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Matthew Holt

Accolade flying flag as patient advocates

I have spent years whining that no one is doing a good job helping people navigate through the maze of health care. And a survey out last week from my old firm Harris paid for by Accolade confirms that people need help. Doctors don’t and can’t do this. 71% of people said they trusted their doctors, but only 16% said their doctors had time to understand their life circumstances. Yet last summer a touted Silicon Valley startup called Better failed to make a go of a service doing just that.

Somehow Accolade seems to be threading this needle. They’ve raised more than $125m (including another $30m late last year beyond what I discuss in this interview). While they’re helping patients they’re charging their employers and insurers for the service. Late last summer I met Accolade’s EVP Amy Loftus. In this interview she explains what they do, and how it works.

Health 2.0 Unveils “10 Year Global Retrospective”

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Health 2.0 announced today its  “10 Year Global Retrospective”, a platform to recognize outstanding achievements in health tech over the past ten years.

For nearly a decade, Health 2.0 has served as the preeminent thought-leader in the health tech sector and showcased and connected with thousands of technologies, companies, innovators, and patient-activists through an array of events and conferences, challenges, code-a-thons, and more. Since its first conference in 2007, Health 2.0 has grown into a global movement with over 100,000 entrepreneurs, developers, and healthcare stakeholders, and 110+ chapters on six continents.

In recognition of its 10th year, Health 2.0 will honor the superstars of the health tech community over the past decade through the global retrospective, a platform which will poll the collective insight of its vast network of health tech stakeholders who will nominate and vote for the top influencers in four categories. Continue reading…

Seth Sternberg talks about Honor

Seth Sternberg was a founder at instant message service Meebo, which was acquired by Google in 2012, and like many tech guys he’s next decided to try to change the health care experience. But unlike many others the aspect he wanted to change was the in home caregiving market, following a bad experience with his own mother. Honor came out from under wraps last year, raised $20m, and is currently operating in Los Angeles and San Francisco. It’s not only a market place where you can hire caregivers for a loved one, but it also allows the client, whether they be the person receiving the care or their loved one–that daughter out of town–to manage the process end to end including booking and paying, and allows the caregiver to report on what they are doing, and follow a careplan.

But beyond that Sternberg is on a mission to “professionalize” the caregivers by not only increasing their pay, but accurately matching them to client needs, and increasing their control over their own situation. To that end Honor recently backed off the Uber independent contractor model and made its caregivers full employees (with stock options!). Very interesting guy with an interesting model. Here’s the interview:

https://youtu.be/6TsqQVlkptE

Aver: Analytics for Care Episodes –Nick Augustinos interview

Nick Augustinos was at Healtheon (later WebMD) in the early days, then at Carescience with David Brailer, and later was senior in the health care teams at Cisco and Cardinal. Given Nick isn’t as young as some health tech startup guys and did OK back in the day, you might wonder why he’d leave the cushy corporate world and take on the supervising adult role at a startup.

But he just did, with Aver–an analytics company focusing on incorporating incentives and quality improvement in bundled care. Last month it raised $13.6m in a series B and I had a quick chat with Nick to find out what Aver was up to.

David Vivero, Amino– Yes, We Need Another Doctor Search Company!

Those of you dismayed at the dearth of recent interviews of notable health tech startups on THCB will be glad to hear I have several in the can and will be putting them up starting with Amino today. And the rest of you can move along….

David Vivero made his money at a company matching renters to apartments that ended up part of Zillow. That was too easy, so now he’s decided to match people up with the right doctor. Amino came out of stealth late last year with about $20m in funding and it has acquired large data sets (including being one of the few with official access to all CMS physician data) and some complex ways to match patients to doctors–the primary one being doctors near you that have seen a lot of patients like you. Why are they in a  market that already has several well known & well funded players like Vitals, Healthgrades, Better Doctor and more? David told me that and more in this interview.

Don’t like CB Insights’ numbers? Just wait…

Last year I got in a modest Twitter spat with Anand Sanwal the CEO of investor analytics company CB Insights. Anand writes a very amusing newsletter, has built a wildly successful business tracking venture investing (at $20-50K a client) and has recently taken on $10m in VC himself to build out his business which was already profitable. The spat was because in August 2015 (5 months ago) CB insights said that “Digital Health” investments totalled $3.5 billion in 2014. You can go read the article Stephanie Baum concocted from the Tweetstream but my point was that when CB Insights, a generalist analyst company, said that the investment in digital SMAC health was $3.5bn in 2014 they were wrong because 4 specialists (Health 2.0, Mercom, Rock Health and Startup Health) all said it was over $4.5bn.

What’s a billion between friends? Not much, but what I left unsaid until now is that if they’re 25% off the average in one sector, where are they in the other sectors they cover? But other than a few amused readers of MedCity News no one much cared and the world moved on.

