Safety and quality are paramount for the unique medical business as it celebrates a successful expansion to the east coast, and new health fund partnerships.
Safety and quality are paramount for the unique medical business as it celebrates a successful expansion to the east coast, and new health fund partnerships.
Providing chemotherapy in the home has proven to be a winning notion and, after achieving some major business milestones, chemo@home founders Julie Adams and Lorna Cook have much to celebrate.
The 2016 Rising Stars winners in the people’s choice and start-up categories won a Western Australian Innovator of the Year category award last year, and have recently successfully expanded their medical start-up to Victoria and New South Wales.
Originally providing in-home chemotherapy services to cancer sufferers, the company is now a unique provider of a variety of infusion treatments.
“Since we won the Innovator of the Year in the growth category, we’ve opened in Melbourne, we’ve just opened in New South Wales, and we were in the finals of a slingshot accelerator program with HCF, the biggest health fund in NSW,” Ms Cook told Business News.
“We’re the first in the world, as far as we know, to be administering these drugs in the community.
“We’ve expanded our nursing team right across Australia.”
The Perth-based company has also expanded its list of partnerships, with more than 30 health funds and partners on board to reimburse patients’ costs.
These include key health funds in each state – Medibank Private in Victoria, Bupa in South Australia, HBF in WA, and new partner HCF in NSW.
Ms Adams told Business News the rapid geographical growth was a result of a focus on quality of care, and a constant willingness to adapt.
This had been inspired by areas far beyond the medical realm, she said, as chemo@home borrowed strategies and innovation from fields as diverse as food and mining.
“We want to use the systems that allow that (efficiency) to happen, with the quality of care that gives people the best experience,” Ms Adams said.
“We learn a lot from other business areas that have nothing to do with health.
“We might learn from mining when it comes to how we track vehicles, how they monitor whether staff are driving hard or speeding, because that helps you protect your assets, but also protect your staff.
“You can learn from other companies like food delivery, which has got the delivering process in an adequate timeframe down to the second.
“We love to interact with other industries, and consider how we could do things better.”
The approach has proved a winner with clients.
Based on the data from more than 1,200 patient experience forms collected thus far, 100 per cent of patients stated they would recommend the service, Ms Adams said.
Whether through bringing on new treatments, improving safety procedures, or adopting digital strategies, Ms Adams said chemo@home had remained responsive to the needs of patients, as well as medical innovations.
Delivering new drugs had been a challenge, she said, as safety of delivery was paramount.
“The idea of chemo@home was to give people more patient-centric care in the home, but it couldn’t be done at the expense of safety or quality of the service,” she said.
“We will assess (new) treatments from a safety point of view to see if there are any problems we need to deal with.
“If there are problems, can we minimise them, can we practically give the drug in the home, or can we use the technology to make that happen?”
Despite this challenge, the process of adopting innovative treatments as they came on to the market had caused a boost in service offerings, and subsequently an expansion in clients.
“The regular chemotherapy was the thing we knew we could do upfront, that was the stock standard bread and butter,” Ms Adams said.
“The newer immunotherapy drugs, as they were coming on to the market, we would have to assess each one of them to make sure they were safe to give.
“So it wasn’t just about ‘could we use that drug in cancer patients’, it was now ‘could we use that drug in a whole other range of conditions that we hadn’t considered up front?’
“That was a learning curve as well, it increased not only the number of treatments we could do, but it also increased the number of diseases we could treat, which meant the number of people who could access our care.”
