Prominent financial and strategic investors lead funding round focused on expanding technology-enabled services platform to transform cancer care delivery for patients, providers, and payers
Reimagine Care, an innovative provider of technology-enabled services that supports oncologists in delivering high-quality, home-centered, value-based cancer care, today announced it has completed a $25 million capital raise led by Santé Ventures, Martin Ventures, and LRVHealth. The funding will be leveraged to further develop and commercialize the company’s first-of-its kind technology-enabled services platform, launch the virtual care center, and expand the patient care team.
Several strategic investors joined the financing round including the CU Healthcare Innovation Fund, a strategic healthcare fund affiliated with the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus; City of Hope, a National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center and founding member of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network; McKesson Ventures; and Sable Investments.
“The potential for home-centered cancer care has been obvious for some time, but Reimagine Care is the first company to fully take on this important clinical and business imperative,” said Doug French, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Santé Ventures, who formerly served as President and CEO of Ascension Health, as well as Founder of Ascension Ventures. “This critical shift is now happening and it’s quickly becoming a key indicator of which health systems will lead the new path forward for cancer care and which slow movers will struggle to compete with early adopters who are no longer facilities-bound.”
The Series A Funding comes as costs for cancer care continue to rise significantly, making up a large and rapidly growing portion of commercial and Medicare costs. In 2020, the total cost of cancer care in the U.S. was $175 billion, and over 1.8 million patients were newly diagnosed with the disease. Those costs are projected to rise to $246 billion by 2030. These cost concerns are elevated by the shift towards delivering more patient-centered care and accommodating patients’ increasing interests in home care options. According to a recent survey, 95 percent of patients preferred receiving chemotherapy and supportive cancer treatments at home as opposed to facility-based care.
According to Devin Carty, CEO of Martin Ventures and Co-founder of Reimagine Care, the high cost of care isn’t the only challenge. “Companies are simply tinkering around the edges of care transformation unless they address healthcare’s fundamental design flaw and align providing an exceptional patient experience with achieving lower costs and better outcomes. This isn’t an easy problem to solve but Reimagine Care is different in its holistic, tech-driven approach. By partnering with health systems, physician practices, and health plans, Reimagine Care can redesign and reinvent cancer care for the benefit of patients while also financially rewarding providers for delivering high-quality cancer care, in safe and convenient settings, which can include the home.”
Recent surveys have confirmed not only that patients would prefer to receive cancer care at home, but also that a growing number of health systems support providing home-centered treatment options. A recent survey of healthcare executives found that 66 percent of executives agree that that home-centered oncology care is gaining traction and represents a real opportunity for growth. Even more significantly, 60 percent of surveyed executives expressed concern that their organizations may fall behind if they don’t make the shift to home-centered cancer care in the very near future.
“We’re honored to partner with these experienced financial and strategic investors who share our belief that the time is now to move away from the status quo way of delivering cancer care which hasn’t adapted to a virtual, digital world and move towards providing a better experience for the millions of patients who deal with this horrible disease each year,” said Aaron Gerber, MD, Co-founder and CEO of Reimagine Care. “We’re eager to accelerate the commercialization of our tech-enabled services platform to help health systems to provide high-quality, home-centered care, increase profitability, and enhance the patient experience while also differentiating themselves from competitors who fail to take this important leap forward.”
With the Series A funding round, French will continue to serve as the Chairman of the Board of Directors for Reimagine Care, alongside board members Gerber, Carty and Keith Figlioli, Partner at LRVHealth. Harlan Levine, MD, President of Strategy and Business Ventures at City of Hope will also be joining the Board of Directors.