Then everyone stared putting out their Q4 2015 numbers. Amusingly, but probably only to me, both Rock Health & Startup Health put out their Q4 numbers 2 weeks before the quarter/year ended, and missed a bunch of late deals! But by the time the revised numbers came in everyone was again in that middle $4 billion range and there was general agreement that funding was about flat in 2015 compared to 2014–albeit at a high level compared to what the Cinderella sector had been recently.
Health 2.0’s numbers in our report were $4.8 billion for the year, as shown on the left. (You can see more on these and some other data in our Q4 report here. In case you don’t know I co-run Health 2.0 as my day job and yes I own THCB). OK. All so far so ho-hum.

Then as the other numbers started coming out I noticed something a little odd. CB insights came out with its numbers for 2015, but something was different.
You’ll recall that I had poo-poohed their 2014 number shown as $3.477 Bn in their blog post here and displayed in the chart below. These are 2014 numbers shown in a post about investment in 2015, published in August 2015. CB Insights chart with 2014 $$ in Aug 15 And that was the number I’d started the original spat about. But when I looked at the post they released in January 2016, not only was the number for 2015 at $5.7 billion (remember Rock Health, Mercom & Health 2.0 all put it in the mid-high $4s) but the 2014 number had somehow climbed from about $3.5 billion to $5.1 billion. CB Insights chart with 2014 $$ in jan 16 Again check the January post and check the chart I’ve lifted from it below. You’d think this was a curious jump and you’d be right. But nowhere in the post does it say why the total for 2014 in August 2015 was so different from the total for 2014 in January 2016.

Of course being the troublemaker I am, I asked about this on Twitter and got a classic no reply from Anand at CB insights. sanwal
So then I sent all this info off to Stephanie Baum at Medcity News thinking that she might like to write more about it.

And a funny thing happened. Instead of writing the article I wanted her to write (i.e. this one!) She found yet another number for 2015 from CB Insights, and wrote about how they were now back in the pack with everyone else.

Continue reading…

Health 2.0 WinterTech–Health Tech Investing at #JPM16

 

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Health 2.0’s WinterTech conference is today January 13. It features leaders from Venrock, Canvas, Grand Rounds, Doximity, Livongo, Omada Health, Maverick Capital, GE Ventures, Kaiser Permanente and more. It’s the only event dedicated to health tech and investing during the health investment mecca, JP Morgan Week, WinterTech will bring together the top tech companies, investors, entrepreneurs, policy makers, and more to explore investing in the health tech landscape.

Online sales are sold out but we have released a few seats that you can buy on site.

Key sessions will address New Clinical Tools and Platforms, the Convergence of Life Sciences and Health Tech, the New Consumer Health Ecosystem and more. Additionally, there will be exclusive one on one interviews with top influencers such as Vinod Khosla, Founder, Khosla Ventures; Bryan Roberts, Partner, Venrock; Owen Tripp, CEO, Grand Rounds; Glen Tullman, CEO, Livongo Health; Sean Duffy, CEO, Omada Health and Rebecca Lynn, Co-Founder & Partner, Canvas with “her” CEO Jeff Tagney, Doximity along with a keynote from Jonathan Bush– CEO and Co-Founder, athenahealth.

Along with key speakers, Health 2.0 is famous for its incredible selection of LIVE demos, and this year you’ll see; Redox; Bigfoot Biomedical; Propeller Health; Lyra Health; Outset Medical; LifeQ; Accordion Health; dacadoo; physIQ & Jiff

Top investors will join us to discuss business models, examine trends, and explore portfolios and meet startups. This year we will have:GE Ventures; Novartis dRx Capital; Maverick Capital Ventures; Ziegler; World Bank Group/IFC Venture Capital; Kaiser Permanente Ventures; and many more.

We hope to see you there!!

Matthew’s Issues & Charities at end 2015, start 2016

Every year (well almost) I write a letter to friends and contacts about which charities I give to and which issues I support, and recently I’ve been posting it on THCB–hey I own the joint so who’s going to stop me!. Here’s this end/start year edition–Matthew Holt

Yes another year with a Matthew issues letter nearly missed but not quite. I’m poolside in Maui winding down as much as possible when on a vacation with little kids and I’ve missed getting this out for end 2015 but because of the weekend 2016 isn’t really here yet, and I’m finally hammering out my end of year news, gossip, charities and issues letter. A couple of weeks ago someone asked me how the new year was shaping up, and I told them I was about ready for 2012….and I still feel the same way. I seem to spend more time reading articles on the habits of productive people than actually being one …thanks Buzzfeed!

