Tomorrow Health launches tech to automate orders of medical equipment as at-home care grows

Tomorrow Health, a health tech company, has launched a clinical rules engine that automates orders of durable medical equipment.

The latest offering aims to streamline what Tomorrow Health calls a fragmented system. The engine automates the ordering process, simplifying administrative bottlenecks and shortening the time it takes for patients to get medical equipment into their homes, according to the company.

“While so many of us believe in the shift of healthcare into the home, the technology and operations infrastructure to enable them reliably and at scale was simply lacking,” Tomorrow Health co-founder and CEO Vijay Kedar told Fierce Healthcare in an exclusive interview.

The engine leverages machine learning and millions of rule combinations to digitize clinical, health plan and compliance data needed for supplier reimbursement. It integrates with electronic health records systems and relies on a five-step questionnaire for providers, customized to patients’ health plans, which then can approve or deny a request automatically and send to a supplier who can process orders the same day. The startup raised $60 million earlier this year.

Patients discharged to home care have higher rates of readmissions, according to a Penn Medicine study published in JAMA Internal Medicine. Tomorrow Health argues this is due to delays in approvals for medical equipment and confusing requirements related to those orders.

While the standard time to get medical equipment orders through is nine days, Tomorrow Health reduces that by 70% to 36 hours, it claims. So far, the engine encompasses 3,500 medical codes. Eventually, Tomorrow Health hopes to expand the engine to all the codes that exist for home medical equipment. 

This approach not only saves time, it also reduces operating costs for many home medical equipment suppliers who otherwise have to manage requests manually, Kedar explained. And, because the engine is powered by machine learning, “it gets smarter and smarter,” Kedar said. 

“It becomes the source of truth that the industry can ultimately use to make these transactions happen a lot more efficiently going forward,” Kedar said. He stressed the importance of building relationships with all stakeholders so they can come to an agreement over the value add that such alignment could bring.

“Only by having those partnerships in place do you have access to the right level of data,” he said. “If you have any of those missing links, it all falls apart.” Tomorrow Health also has an advisory board of payers and hospital system executives that has helped drive adoption and engineering capability. 

While different point solutions exist on the market, what’s been missing is a back-end database to manage the entire end-to-end ecosystem, according to Kedar. 

The feature is currently being rolled out among providers.