We know that good high quality evidence based supportive care can improve quality of life for patients and their loved ones while simultaneously reducing unnecessary medical spend. But one of the challenges is that payers and Health Systems struggle to identify patients early enough in their illness trajectory so they can get this good high quality supportive care and reap the benefits of it, and have better outcomes as they approach the end of life including lower total cost of care.

For those patients that actually get supportive care, we also know that there’s a huge variation in the quality of that supportive care delivery. Most of the care that we see out there is reactive as the patient is getting sicker, there’s a delayed response to improving their care. And we know that there’s a real opportunity to actually predict these changes in acuity ahead of time, using continuous assessments and actually intercede before that patient ends up in the emergency department or in the hospital.

We also know that there’s not enough supportive and palliative care clinicians currently in the field to meet these burgeoning needs. And what we often see is these limited resources are sadly used inefficiently. And so there is an opportunity to create a new model that is both scalable and creates access to good high quality supportive care.

Lastly, we know that hospice at the end of life is frankly not utilized optimally and particularly in terms of timing of hospice referrals. We know that when patients are referred to late to hospice meaning less than 10 days life expectancy, this results in poor quality of care and high costs for them significant burdens on the patients and their loved ones. Conversely, when patients are enrolled too early, we see significant unnecessary medical spend for these patients. What we know about hospice the United States is that 50% of patients are not even enrolled in hospice at the time of death. 25% crashed into hospice in that last week of life. And we see that patients who are enrolled too early who have long lengths of stay greater than 180 days, who frankly, are not ready or need hospice, this results in this drives about 60% of the hospice cost that we currently see in the United States.