Deep Dive: Home Healthcare

How Home Healthcare is Transforming the Patient Experience

Over the past two years, interest in home health has increased dramatically. The COVID-19 pandemic has squeezed perhaps a decade’s worth of interest, demand, and innovation into a much smaller period. Telehealth, an important aspect of home health, is now widely accepted, with over 80% of the U.S. population having tried it at least once.

Home health had the tools and technology necessary to expand like this even before the pandemic. With rising healthcare costs and advances in home sensor tech, doctors have been able to take care of more patients remotely and carefully choose who needs to come into the hospital at all.

Home health can also help with the costs of caring for chronic diseases. According to the CDC, 90% of the U.S.’s $3.8 trillion in annual healthcare expenditures are for people with chronic and mental health conditions. This astronomic number represents between 17% and 19% of the U.S.’s GDP.

We’re also on the precipice of a severe shortage of doctors. The Association of American Medical Colleges recently projected that the U.S. could see a shortage of between 37,100 and 24,000 primary and specialty care physicians by 2034. The American population is also living longer on average, meaning that in the coming decades, there will be more elderly Americans than ever before, the segment that most requires consistent care for chronic diseases.

Using Stealth Devices to Monitor Women’s Health

Bloomer Tech, an emerging company in women’s cardiovascular health, is developing minimally invasive sensors that can fit comfortably in women’s bras to monitor individuals’ biometrics seamlessly.
These sensors will be used to create data sets that help researchers understand how womens’ metabolisms differ from men’s, and find patterns in cardiovascular disease.
Using these sensors, doctors can better see how women metabolize drugs, detect chronic diseases earlier, and predict other conditions before they even become symptomatic.
In early studies at the MIT clinical research center, these devices showed a 92% similar signal to a traditional in-hospital ECG device. However, the sensors proved to work better than the ECGs when movement was added to the equation and have been tailor-fit to women’s physiologies to provide the best custom data for the population.
The devices collect over 500 megabytes of data per day, by recording traditional biomarkers such as electrocardiogram, respiratory rate, and heart rhythm.

Developing a Breath-Based Biomarker Reader

Aidar Health, has a new biomarker sensor technology that was recently FDA cleared and CE mark approved.
Lovingly known as “a check engine light for health,” the device operates like a breathalyzer but picks up more than 10 essential biomarker parameters in just a 30-second test period. In a short period, the device measures the user’s temperature, blood pressure, ECG, oxygen, saturation, pulse rate, respiratory rate, respiratory flow, morphology, heart rate, heart rate variability, and lung functions.
Experts at the company are using the data collected from the device to work with pharmaceutical partners, allowing them to get direct feedback on the efficacy of certain drugs in real-time, on real individuals.
The device’s architects are working to add breath and saliva sensors to the device in subsequent iterations, allowing for an even more comprehensive daily snapshot of individual health in the same short testing period.
The device has clear applications into asthma care as a digital companion tool for asthma patients. The tool can detect asthmatic exacerbation early and prevent costly and possibly unnecessary patient hospitalization episodes.

A Data Aggregator Platform Designed to Work With Any Device

Explicitly designed to cross health-equity barriers, Current Health’s health data aggregator software works with as many varieties of devices and sensors as possible. It’s also intended to synergize seamlessly with major electronic health record systems used at most hospitals around the U.S.
This system has many essential applications in-home healthcare, allowing patients to centralize and access the needed data.
The platform serves roughly 20,000 patients daily, linking with different health products and sensors reporting data. While some devices sold in tandem with the platform provide fall protection, others can offer help with mental illness or access to care.
Through Current Health’s partnership with Best Buy, they’re developing a full telehealth and home care system so that customers can take advantage of the new level of communication possible between care providers and patients.
At-home sensors paired with Current Health’s software platform can enable earlier safe hospital discharges. This allows the patient to save large amounts of money and allows the health care professionals to have more time to treat others in-office.

Balancing Consumer Adoption with Provider Integration

For telehealth medicine to continue flourishing after the COVID-19 pandemic, we must find novel solutions to balance the cost of care for at-home bed treatment. Most hospitals rely on in-patient care for billing from the patient and their private health insurance or government health programs. With these new technologies coming onto the market, a new standard of payment for at-home health will likely have to develop.
As new at-home sensors become more and more common, providers and hospitals will need new ways of coping with the vast amounts of data coming their way. While some will welcome this change, it’s important to consider that some systems may be overwhelmed.

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Consideration

With 2021 well underway and with public markets still strong, we think it is an important time to highlight some of the key private market, venture investment themes that iSelect fund has identified for the year. We believe technologies transforming the Agriculture, Food and Wellness markets will flourish, with a focus on four areas: technologies that enable better food choices to drive better health outcomes, technologies that drive better, more profitable farm operations, technologies that drive the Consumerization of Healthcare, and biome-based treatment technologies. At iSelect, we invest for impact AND performance. We offer qualified investors access to emerging growth companies through our national venture capital strategy. Our unique structure allows our investors to continue to invest in these companies as they develop.

Timing

Why is now the right time for venture? The answer is that now is not explicitly the right time. Venture is something we need in our economy at all times. Now is not better than any other particular time. The question is, why ever stop? When we look at the challenges we’re facing in food and healthcare the reality is there is someone, somewhere who has an insight about how to build a product that will solve those problems. And if they put the right resources to it, they will succeed. As long as we need new technology to make life better or make our lives more enjoyable, we need venture capital to help fuel those entrepreneurs.

What is iSelect as a product?

iSelect is a very unique product, but when you break it into its parts it’s fairly easy to understand. On the front end we’re a traditional venture capital fund. We have a diligence process. We have an investment process. We have categories of industries where we have focus and real expertise, and we invest in companies in those areas that meet requirements for the fund. On the back end we’re unique in that we don’t raise a large amount of capital at one time and deploy it over the life of our fund. Each deal that we bring onto the fund, our investors have to prove and determine to invest in that deal. We have to constantly prove our diligence standards. It’s accessible, transparent and easy for investors to come in and see our comprehensive process.

What is the ideal iSelect company?

We are looking for founders that are passionate and we want the problem they’re trying to solve to be big, real, and painful. We want the solution to be revolutionary and we want our capital to be able to help them solve that problem. We want to know that they have customers involved and that the solution they’ve come up with actually meets those customers’ and market needs. And we want the team to be capital efficient with the money they’re spending.

What does the ideal iSelect company look like?

We’re looking for a company that has an opportunity to have a 10x return to our investment or greater in a period of three to seven years. What excites us at iSelect are companies that are solving big problems. We want companies that are going to be the Monsantos of the future. Not just in the size and the scope, but the impact they have on people’s lives. We want to create positive impacts on people’s lives, so we invest in areas like agricultural production and areas like producing healthy foods for our kids. They are problems that impact real people’s lives on a daily basis. That’s what we’re trying to do at iSelect. We’re trying to solve the big problems out there. Find ways to bring capital to the entrepreneurs who are the real heroes out there getting up every morning, beating away at these things that are problems that you and me and everyone else faces in their everyday lives.

What is iSelect?

iSelect is a venture capital firm. What that means is we look at hundreds and hundreds of different companies and we apply tough diligence standards to each of them, looking at whether the team has a good plan for growing the business, whether the team is qualified and credible, and more. We do that to resolve the few who provide the best opportunities for investors. And then iSelect takes that smaller set of investments and goes to investors who are interested in venture capital and provides a way for them to invest in these companies, either individually or all at once. We co-invest alongside other venture capitalists. We source transactions through to an exit where the company would become public or get bought. And we manage that whole investment process on behalf of our investors.