Q&A: Thyme Care's new CEO on the company's next phase

Summary:

• Thyme Care has grown from two payer contracts and just under 2,000 members when Diephuis joined in 2022 to 14 clients and more than 125,000 members today, with headcount expanding from roughly 70 people to over 800.

• Diephuis confirmed Thyme Care reached profitability last year alongside its $97 million raise, framing the milestone as proof the model can deliver savings sustainably rather than as a growth target in itself.

• Robin Shah is staying on full-time as executive chairman to build new business lines

Thyme Care, which offers a value-based cancer care platform, announced it promoted Dr. Brad Diephuis to CEO of the company, succeeding cofounder Robin Shah, who transitioned to executive chairman.

Diephuis sat down with MobiHealthNews to discuss how his experience at Thyme Care will shape his approach as CEO, the former CEO Robin Shah's focus in his new role and Diephuis' plans for the company's growth under his leadership.

MobiHealthNews: You started at Thyme Care as its chief business officer in 2022 and subsequently moved up to president. You've now been appointed as the new CEO of the company. So you've seen the company develop and change. What sort of strategies will you keep from previous leaders, and what would you like to adjust in the future?

Dr. Brad Diephuis: When I joined, we had two payer contracts, and we were serving just under 2,000 members. Today, we have 14 different clients that we work with, and we have over 125,000 members that we serve today. So, it's just been a dramatic change in scale and in the depth and maturity of our offering with a much wider set of customers.

I think what we have seen over that trajectory has been, you know, when I joined, we had a great clinical model and a strong thesis on how we could make lives better for patients who are going through cancer care and drive sustainable cost reductions for payers. We have now seen ourselves actually prove out that we can do that effectively and repeatedly at scale.

That has been a throughline; the mission of what we're trying to do hasn't changed. The core concepts of what we are trying to accomplish hasn't changed. What has changed is our sophistication at doing it and our repeatability at making sure that we can do this at scale, and our organization has evolved in the ways you would expect with that.

I believe we were around 70 people when I joined; we are over 800 people today. We have built a lot more structure, quality processes and components to make sure that we can deliver these things repeatedly, time after time.

So, I think in terms of leadership changes, I think the throughline is the mission and the vision of what we are trying to build. Robin, our founder and former CEO, is an amazing visionary, amazing entrepreneur who has the ability to just conjure into life things that didn't exist, and is just an amazing skill. Robin is staying on full-time. He's going to his exec chair role. He has a ton of new initiatives that I'm excited for us to talk about more in the future.

My tendency and my focus is a lot more of getting down from 50,000 feet down all the way into the details and making sure that we have all the operational processes and the maturity to operate at the scale that we have today. I think, if there's any change that I will see or I will be focusing on, is – and this has really been an evolution for our company – how do we continue to deliver at the same level of care at the size and scale we are at today?

MHN: Speaking of that size and scale, Thyme raised $97 million last year, and actually achieved profitability. How will you keep that momentum going to ensure that the company continues to end up in the green?

Diephuis: For us, it really just starts with how do we make sure that we are delivering the outcomes we promised to our patients, to our provider partners and to our payer partners. So, fundamentally, the thesis of our company is that we can make lives better for patients who are going through cancer care. We like to say make cancer care better, or if I were to say, like, make it less bad. Cancer care is hard. I'm a cancer survivor. I've lived through treatment. You're not going to make cancer treatment pleasant, but you can try to smooth around some of the rough edges and the things that can go wrong during cancer treatment.

Our belief, and what we have proven out, is that you can do that, and when you do that, you can keep patients happier, healthier and out of the hospital in ways that takes the burden off of providers and saves costs for the health insurance companies. It's a rare triple win in our healthcare ecosystem.

So, what we are focused on doing is, and why we were very excited about the profitability milestone last year, is how can we prove out that we can do this in a sustainable way, in a way that we can continue to deliver and actually enhance the services that we deliver for members, and have it drive enough savings and be a financially sustainable business, which we're super excited to be at this point.

MHN: From here on out, how do you look to expand the company?

Diephuis: Our number one focus is just to continue bringing the set of services that we have demonstrated work to as many members as possible, and so that means expanding within our existing clients. That means going to new clients who are excited for ways that they can help their members do better while also bending costs and doing that across new business lines. We've been predominantly, although not exclusively, focused on the Medicare market to date. We have increasingly had traction within the commercial health insurance market, and we see deepening within that space. We see opportunities across both of those market segments to grow.

I think number two is how do we deepen what we do for our members? And so each year our care model becomes more sophisticated. We have more ways in which we can use technology to stratify who's going to benefit from what intervention at what time, and we see ourselves having more and more interventions that we can do. And we've seen that over the past three years, and I anticipate that over the next three years we will continue to focus on how we not just drive value to more members, but for the members that we have, drive even more value to them. And so I think those will be our two focus areas of what I'm really focused on.

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