By Elizabeth Coston McCluskey and Tasha Seitz
The number of chronically ill Medicare patients is expected to double from 40 million to 80 million by 2030. Insurers are pushing providers to manage their chronically ill populations via lower cost staff and digital health tools. Condition monitoring, care coordination and disease education for patients with multiple chronic conditions is estimated to represent a $15 billion market.
At the same time, many patients want to age in place with convenient, personalized healthcare. However, adopting new care management programs requires change. Healthcare providers need people, processes and tools to transform from episodic and reactive in-person care to continuous and proactive virtual-based care.
Solution
TimeDoc provides a virtual care management platform to Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) and provider groups with 10+ physicians. Their initial focus is on Medicare patients with chronic conditions that qualify for reimbursement for remote care, and they are piloting a behavioral health integration component for screening.
TimeDoc’s differentiation is that they offer a hybrid solution for virtual care management, meaning they have a SaaS solution that enables the provider’s staff to document the time they spend on working with and for patients and get reimbursed for that time, plus they can supplement the provider’s capabilities with TimeDoc’s own care managers. This makes it easier for providers that are cash-strapped and resource-constrained to launch virtual care programs and gradually transition their staff to take over the management of patients as they have capacity, while getting reimbursed for the work that they do with patients.
Why We Invested
We believe TimeDoc offers a very pragmatic solution with a combined software and services model, making it easy for providers to launch a virtual care program. The company has demonstrated an ability to generate strong revenue traction despite a small sales team and limited investment capital to date. We have also been very impressed by the company’s high customer win rate, patient enrollment and retention metrics.
COVID-19 has changed the landscape for the delivery of healthcare in the near term, if not the foreseeable future. We believe that TimeDoc is well-positioned to help providers increase their virtual and remote patient management practices. Additionally, the company itself is structured well for these uniquely challenging times. The company utilizes an inside sales model, and care managers are already accustomed to working remotely.
Impact
By providing consistent virtual care management for patients and building relationships over time between managers and patients, we believe that TimeDoc will improve outcomes for patients while enabling financially-strapped clinics to receive reimbursement for the time they spend managing patient care outside of office visits. TimeDoc has collected some early impact data from customers on the impact of patients enrolled in its virtual care management programs. One community health center found a 70% improvement in the number of diabetic patients coming in for testing, and a 16% improvement in the number of patients successfully managing their diabetes. Another customer more than doubled the growth in the number of patients coming in for primary care visits and tripled the number of patients completing depression screenings.
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