Introducing the Home Smart Clinic

Written by Dedi Gilad

What’s standing in the way of excellent primary care for everyone, and what can we do about it? TytoCare CEO and co-founder Dedi Gilad shares his vision. 

Remote primary care has changed a lot over the last few years, and we are currently at a pivotal moment in its development. Current programs struggle to fully support the complex relationship between remote care and critical business metrics. It has become exceedingly difficult to balance total cost of care with growing market share while increasing quality and equity of care, as growth in one area can mean reduction in others. This is in addition to the other challenges faced by health systems, such as the severe shortage of clinicians.

Significant barriers prevent people from accessing quality healthcare. Geographic and social disparities, along with limited clinician availability, make it difficult for people to attain the regular, proactive care that could keep them well throughout their lives. As a result, many people go without care or are forced to utilize EDs and urgent care centers.

Exceptional primary care from home can alleviate many of the challenges currently faced by the healthcare industry globally. The home, which is the epicenter of our lives, is already a place from which we access many other services successfully – from food orders to banking.

The pandemic brought home-based healthcare into the spotlight, and in its aftermath, the home has become increasingly central to primary care delivery. Home-based care addresses critical business metrics such as accurate diagnostic capabilities, improved retention and acquisition, equitable access to care, visit resolution, and member engagement. 

Funding for home-based care continues to rise, with the home seen as the preferable place to receive care in many cases. Barriers such as internet connectivity are being alleviated by federal funding, to the delight of members, providers, and health plans. Moving healthcare to the home can improve health outcomes, shorten hospital stays, and increase patient satisfaction.

On paper, telehealth has all of the necessary components to expedite the shift towards primary care at home. Telehealth is working in some cases, particularly in its ability to provide effective behavioral healthcare, but some applications of telehealth still struggle. 

Traditional telehealth has clinicians struggling to make confident diagnoses over phone or video calls, and build trust with patients. As one of our customers recently told me, “Just talking isn’t primary care.” Patients must often follow up telehealth visits for acute conditions with in-person appointments. Telehealth is largely underutilized by families for the purpose of primary care. It fails to generate positive ROI, leaving it unable to prove its worth.

At TytoCare, we have termed this phenomenon the Home Health Delivery Gap™. It cannot be closed by traditional audio/video telehealth, which fails to provide the quality of care comparable to an in-person visit. With an inability to examine patients and no way to cultivate trust with doctors in the cloud, families still experience poor access to primary care, leading to even greater care gaps. Health plans and value-based providers face higher total cost of care due to ED overuse and lack of primary care access. 

We’re now facing a pivotal moment in healthcare. Traditional telehealth offerings face real challenges in delivering the expected ROI and outcomes, but TytoCare is changing that. 

At TytoCare, we know virtual care can do better. Virtual care has the potential to bring people everywhere the excellent primary care access they deserve. 

The Home Smart Clinic is our new comprehensive offering that helps health plans, providers, and families by providing better access to high-quality primary care from home, with no compromises. It’s here to make the home the preferred place for families to access healthcare they can trust. It could even become a new industry category evolved from the broader telehealth category, with Home Smart Clinic solutions offering better diagnostic opportunities from home. 

We believe there is no reason why meeting your doctor remotely from home should be any less effective than an in-office visit. We believe doctors should be equipped with best-in-class insights that give them an accurate picture of their patients’ health. 

We’ve seen the impact of our remote physical exam solutions across our partners over the past five years, including outstanding virtual care utilization and significant reductions in total cost of care.

While the Home Smart Clinic uses powerful technological innovations, it’s not just about the tech. There are so many additional elements that we know are essential to healthcare – elements that tend to get lost in the focus on tech-driven telehealth. We need solutions with the flexibility to cater to different population and family types. One size does not fit all, and we must take that into account when rolling out virtual care programs. We must address different primary care modalities, and consider how we provide a holistic solution for acute, chronic, and preventive care that doesn’t require members to download different apps or have new devices. 

The Home Smart Clinic addresses these essential issues head on. We’ve included as integral elements our Tyto Engagement Labs™ that leverage behavioral science and take population criteria into account when developing better patient engagement journeys, and AI-powered guidance and diagnostic support that eliminate the friction from remote care. 

The Home Smart Clinic can be completely integrated with any provider model and health plan system, and can be used for any primary care modality. This ensures that TytoCare’s solutions provide a holistic blueprint that lets health plans and providers build trust, connect authentically with patients, and provide the accurate diagnoses and treatment that can successfully resolve health concerns. 

I’m excited that we’re bringing the TytoCare Home Smart Clinic to the market today, together with our partners around the world. When I co-founded TytoCare along with Ofer Tzadik a decade ago, I wanted to make primary care more accessible for families, no matter where they are. Today, we are taking that vision a giant step forward. We’re improving lives with the best virtual primary care available, empowering health plans, health systems, clinicians, and families with the primary care people need and deserve. Primary care from home will continue evolving from ad-hoc, hard-to-get appointments with clinicians in their office, to continuous care from the comfort of home with your own clinician with whom you and your family have an established relationship. We have so much left to do, and I look forward to sharing more updates about our future plans soon, so stay tuned!