Tomorrow Health & Its Novel Roadmap to Become the Amazon of Home Healthcare Equipment
Vijay Kedar and Gabriel Flateman created Tomorrow Health, known as the Amazon of home health care equipment, in 2018. The company is headquartered in New York City. The platform has developed considerably since its beginnings, and as of April 2022, it was available in 25 states with Medicare Part B, from South Central to the Northeast region include: Texas, Washington, and Michigan. Tomorrow Health is considered as the trusted partner for high-quality home-based care, it has partnership with more than 125 top health plans and hospital systems.
Tomorrow Health offers a platform that curates the home healthcare goods, supplies, and support most fitted for patients’ clinical requirements, delivers straight to the patients’ doorstep, and navigates insurance benefits on their behalf by combining tech operations with personal service. In addition, the technology-driven home healthcare organization intends to handle the logistics including payers, insurance coverage, and referring providers. University Village, Fairview Health Services, Country Place Living, and Connect Health are among Tomorrow Health’s main rivals.
The company adheres to its key beliefs throughout the process of formation and development: “fight like hell for patients.” Thanks to this set of core values together with the public’s help, the team will be able to scale the mission to touch many lives. Not only that, but the Tomorrow Health team has foresight, including having an outsized effect on enhancing home-based care, making it critical for them to come to work with compassion, teamwork, and strong devotion to the individuals they serve.
Tomorrow Health is also impressive as a young start-up but has received many prestigious awards. Specifically, in 2021, even though it is just a young startup, it is honored to be on Business Insider’s list of 23 of the most promising healthcare startups as well as being one of the 150 fastest-growing companies on the Rocket List. That same year, the company’s leader, Co-founder and CEO Vijay Kedar, was named a “Top 25 Consumer Executives of 2021” by The Healthcare Technology Report.
A Start-up Raises from the Desire to Solve the Mother’s Miserable Experience
Vijay Kedar spent several years prior to Tomorrow Health working to build Oscar Health, a leading care management strategy and operation that supports chronically sick patients through home-based treatments. He was instrumental in molding the company’s success by implementing strategy, finance initiatives, network growth, medical management, regulatory affairs, and other responsibilities. He graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Business School and worked in Private Equity at Goldman Sachs for a few years before making his way to Oscar.
Vijay Kedar claimed the inspiration for Tomorrow Health came from caring for his cancer-stricken mother. Her lungs healed after 4 months of hard labor in the ICU battling life-threatening lung cancer, and she was discharged from the hospital to come back home. When she returned home, she is in need of a variety of medical equipment, supplies, and services to complete her rehabilitation, including liters of portable oxygen, mobility assistance, ostomy, and wound care supplies, and physical and respiratory therapy. It was only then that he and his mother recognized they were unprepared for the obstacles of transitioning to home-based care and knew that organizing and delivering her care would be a difficult task.
After his mother’s recovery, he went to work as a care innovation leader at Oscar Health, a tech-forward insurer, where he found the same uphill struggles managing home-based care. He witnessed durable medical equipment (DME) suppliers that were sincerely dedicated to patient care but were hampered by operational issues, bandwidth limits, and profit pressure. It became evident that there was a big opportunity for tech-driven innovation to benefit suppliers and patients in the DME space. Ultimately, this is what drove Vijay Kedar to move swiftly to resolve this pending issue.
This personal experience, coupled with his prior work leading care management strategies as an executive at Oscar Health, inspired him to drive change in the home health care system. Kedar found his schoolmate, Gabriel Flateman (formerly Co-Founder and CTO of Casper) and together the two founded Tomorrow Health. After that, they also quickly found like-minded teammates, as well as strong investors to join hands in the continuous development of Tomorrow Health.
What Possibilities Did the Early Challenges Present for the Young Start-up
According to Kedar, inventing in health care necessitates awareness and recognition of the industry’s complexity. Besides, because they had to rebuild the health care infrastructure so it would take them a lot of time in the research process. Collectively, the problems Tomorrow Health faces include establishing a full-stack home-based care provider, entailing hundreds of regulatory licensing applications, selecting where to build and where to partner, and continuous learning on the best methods to support their patients and their partners.
