platform includes a suite of electronic health record-integrated tools to “help cancer centers continuously engage with their patients, streamline clinical workflows and capture new reimbursement streams.”

“There’s a lot of big things that are happening in the oncology market,” Kwiatkowsky told Home Health Care News. “Firstly, there’s value-based care. And also, changes in how health care is being reimbursed in general.”

Canopy has partnerships with organizations such as the Highlands Oncology Group, the Cancer Specialists of North Florida, Northwest Medical Specialities and the Los Angeles Cancer Network, among others.

As Canopy pointed out in its press release, up to 50% of patient symptoms and treatment side effects are undetected in cancer patients. Due to that, there are avoidable hospital visits, unnecessarily poor experiences, and most importantly, a worse chance at survival.

All of this has been exacerbated during the pandemic, as patients have had less access to care and generally been less willing to travel to brick-and-mortar institutions.

This is reflected by the amount of steam the concept of in-home cancer care has gained during the pandemic. Previously viewed as unfeasible, treating patients in the home has become the mission of a slew of new companies.

In July, the Children’s Oncology Group teamed up with Signify Health (NYSE: SGFY) to bring cancer care into the home. In late January, Reimagine Care – a startup in-home cancer care enabler – announced that it had raised $25 million in a Series A.

“I really do think we’re going to see more cancer care in the home, and I think it’s part of a larger trend, where more and more specific disease categories will see additional home-based resources brought to bear for their patient populations,” Marc Rothman, the CMO of Signify, told HHCN last year.

There’s clearly interest from investors as well. Reimagine’s funding round was led by Santé Ventures, Martin Ventures and LRVHealth. For Canopy, GSR Ventures – which has a portfolio filled with companies at the intersection of health care and technology – led the round. But Samsung’s investment, as it moves away from its traditional mobile devices, is also notable.

“We have been early believers in the need for software to enable proactive patient care,” Justin Norden, partner at GSR Ventures, said in a statement. “Canopy stood out as a leader through its rigorous focus on improving clinical outcomes, and, notably, significant improvements can already be seen in thousands of patients. We look forward to the next phase of this partnership as Canopy reaches new heights in helping deliver real-world, positive outcomes to patients and their families.”

As Kwiatkowsky explained, with oncology care, the incentives are actually more aligned between patient and provider than in almost any other type of care.

“There’s something very unique about oncology because the incentives are aligned,” he said. “When you’re talking about diabetes or obesity, for instance, the doctor wants something, but the patient doesn’t always want the same thing, right? It’s really hard to get people to comply. But in oncology, all the incentives align so beautifully. Patients want to do their very best to get better. And the physicians, the doctors, they want the same for the patient.”

Canopy’s platform has a 86% rate for patient enrollment with the providers it partners with, as well as an 88% engagement rate and a 90% retention rate for patients at the six-month mark. Meanwhile, it has reduced ER visits and in-patient admissions, according to the company.  

Its goal by the end of the year is to move from a semi-personalized model – where it’s at right now – to a completely personalized one. As it does that, it believes it will see even better outcomes for its patients, which will ideally lead to more business.

“There was a lot of resistance when we first got started before COVID,” Kwiatkowsky said. “I don’t think the resistance was about the patient’s actually resisting as much as people were just used to doing things in a certain way. But today, people believe [in the model] more. … The perceptions of the model changed more than the actual reality did, in my opinion.”

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