Tomorrow Health, a pioneering startup in home-based care, is aiming to lead the charge in revolutionizing patient wellness.

Under the leadership of co-founder and CEO Vijay Kedar, the company is dedicated to reshaping the patient experience through cutting-edge technology and strategic partnerships.

Tomorrow Health partners with providers of home-based care, home medical equipment (HME) suppliers, health plans and other stakeholders in all 50 states. Its business model revolves around solving many of the pain points associated with moving care into the home, such as equipment logistics.

In 2024, Kedar has his sights set on transforming home-based care with a digital revolution, targeting operational inefficiencies and driving superior patient outcomes.

Kedar sat down with HME Business (HMEB) to talk about the company’s growth goals, converting the industry from analog to digital, home health’s shift to value-based care and more.

HMEB: For the HMEB folks who maybe haven’t read about Tomorrow Health before, could you provide a business overview?

Kedar: Our vision at Tomorrow has remained unchanged from the early days – and that is, ultimately, to restore the home as the patient’s primary place of care. We do that by providing technology to coordinate the breadth of home-based care that patients need, to improve reliability, efficiency, value and the coordination of care that patients receive.

When we first started the business, we believed it was really important to own the patient journey, and we began as a provider of medical equipment, supplies and certain services. We built out technology components that enabled us to digitize otherwise manual processes and really augment the efficiency and the value that we can deliver to patients directly.

And in doing so, we saw the opportunity to leverage that technology to support other stakeholders in the ecosystem. To support referring physicians, to support health-plan partners looking to manage this ecosystem and, critically, to support other suppliers in the space, and other home-based care providers. Increasingly, we were getting quite a bit of interest and demand from other home-based care providers looking to leverage some of the technology that we built to serve their patients in a more holistic and more efficient way.

From that lens, we really evolved our business with the primary focus of being a partner to home-based care providers as they look to operate their businesses more efficiently and deliver greater value to patients. That is our primary focus today. We partner with stakeholders from across the ecosystem. That means national, regional and provider-sponsored health plans that are seeking support to coordinate and manage the breadth of home-based care that they deliver to their members. We partner with referral sources, health systems and outpatient provider organizations to provide technology to digitize their systems and processes around home-based care. We work with a range of home-based care providers: large nationals, small mom-and-pops and regionals, to provide them technology to grow their businesses to serve a wider patient panel — but also to operate more efficiently while doing so.

Collectively, the outcomes that we’ve been able to drive have been pretty meaningful. We’ve cut down the time it takes patients to get home-based care by over 80%. We’ve cut down the time and the operational burden for clinicians to order and manage home-based care by over 50%.

If you look back at 2023, what were some of the main highlights for the company?

Well, 2023 was a banner year for us in a number of different ways. First, we expanded to new markets as we grew our partnerships with payers and with provider organizations. We expanded the breadth of home-based care provider partners that we work with. We built a suite of technology capabilities to really enhance the value we brought to each of our stakeholders, and that was integrating more deeply with provider organizations. That was really augmenting our back-end clinical rules, infrastructure and, in an exciting way, leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning to augment the capabilities and the efficiency of the tools and the processes we can offer to our customers.

We grew our team. We added 50 new team members across the organization in all areas: technology, on the commercial side and operations. And we were able to continue to harness the value of our community, which we think is a really important piece.

Looking at 2024, what would you say that Tomorrow Health’s primary goals and objectives are, and how do those fit your ultimate vision for the company?

Our vision is to restore the home as a patient’s primary place of care. We endeavor to serve 100 million patients and families for home-based health care and to create a platform where a patient does not need to work with a dozen different home-based care providers, does not need a full-time caregiver to be picking up the phone calling and coordinating, does not run the risk of falling through the cracks.

We want to be a company that can work to digitally and seamlessly connect patients with some of the highest quality home-based care providers in the country, to provide coordination and ensure that they receive reliable and efficient care. And critically, that it’s embedded within their insurance benefits to be reliable and affordable. Most of all, our mission is to keep patients healthy and safe at home in a way in which everybody in the ecosystem wins.

So 2024 will chart that path in a couple of different ways. Our core focus is around growth. This year we’ll be expanding with new partners that we’re really excited about, some of which we’ll be able to announce over the coming months. And continuing to drive really tangible and repeatable value for our partners.

We’re continuing to expand the breadth of our platform, and we’re continuing to deepen our technology to augment its value for our stakeholders. I would expect growth in the platform, in the technology and an entrance into new markets through new partnerships across the country.

We’re continuing to grow the team. We’re hiring for a number of exciting roles across the company.

