Yet another company is tasking itself with taking on oncology care outside of brick-and-mortar settings.
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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