Despite the challenges, Tomorrow Health is grateful to have closely aligned investors and advisers at Andreessen Horowitz, BoxGroup, and Rainfall Ventures who have supported them at every step of their journey. Their consultants, including Trent Haywood (former chief medical officer at the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association) and Beth Bierbower (former segment president at Humana), assisted in informing their insurance partnerships and the best methods to maximize value for their partners. Trevor Fetter (former CEO of Tenet Healthcare) gave vital advise on leadership during a period of significant uncertainty as the COVID-19 pandemic began.
Overcoming these challenges, the leaders have positioned Tomorrow Health to be America’s trusted platform for delivering and coordinating home health care. Over the next several years, they plan to grow nationwide, form new partnerships with industry stakeholders, and broaden their capability set, which allows them to cover a broader range of patient requirements. They seek to expand their workforce in different sectors such as information technology, operations, business development, and care advocacy.
Furthermore, they hope to be a collaborator and advocate for millions of patients and families while they manage chronic diseases or get over surgery at home. While their presence, staff, and skills will expand, they want to keep the same ethos and core values that have guided them, aiming to develop the health care experience they believe patients deserve, constantly stick to the mission, and treating every patient as if they were their own family members.
Notable Milestones in Becoming a Rising Name in the Home-Based Healthcare Industry
Kedar stated in a blog post introducing Tomorrow Health that one of the reasons he recognized a need for this company is the rising proportion of Americans who want to “age in place” at home rather than seek out an assisted living facility. Making the decision to seek for financial investment is an appropriate method for achieving this aim In just over a year, Tomorrow Health has gone through 3 rounds of fundraising and raised up to $92.5 million. In particular, the company successfully raised $7.5 million in April 2020 following the seed round lead by Andreessen Horowitz. A year later, the startup has scored a $25 million in Series A round of funding with participation from Obvious Ventures and BoxGroup. Just 2 months later, Tomorrow Health continued to participate in Series B funding and raise $60 Million.
When being asked about using this new $60 million investment, Tomorrow Health CEO Vijay Kedar announced that the company wanted to “double down” on its cooperation with the HME industry. “This funding is a demonstration of how valuable the HME industry is and will be toward transforming health care overall and that’s what investors are motivated by,” he said. “Our focus and our intention is to be the best possible partner to HME suppliers big and small and to enable them to fulfill their strategic goals as a business.”
In addition to requesting a large investment, Tomorrow Health wowed the press when it announced collaborations with Geisinger Health Plan in Pennsylvania, another big health plan, in order to provide additional services to patients at home. “Tomorrow Health is helping fill a void for Geisinger” Vijay Kedar said in an interview. The partnership, which began in January, came at an appropriate moment, as a COVID-19 rise raised the need for respirators, mobility equipment, hospital beds at home, and other equipment. “With Geisinger, our focus has been on supporting those needs,” Kedar said. “We have been able to support thousands and thousands of patients.”
Which Lessons That the Leader’s Not Hesitant to Share
In an interview, Gabriel Flateman, co-founder of Tomorrow Health, was once asked about things related to his entrepreneurial journey. He was also questioned about giving advice that he thought would be helpful to other businesses and entrepreneurs. And here are his answers which are worth referencing.
#1. Don’t Underestimate Motivating Coworkers
Flateman said that the most important thing for a business is to get everyone working towards a common objective and keep it up. He advised leaders to pay attention to even the smallest details and make sure that all the details create excitement for employees. The employees need to feel that they themselves are an integral part of the development of the whole process.
#2. Making Progress Every Single Day Is of the Essence
Flateman emphasizes the importance of constant effort, no matter if it’s small or often overlooked. He also gave examples that those efforts could be replying to a short email or spending just 15 minutes a day brainstorming an issue. “It’s crucial to keep moving forward, no matter how small the progress is” said Gabriel Flateman.
The Bottom Lines
Vijay Kedar once shared that Tomorrow Health was founded on the first-hand experience he had with home-based care. Therefore, he and his teammates always uphold the practical values that the company can bring to their customers, so that they are always motivated to constantly develop themselves in particular and the whole organization in general. This is something that is not only important to Tomorrow Health’s people, but is also worth learning for all other leaders.
