Reimagine Care is hoping to become a trailblazer in the at-home cancer care industry, and things are moving fast.
Dan Nardi, the company’s new CEO, will be in charge of ensuring things stay on track amid the chaos and excitement.
“I’m two weeks in and so personally, the biggest challenge for me is all about getting my arms wrapped around all of this,” Nardi told Home Health Care News. “I’ve been in the health care field for over 22 years now, but the oncology space is one that is very specific in the broader health care spectrum.”
Reimagine Care is a Nashville-based in-home cancer care enabler that provides technology-enabled services to health systems and oncologists to deliver home-centered, value-based cancer care.
Before joining the company, Nardi worked at Livongo Health, a biotech company that grew tremendously during his time there. Following that, he served as the CFO of Carrum Health, a tech-enabled health care company that connects self-insured employers with providers.
Now, he is tasked with making Reimagine Care the face of cancer care delivery moving to the home.
“We still remain firmly behind our original vision of providing cancer treatment and cancer therapy to patients where they are most comfortable: in their home,” Nardi said. “Reimagine Care is really, really good at – and really focused on – that patient experience. We have a very strong vision about how patients should be able to receive the highest quality care where they’re comfortable and over the last couple of years, what we’ve learned is that it’s going to take a while. Changing health care is hard.”
More cancer care in the home would certainly mark a change in the health care system. Reimagine Care plans to do that by partnering with like-minded providers, technology companies and health plans.
“As we continue to work towards that longer-term vision, one of the things we’ve seen a lot of success with is with our symptom management in the home,” Nardi said. “Being able to partner with some of the best hospital systems and cancer clinics around the country, being able to help support their efforts, augment their staff, we’ve got a really great opportunity here to help those systems and clinics be able to provide the best possible care for patients in the home.”
Reimagine’s model is set up for fee-for-service and value-based models but works much better in the latter.
“We really wanted to have a model that’s provider first, payer second,” Reimagine Care co-founder Aaron Gerber previously told HHCN. “We built a model that works in fee-for-service and in value. It works better in value. We’re looking to accelerate to value as quickly as we can with our provider partners.”
Home-based care and value-based care naturally go hand in hand, Nardi said.
“Health care has been tied to physical locations for so long that when we start to think about how we can cut costs and reverse some of the explosive growth in costs, it becomes by not being tethered to a physical location,” he said. “There are a lot of parties that need to come together in order to make this a reality, not only the providers, but the payers and organizations like Reimagine Care to create these value-based care arrangements.”
It’s worth mentioning that Reimagine Care partners with home health and home care providers, too.
Moving forward, Nardi sees the company’s best asset being its clinical abilities. The company “doesn’t hire generalists,” he said.
“Plenty of digital health companies start with technology, they let technology lead and then the clinical focuses are along for the ride,” he said. “In this case, clinical plays the lead for us. We’re really good at combining that with intuitive technology that’s really easy to use. We do all this with a very empathetic, talented and focused oncology team. We have oncology-specific nurses and a medical director on staff because we have to be able to have that clinical focus that helps drive and determine the direction of our program. Instead of the other way around.”
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