My mother was struggling to breathe. The lights on the hospital monitor flashed red as her oxygen levels dropped. The room filled with critical care nurses who prepared her for intubation. She was sedated into a medically induced coma and placed on a ventilator to support her weak and infected lungs.
A story that has become frighteningly common during the COVID-19 pandemic was my reality five years ago, as my mother battled Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) — a life-threatening lung condition she had developed while immunocompromised from her cancer treatments. She would spend four months in ICU room #14 until thankfully, her lungs recovered and she was discharged from the hospital to return home.
While overwhelmingly relieved to have my mother back home, we were unprepared for the challenges that lay ahead as she made the transition to home-based care. My mother required a range of medical equipment, supplies, and services to complete her recovery — liters of portable oxygen, mobility support, ostomy and wound care supplies, and physical and respiratory therapy.
We soon realized that coordinating and delivering her care would be a full-time job. All in, we worked with nearly a dozen local healthcare providers to find the resources she required. There was no guidance — in identifying the equipment best suited for her clinical needs, educating us on proper care, or navigating her insurance benefits. After weeks of delays, thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket costs, and countless hours negotiating with local providers, we were appalled when faulty equipment and unreliable patient support led us right back to the hospital. We ended up in the place she had worked so hard to leave.
After my mother’s eventual recovery, I returned to work leading care innovation at Oscar Health, a technology-forward insurer, where I saw the same uphill battles managing home-based care — this time, from the perspective of clinicians and insurers. While healthcare providers across the country are transitioning more care towards the home in line with value-based care, a fragmented and uncoordinated landscape of home-based care resources frequently leads to delayed discharges and readmissions to the hospital. I often found myself sitting with our care management nurses at 9 o’clock on a Friday night to coordinate a member’s discharge only to find that, due to unreliable medical equipment and services, our member had to remain in the hospital through the weekend.
With these experiences it became clear to me that we can, and must, do better.
Introducing Tomorrow Health
Together with my friend and colleague, Gabe Flateman (formerly Co-Founder and CTO of Casper), we’ve built Tomorrow Health to be that solution. We are a technology-driven home healthcare company changing the way that individuals and families manage care. By combining technology-enabled operations with personalized service, we curate the home healthcare products, supplies and support best suited for the clinical needs of patients, deliver directly to their doorstep, and navigate insurance benefits on their behalf. We partner with insurers and care providers to coordinate and deliver home-based care. Most importantly, our Care Advocates provide end-to-end guidance and support — working on behalf of the patients we serve as we would for our own family members.
We are part of an important national shift towards care in the home. Today, 90% of seniors elect to age in place rather than in a nursing home. At a time when healthcare bills are the leading cause of personal bankruptcy, the home is the lowest cost and highest value setting of care. But in the context of COVID-19, the need for home-based care has become even more acute. Millions of Americans, including seniors and at-risk individuals are homebound, in need of care but unable to leave their homes. Americans are deferring treatment to avoid hospitalization, while many of the most acute COVID-19 patients are being discharged early to free up beds, left to complete their recovery at home.
Our team
Towards this effort, we’ve brought together an exceptional team, combining deep healthcare services knowledge with technology and operations expertise. Our team encompasses experience in building healthcare operations at national scale at Oscar and Collective Health, designing world-class data architecture to power billions of transactions at Stripe, orchestrating technology-enabled logistics at Casper and crafting healthcare policy at the state and federal levels.
We’re grateful to be backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Box Group and Rainfall Ventures, and individuals including C-level executives from Flatiron Health, Quartet, Stripe, Massachusetts Medicaid, and the World Bank. We also welcome industry advisors including Trevor Fetter (former CEO of Tenet Healthcare), Trent Haywood (former Chief Medical Officer of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association), Beth Bierbower (former segment President at Humana), and Phyllis Yale (Advisory Partner at Bain and board member at BCBS Massachusetts, Bristol-Myers Squibb and DaVita Health).
Together, we’ve built the infrastructure to navigate the vagaries of the healthcare and insurance ecosystems, such that for individuals and families, we can provide the seamless experience they deserve.
The journey ahead
If you, a loved one, or a patient you serve is in need of home healthcare resources, visit us at tomorrowhealth.com If you are an insurer or care provider working to enable innovative care delivery solutions for your members, partner with us. If you are a healthcare visionary, interested in transforming the next frontier of healthcare at home, join us.