On RDV’s Investment in Intus Care
Empowering geriatric care providers with ML.
Why We Invested in Intus Care
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed many flaws in the American long-term care system.
Over the last year, the American healthcare system has been challenged with accommodating unprecedented patient influxes while maintaining appropriate levels of care for existing patient loads. Because most hospitals in the US already operated at or near capacity, COVID-19 significantly overwhelmed hospital systems, despite any surge plans they may have had in place. Long-term care (LTC) clinics and facilities were no exception. With older adults as one of the highest risk groups for contracting acute forms of COVID-19 and for getting hospitalized, LTC organizations quickly became ground zero for infection — the US reported that 41% of total COVID-19 deaths as of October 2020 were concentrated in care home residents, even though they compose less than half a percent of the population. Lack of technology used in these organizations to facilitate socially distant practices as well as to monitor overall patient population health are among many reasons why LTC facilities faced the brunt of the pandemic.
While the pandemic has amplified many flaws in the US healthcare system, it has perhaps most notably highlighted the need to transform how we approach prioritizing and taking care of older adults. The US will soon be facing a so-called “Silver Tsunami” — by 2034, older adults (65+) will outnumber children (<18) for the first time in the nation’s history, a critical demographic shift that the US healthcare workforce is not equipped to manage.
Long-term care facilities still use disparate spreadsheets and physical paper charts to manage patient populations.
As we work to scale up our resources to take care of an increasingly aging population, the historical lag in healthcare innovation compared to other industries has become increasingly obvious and costly. Specifically, many LTC organizations today use archaic patient data management systems — care providers commonly enter data about their patients manually in scrappy spreadsheets and calculate key metrics on their patients by hand. All of the data a LTC organization needs to understand how their patients are faring lives within siloed spreadsheets, handwritten notes, software platforms, and EHR records.
LTC has traditionally been an unsexy problem, leading to a permissive culture of clunky, complicated software that often causes providers to spend more time on the interface rather than with patients. Legacy administrative and billing software have also sat comfortably in these facilities for decades, with few integrations with patient data sources that connect both financial and health outcomes. These are both critical obstacles in the US healthcare system’s move towards value-based care and away from fee-for-service models — less time and resources are dedicated to improving patient outcomes. For instance, there are some 39% preventable LTC hospitalizations, contributing to $60B in unnecessary annual expenses in the sector. High hospital readmission rates have also resulted in significant financial penalties from the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) — an estimated 75% of skilled nursing facilities are subject to these types of penalties every year.
Intus Care is modernizing the way long-term care providers deliver healthcare.
These are problems Robbie knows all too well. He first started working on the idea that became Intus Care after watching his mother, a social worker turned executive of a MI-based geriatric health plan, struggle to use many different data sources to help track patient progress and organizational health. Led by a sharp, young team who recently dropped out of Brown University to pursue the venture full-time, Intus Care works to make siloed data sources interoperable and empowers facilities with data-driven, actionable insights, powered by advanced machine learning models. These models support provider care decisions and help administrators predict and avoid high-cost events. For LTC facilities and health systems that use their product, what they see is an intuitive, clean dashboard that automatically pulls in patient data and outputs insights on the health of their patient population and organization, all in real-time.
Partnering with the Intus Care team on the exciting road ahead.
At Rough Draft Ventures, we believe that we are at a critical inflection point in LTC, where incentives among healthcare organizations, payers, and care providers are finally aligning, paving the way for a new entrant like Intus Care. And after spending this past year with the team, RDV has been consistently impressed with Robbie, Alex, Evan, and Sam and their vision. Coming off of wins at MassChallenge and Brown Venture Prize and a $500k Pre-Seed raise, the team has since garnered significant traction — they have 7 paid partnerships with geriatric health plans that serve over 2,000 patients across 3 states and channel partnerships with 5 state-level LTC associations. RDV could not be more excited to formally partner with them on their journey to support long-term providers and improve geriatric patient health outcomes. Congrats to the Intus Care team on their latest $1.65M financing!
Learn more about Intus Care on their website and LinkedIn. See their most recent Forbes feature here. Thanks to Amanda Deng for edits to this piece.
*Powered by General Catalyst, Rough Draft Ventures supports student-led teams with $25K-$500k in funding and access to a community of peers, experienced mentors, alumni and investors to help take their startups to the next level.
