Guidehealth Partners with Koda Health to Revolutionize End-of-Life Care Planning

In a significant move to address the challenges of end-of-life care planning, health tech company Guidehealth has announced a strategic partnership with Koda Health. This collaboration aims to integrate smart, compassionate planning tools directly into clinical workflows, potentially transforming how healthcare providers approach advance care planning (ACP) for patients.

Streamlining Advance Care Planning

Guidehealth, a company launched in 2023 to support health systems in scaling value-based care, will now incorporate Koda Health's digital ACP platform into its services. This integration allows Guidehealth's virtual Healthguides to access Koda's full ACP toolkit, enabling everything from guided decision-making to real-time sharing of patient preferences across care teams.

Koda Health, founded five years ago, has developed a scalable, digital-first approach to ACP. The company's platform supports the entire ACP journey, from patient education to electronic documentation. Recent deployments have shown significant reductions in unnecessary acute care utilization, high patient satisfaction rates, and considerable cost savings.

Addressing a Critical Healthcare Need

The partnership comes at a crucial time, as data shows that approximately one-quarter of traditional Medicare spending goes towards services provided to beneficiaries in their last year of life—a proportion that has remained steady for decades. Much of this spending is often misaligned with patients' wishes due to a lack of communication and planning about end-of-life care preferences.

Dr. Sanjay Doddamani, founder and CEO of Guidehealth, emphasized the importance of this collaboration: "By embedding Koda into our value-based care ecosystem, we're equipping providers to have meaningful conversations with patients, reduce unnecessary interventions, and ultimately improve the experience for families and clinicians alike."

Expanding Reach and Impact

Guidehealth currently supports over 600,000 lives and partners with leading health systems and clinically integrated networks across the country. The company's technology-enabled services platform integrates directly into primary care workflows, helping providers identify high-risk patients, coordinate care, and reduce administrative burden.

Koda Health, on the other hand, serves more than 700,000 patients through its digital platform. The company's solution pairs a cloud-based ACP platform with in-house, one-on-one longitudinal ACP support and navigation. This allows healthcare organizations to provide scalable, personalized ACP without increasing organizational burden.

Dr. Tatiana Fofanova, CEO and co-founder of Koda Health, highlighted the accessibility of their approach: "Not only do we have high rates of engagement, we have really high rates of engagement across race, gender, and socioeconomic status, which is pretty huge."

As the healthcare industry continues to evolve, partnerships like this between Guidehealth and Koda Health demonstrate a growing focus on patient-centered, value-based care that extends beyond traditional medical interventions to encompass comprehensive end-of-life planning.