Rethinking Access to Healthcare in Rural America (Jennifer Schneider, Homeward)
More than 46 million Americans, or 15 percent of the U.S. population, live in rural areas as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau. According to the CDC, the reasons for worse health outcomes are related to lifestyle, environmental hazards, habits such as not using seatbelts, long distance to emergency, and specialty care.
Jennifer Schneider used to be the Chief Medical Officer and President of Livongo. In 2022 she started a company focused on improving access to healthcare in rural America. The company called Homeward is on the mission to deliver care to those who don’t have it, in a more convenient way than what is available at the moment.
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Telemedicine and partnership with existing medical professionals
“One of the things that we noticed in our research is that many people live in what are called health deserts, where they're typically expected to travel anywhere between two to five hours to access healthcare. Two to five hours. So think about going to your primary care doctor for a 15-minute visit and having to travel five hours to get there for a 15-minute visit. If you're an hourly wage worker, it's unlikely that you're going to take a full day off, lose a full day worth of wages to receive a very short amount of time in terms of clinical care,” says Jennifer Schneider.
The formal definition of rural markets is less than 2,500 people in a community. The idea around health deserts and health access is what Jennifer Schneider and her team to think differently about rural health markets. “When we approached the problem, we asked ourselves, if you are going to design healthcare service delivery in rural markets, would it look like it does today? And the answer is no. You wouldn't build a center and ask people to go to the center over large distances with let the lack of infrastructure, lack of public transportation. In fact, you'd probably turn the delivery model on its head and think about how can we bring healthcare to people rather than putting the burden on individuals to go seek healthcare in a world that doesn't provide it or make it very.”
People in rural America get 23% higher mortality rates than people who live in urban areas. And that's not right. And it's fixable, Jennifer Schneider says. Homeward was founded in March 2022, and is planning the first launch of services in July 2022.