Tomorrow Health strives ‘to give more time to everybody’

In his seven years working at Uber, Ryan Colby handled the nuts and bolts of automating a business. He brought that framework to his new role as head of go-to-market at Tomorrow Health. 

“One of the most important things through all of that was the ability to move any given process or strategy along the continuum from really scrappy and manual all the way through to fully automated,” said Colby. “This is something we think about a lot at Tomorrow Health. How do we go from something difficult and onerous to do to something that can be very efficient and fully automated with technology?” 

In a recent episode of the HME News in 10 podcast, Colby discusses how Tomorrow Health is using technology to build a better home-based care ecosystem. 

Driving the renaissance 

Colby says there’s been a “renaissance” of home-based care in the past few years, driven in particular by COVID-19, and that’s only going to continue this year and well into the future, resulting in better support for chronic care management in the home.  

“Hospital systems need to continue to invest in smoother care transition to address capacity issues and some of the other challenges in the post-acute care facility ecosystem,” he said. “And then payers have to continue to adopt and then expand those solutions to enable those transitions to the home. Payers of all types need to expand this set of HBC offerings.” 

Building the marketplace 

For Tomorrow Health, which relies heavily on an interconnected network of referral sources, payers, patients and HME suppliers, it’s critical to balance the needs of all stakeholders, says Colby. 

“You can’t succeed if you don’t have all of those (stakeholders),” he said. “And then you have to understand what metrics matter to each stakeholder and how you can move those metrics and what good looks like. Finally, and this is super important, is to really focus on the HME supplier community. Platforms like ours really succeed or fail based on how well they service the supply side and for us, that’s HME suppliers.” 

Rewiring the ecosystem 

Five years from now, Tomorrow Health would like to have “rewired” the whole home-based care ecosystem with a suite of technology, complemented by operations, that transform how home-based care is ordered, delivered and paid for, says Colby. 

“This one all starts with the mission: to truly restore the home as the primary place of care,” he said. “We want to expand in new markets; we want to expand the scope of our services to include the full breadth of home-based care; we want to perfect our technology. There’s more work to do to coordinate between all of the folks involved here, ultimately giving more time back to everybody. We’re excited to get lots of feedback and learn from all the folks in the industry.”