At the start of 2023, Reimagine Care had teased two new partnerships that were in the works as the company continued its mission to deliver home-centered, value-based cancer care.

One of those partnerships was officially announced this week.

Reimagine Care is partnering with DispatchHealth, the Denver-based in-home medical care provider, to offer cancer care beyond the traditional facility setting and hopefully lower the total costs of care for patients.

Dan Nardi, the brand new CEO at Reimagine Care, told Home Health Care News this week that companies in the home-based care space — especially those that are relatively new to the scene — shouldn’t expect to do it all by themselves.

“You can’t do it all by yourself,” Nardi said. “You’ll run out of money if you try and do everything, so you have to be really strategic and find those companies that are already doing something really well. At every inflection point, you have to sit down and do the build/buy [or] partner evaluation.”

Reimagine Care is a Nashville, Tennessee-based in-home cancer care enabler that provides technology-enabled services to health systems and oncologists so they can deliver home-centered, value-based cancer care.

DispatchHealth serves over 50 markets across the U.S and has raised over $700 million in funding to date.

When it comes to the partnerships that Reimagine has — which include academic medical centers, large community health care systems and independent oncology practices — the company asks itself what it wants to own as Reimagine Care and where it makes sense to partner with others.

“We can’t spend a lot of money and time building out things like going into the home,” Nardi said. “So the partnership with Dispatch is a big one, and it’s been extremely successful already. That’s just one example of where we did the evaluation, and it doesn’t make sense for us to do it on our own, so why not own our swim lane and strategically think about what are the right groups to partner with and at what times.”

According to a study published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, the annual costs for cancer-related medical services and drugs are projected to total nearly $246 billion nationally in 2030, a 35% increase from 2015.

The partnership between Reimagine and Dispatch will give cancer patients a more coordinated care experience between the two companies and the patients’ primary oncology team.

Patients enrolled in Reimagine’s Cancer Care at Home platform are monitored and have around-the-clock access to oncology nurses. When virtual clinicians identify the need for services, DispatchHealth will arrive at the patient’s home for hands-on symptom management.

The partnership, for now, is based on a fee-for-service model where DispatchHealth will bill a patient’s insurance for the type of visit that they provide in the home. Reimagine Care will then validate each patient’s insurance coverage prior to initiating an in-home visit.

However, Nardi said the long-term goal is to move to a value-based care arrangement where the two companies are “actively developing risk-based programs for the coordination and delivery of cancer treatments in the home.”

“Traveling to an emergency room for diagnostics or treatment of side effects while undergoing cancer therapy is the last thing a patient wants or needs,” DispatchHealth co-founder and CEO Mark Prather said in a statement. “The risk of hospital-acquired infections is real, as is the inconvenience and unnecessary cost. We believe that the home is the optimal site of care to heal whenever possible.”