Shivani Stadvec, Tomorrow Health’s new Head of Marketing, shares what brought her to the under-serviced home health space after her time at Flatiron Health
There’s a lot to say about the home — home is where the heart is, what makes a house a home, home is wherever I’m with you. (“Song lyrics + home” returns 6.6B search results on Google search). Up until last year, I didn’t really connect with the concept of home. I moved a few times growing up without a connection to a childhood home. As an adult, I signed a new lease on an apartment nearly every year for almost 10 years. There were a few comforts that I kept on each move — some coffee table coasters from a trip to New Orleans, art from my great-aunt’s collection, knick knacks from my parents house — but at the end of the day they were all just decor.
Like many of us in 2020, the concept of home took on a new meaning for me. In March of last year, I was calling home a cozy apartment in Brooklyn with my husband, Andy. I was six months pregnant and fully in the “nesting” phase. I spent Saturdays assembling furniture, tossing all possessions that didn’t bring me joy, and imagining what life would be like with a newborn.
Suddenly and startlingly, the concept of home became something very different. Stay at home orders went into effect the weekend of our planned baby shower. The hospital down the street gave us a haunting 24/7 ring of ambulances, and we started hearing news of friends and family getting sick. I was forced to understand how important it was to have a place to retreat. Home was the only place that felt safe, calm, and somewhat normal. Watching TV on the couch was a (privileged) escape from the reality around us.
At the same time I was voraciously reading — the doom scroll of 2020. Stories about patients in the hospital not getting a chance to say goodbye to their loved ones. Stories about clinicians providing patient care in ways they never thought they would imagine. I was working in marketing in cancer care at Flatiron Health, a mission driven health tech organization. Oncology practices with high-risk patients were (and still are!) working night and day to ensure patients got the treatment they needed safely. Healthcare and technology got creative — adoption spiked in telehealth visits and previously skeptical providers were learning about patients’ social determinants of health and support systems through virtual visits.
Healthcare was changing rapidly — how it was delivered, who had access to it, and where it was administered. Home became where many patients and families, including me, felt the most safe. As we move past the pandemic, we see the effects of this shift — home has new meaning and importance for so many. This felt like the perfect time to embrace Tomorrow Health’s mission — to restore care to the home.
Professionally, I now have the opportunity to work with driven leaders from industry leading companies (Oscar Health, Amazon, Warby Parker, WeWork, Uber, and more) and make an impact in a space that is largely ignored in healthcare today. Even with 10+ years working on technology and systems in healthcare, I haven’t scratched the surface in understanding the ecosystem of home health, and I was intrigued by the challenge of operationalizing something that sounds so obvious in practice — the home is the highest value and lowest cost care setting.
The pandemic forced us to answer some of these questions. There is innovation slowly and surely across the technology ecosystem — but home health is still a new frontier. We’ve seen a rise in telehealth, patient engagement technology, and home care services. But as of today, no company has managed to create a platform that aligns incentives for patients, providers, payers, and medical equipment suppliers. Our fundamental problem with healthcare in the United States is misaligned incentives. I joined Tomorrow Health to change the system from within. I encourage you to join me.