Koda Health
Modernizing Advance Care Planning
Within health care, there are a lot of difficult conversations. Perhaps none are more challenging than the conversation between providers and their patients regarding end-of-life scenarios. Koda Health is changing that.
“Our mission is that advance care planning should be available for everyone, regardless of age, socioeconomic status, or the severity or progression of their disease state,” said Tatiana Fofanova, Ph.D., CEO, Koda Health which was recently named a finalist in the @Digital Health Hub Foundation and Digital Health Awards Longevity category.
Koda has built a shared decision making and education platform targeting health systems and payors, enabling their patients to complete the process of proactive healthcare planning, auto-generateing legal documents to protect their care, and virtually notarizing these documents at no cost to these patients.
“We are able to help patients plan for their future health care. That impacts their treatments, and their quality of life now, to and through serious illness, and all the way up to the end of life,” Fofanova said.
Advance care planning can be extremely painful and challenging for patients and their families. It can also impact providers who, based on our current standards for care, know they are delivering care that may be unnecessary and that patients might not want. It also can have a direct financial impact on health plans, value-based providers and others.
“At the end of the day, it affects risk-bearing entities and payors that are paying for that delivery of care that patients might not want,” Fofanova said.
While there is an awareness of the need for impactful ACP, the industry is bogged down with antiquated and ineffective approaches – with many still relying on paper forms. This leads to relatively low engagement, with a frustrating and forgettable few minutes of checking boxes for participating patients. Such approaches yield more problems than benefits for the healthcare organizations.
Because its solution solves these inefficencies, Koda is seeing tremendous market traction. It is currently raising additional funding and is looking for advisors to help scale the business.
Fofanova adds, “If anyone wants to come talk to me to help us meet this need, I’d be more than open to that conversation.”.
