Health IT, Startups

Q&A: HomeHero expands business to target enterprise customers

HomeHero is also rolling out a HIPAA-compliant mobile app to help home care workers collect relevant patient health data.

By Stephanie Baum on March 01, 2016

homeheroHomeHero, a senior homecare marketplace, said it would convert its care providers from independent contractors to W-2 employees. The move is part of a new care management platform aimed at hospitals and health plans to support remote monitoring.

HomeHero is also rolling out a HIPAA-compliant mobile app to gather the patient data. Additionally, it hired a Chief Medical Officer and Chief Nursing Officer to support an expansion from a direct to consumer model to focus on enterprise contracts.

In a phone interview with HomeHero Co-founder and COO Mike Townsend, he talked about the new developments at the digital health business.

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What kind of data will the HomeHero Collaborative collect that will be useful for hospitals?

HomeHero Collaborative leverages mobile technology and in-home visits to collect critical patient health data such as hospital readmission visits and details for each patient, nutrition intake details, as well as monitoring multiple physical conditions which alert our patient experience team at appropriate moments. Then, using an analytics engine, we can triage patients to the appropriate care provider within the Collaborative.

Can you give me a sense of how this fits into their workflow?
Each healthcare provider is unique and our workflows are customized to satisfy the needs of each client. Thanks to our small, talented team, we have the ability to nimbly adapt our data collection and analysis tools to most healthcare needs. And with HIPAA compliance, we expect to integrate directly into electronic medical record (EMR) systems. Operationally, we coordinate with hospital discharge planners as well as other pertinent medical staff to ensure patient transitions to and from hospitals are conducted promptly and seamlessly. HomeHero Collaborative uses our predictive analytics engine to prevent unnecessary patient readmissions to hospitals. Included in the Enterprise launch is a reporting tool that allows to generate custom data fields in reports to hospitals, giving them critical insight to customer satisfaction scores, readmission rates, cost savings and more.

Who have been your pilot partners?

HomeHero has successfully managed patient discharges without readmission for many of the top health systems in California including Kaiser Healthcare, Cedars-Sinai, Stanford, Dignity Health, University of California, San Francisco Medical Center, Providence Health and many more. We will be announcing official partners in the coming months.

Why the shift in employee status?

Up until this point, we have operated under a domestic referral agency safe harbor that exists in California and many other states, but not all states. Given we have an aggressive business model that requires national expansion, the switch to W2 helps us ensure a consistent client experience in all geographic areas