Nashville-headquartered Thyme Care recently secured $60 million in funding to expand its health services for cancer patients, including palliative care and programs to address social determinants.
The value-based oncology provider has a team of nurses and care professionals that support roughly 3,000 patients and families navigating cancer and serious illness.
The funding round will allow Thyme Care to deepen its partnerships with health care providers across the continuum and widen its geographic reach, according to Dr. Samyukta Mullangi, the company’s medical director.
“What we hope that we use this capital for is wanting stakeholders to really feel that much more [people] are supported by us partnering in their journey,” Mullangi told Palliative Care News. “Patients really should feel a much more seamless cancer care experience than their counterparts who don’t have this access. Care teams should feel confident in their care plans and have somebody to call if a need arises so that they secure better health outcomes as a result.”
Thyme Care was established towards the end of 2020 following a series B funding round of around $16 million, led by Town Hall Ventures and Foresite Capital.
A group of health care professionals with experience in the oncology field started the company, Mullangi indicated. These professionals increasingly recognized that cancer treatments have advanced in the last two decades, while patients are also having longer health trajectories, she stated.
The oncology startup’s investor base has since grown to include AlleyCorp, Andreessen Horowitz, Casdin Capital and Frist-Cressey Ventures, which contributed to the provider’s most recent $60 million capital infusion.
“This signifies a validation of what we had started a couple years ago. It gives us fuel to really accelerate that mission of how to potentially use it to try and build out a national network of oncology partners, new geographies, new markets and deepen those relationships with more comprehensive cancer support services,” Mullangi said.
The shift from a more acute to chronic illness management for cancer has complicated reimbursement and care models, Mullangi stated. A main challenge is that many cancer patients receive fragmented health care, largely as a result of broken payment structures for serious illness care, such as those in the palliative reimbursement realm, she added.
Navigating both fee-for-service and value-based reimbursement landscapes can be a complicated journey that adds burdens on both the provider and patient, Mullangi indicated.
Thyme Care aims to develop innovative, value-based payment arrangements to ensure care for cancer patients who expressed a need and desire for palliation, she indicated.
For instance, developing technologies that systematically review electronic health records against billing claims can allow palliative providers to find opportunities to improve referral management processes, identify patients sooner and initiate goals-of-care conversations, Mullangi indicated.
“There’s a lot of momentum in value-based care that represents a lot of opportunity to develop practices and payment models that better support the full degree of serious illness care,” Mullangi said. “Achieving value-based care can be difficult and complicated, but we want to remove the friction from the system so that we can partner with physicians in that larger part of health care to address social determinants and also better understand ways to secure the type of palliative care that patients want or need.”