When you think about those goals and objectives, what would you identify as some of the biggest things that stand in the way? What are some of the biggest challenges that Tomorrow Health is going to have to navigate?

I think one of the biggest ones is something that our industry has been facing writ large, which is the transition from analog to digital. There’s no question.

A wide breadth of how home-based health care is delivered today is still on the back of incredibly rote, manual, inefficient processes. These are processes and bottlenecks that help no one. They drive increasing operating costs for providers and suppliers. They drive inefficient capacity for physicians and hospital partners looking to coordinate the transition to home-based care effectively, and they drive delays in patients getting care.

As a result, they push people to go back to the hospital, which drives up the cost for insurers, risk-bearing entities and everyone involved. So it’s been a big focus of ours, to really accelerate the digitization of this ecosystem. It requires building purpose-built technology for each of the stakeholders that I referenced. Technology that changes the way they operate, but also critically, meets them where they are today.

I think the other thing I would say is, when we look at our customers and the home-based care providers that we serve and that we support, they’re facing a myriad of challenges right now. Reimbursement cuts, rising underlying unit costs due to inflation, threats of consolidation in different areas — which, for a lot of organizations, can present challenges. Another thing that’s universal and a challenge across health care is staffing shortages.

All of those factors for many of our customers drive significant barriers to growth and drive margin compression. Again, that’s really where we see the critical opportunity for technology. We want to enable our partners in this industry to really enter a new phase of growth and care delivery that is built on digital enablement and efficiency. We think that’s going to drive the benefit of organizations, providers and patients alike.

Are there any specific opportunities you’re excited about for this year?

We have a value here at Tomorrow Health, and that is to change the system from within. We don’t really believe in being an industry disrupter that disrupts how things work from the outside. We want to be a partner to organizations that are doing great work in this space and help them to drive change together from the inside. I think that’s where new opportunities will continue to come, beyond those that I mentioned.

Looking at the HME market overall, what are some of the big-picture trends that you’re keyed in on?

When we look at the broader home-based care landscape and what it takes to drive a 10x shift in the breadth of patients receiving health care at home — as opposed to in a facility or another post-acute setting — we continue to believe there’s an extraordinary opportunity for HME providers to play a pivotal role in driving that.

It’s an industry that supports truly life-saving equipment and supplies for patients across all business lines and acuity types — those transitioning from intense care in the hospital to those managing ongoing chronic conditions. HME touches all of that. We think there’s a huge opportunity for the industry to play a big role in enabling this holistic shift of care to the home and to transform what has been the perception of this industry by other stakeholders as a commoditized space into one that is integral to an integrated care model in the home – and to more efficient care delivery, more broadly.

Fundamentally, we believe that as we look at the most effective ways to deliver care to patients, there should be more HME in the highest-value ways, not less.

To bring it home, a couple of trends that I would highlight: One is the shift to value-based care. Towards that end, we think HME can play a bigger role in reducing the total cost of care by enabling more seamless transitions of care to the home and preventing downstream readmissions. This will require providers to think a little differently about their operations and how they drive value. It’s going to require partnerships that we facilitate for providers with health plans and risk-bearing organizations to be compensated for the value they drive.

The second trend I would point to is reimbursement challenges. This will continue to be seen across the industry as government and commercial payers look to drive their cost trend down. There will continue to be pressure on providers and suppliers to do more with less.

The third trend I would point to is the opportunity to capitalize on expansion and growth into new business lines. We work with suppliers all the time that have been operating under fee-for-service Medicare, and are looking at opportunities to expand and shift their payer mix. Similarly, in other categories, we see a lot of opportunity for suppliers to expand and grow their businesses and patient panels through new payer partnerships and increased order volume, which is something we help unlock for our suppliers.

You previously said HME suppliers are critical to shift care into the home that’s often overlooked by payers. Do you think the tides are starting to change a little bit or do you still find that to be the case?

I think payers and risk-bearing entities are starting to wake up to the opportunity. That’s a big part of the mindset shift that we’ve been working to catalyze with our health plan partners: to recognize the value, not just the cost, that can be driven by HME and DME.

The focus is really going to come down to how they manage care in a more high-value way. They’re starting to see that they can’t do it the same way as before. We’re seeing them start to garner a lot more focus and interest in creating these types of value-based opportunities and harnessing the potential of this ecosystem.

The reality is, for most suppliers — even the big ones, but especially those operating at a regional level – it’s not easy to facilitate those conversations with health plans. One customer of ours told me, “Getting a payer on the phone is like calling the White House and asking to speak with President Biden.” That’s the type of connectivity we look to foster through our platform. We see a shifting of the tide, and we aim to enable a new dimension and a new set of opportunities for this industry.