If you don’t know, this is a letter I write mostly to myself about what happened in what’s now last year and what I should do about it–in terms of making charitable donations while it’s still 2015, although I must confess that I sometimes give money on Jan 1-2 and claim it on my taxes for the year before, so I hope the NSA isn’t sharing this email with the IRS. People do ask me about it every year, sometimes in advance, so hopefully it’s not a waste, and if you don’t care then hit delete, or go onto the next fascinating Facebook article on 15 celebs that look gross after plastic surgery, or whatever….and I love comments on the blogs/Facebook/Twitter or by email, so please let me know what you think.
 
The main stuff is the issues below, but quick update on me and mine. Aero (1), Coco (4) and Amanda (unspecified) still continue to interrupt my attempts to waste my life away. Amanda says that my appeals for a diaper changing robot are unnecessary as Aero only has about 2,000 changes to go. She does say though that I might soon need one, Health 2.0 had a great year with our biggest ever crowd in Santa Clara plus 2 other successful conferences in the US plus others in Europe (Barcelona) Korea, Latin America  (São Paolo) and Japan, where I had great fun this November. I also snuck in a trip to Finland to talk about Health 2.0 (12 mins of fun here) at the wonderful SLUSH conference and had a cold plunge after a sauna, leading to my most viewed and commented Facebook video post ever! (Thanks to my host Pekka Sivonen). Thanks to everyone who worked for, volunteered at, spoke at or came to a Health 2.0 conference. 
 
In addition due to the work of  my long suffering partner Indu Subaiya, and our New York team led by Graeme Ossey & Jen David we now have a really vibrant business running challenges and pilots, including a huge new project for the World Bank exposing hospitals in India to new technology. You can also very occasionally see me write on The Health Care Blog which I own while John Irvine manages it (well sort of!!)
 
But this email isn’t about that, it’s about about issues, charity and politics—I missed end of 2013 but 2014’s was pretty good, so much of this is a minor update. If you want to see the past editions here’s 20122011 2010 20092008 and you can search back to 2002 (first one was either 2000 or 2001 but either way it was pre-Blogger so I dont have a copy!), As ever, this letter is about my views and suggestions for donations about health care, poverty in developing world, poverty at home, torture, drug prohibition, and other stuff…. And as I said earlier comments/insults are welcome
 
Health care & (poor) women’s & kids care
 
The affordable Care Act is finally established, having survived yet another crazy attack in the Supreme Court. And in the most expensive and inane way basically 10 more million Americans have health insurance than did before. But before you criticize, realize that this was the best that could be done given the insane politics of America and that, other than the disgraceful refusal by many southern Republican governors to expand Medicaid in southern states leaving many of the very poor uncovered, almost everyone now has the chance to be in the system–including those  people who had health conditions who were previously left to go broke or die. America hasn’t done entirely the right thing yet, but we are getting there.
 
What sadly has come into focus this year is the desperate attempts to attack women’s access to health care. If you’re a woman– especially a young or poor one who needs access to contraceptives, mammograms, cervical cancer screening, sexually transmitted disease testing, and all kinds of health procedures including safe abortions, it’s become the mission of mainstream Republicans to stop you getting them–using disgusting, deceitful, and downright illegal methods. And that’s as polite as I can say it. So my biggest bump in funding this year went to the one organization that consistently not only campaigns for but actually provides reproductive health services (including contraception, STD testing, counseling, pregnancy support and, yes, safe abortions), Planned Parenthood. I cannot believe that men want to live in a world where women cannot get these services, although I guess the evidence shows enough do….especially in Texas, Louisiana, Indiana and many more.

Finally Coco’s first pediatrician, the amazing Nadine Burke Harris just got a big grant to study the impact of Adverse Childhood Events.. Worth checking out some information about that here (no donation required!) 

Continue reading…

Job–Health 2.0 seeks Conference Director

Quick note from Matthew Holt, TCHB publisher

Our sister organization Health 2.0 is looking for a conference director. That is, someone to essentially be the GM of our conference business, reporting to me & Indu subaiya. We looking for someone who knows the world of new SMAC technologies in health care (go ahead, Google it!) & who can run an events business. If that’s you or someone you know, please take a look at this job description and apply there.

Health 2.0 Presents the Final Agenda for WinterTech 2016

Screen Shot 2015-12-09 at 2.18.47 PMHealth 2.0 announces the final agenda for the WinterTech conference, January 13, 2016 in San Francisco, California. As the only event dedicated to health tech and investing during the health investment mecca, JP Morgan Week, the event features leaders from Venrock, Canvas, Grand Rounds, Doximity, Livongo, Omada Health, Maverick Capital, GE Ventures, Kaiser Permanente and more. The conference brings together top health tech entrepreneurs, investors, and the health care establishment to discuss financial and business trends. “Everyone knows by now that health tech is a hot place for venture investing,” says Health 2.0’s Co-Founder Matthew Holt. “At Health 2.0 WinterTech, we are going to uncover the secrets of how the top VCs think and how they work with the star CEOs.” Key speakers will include:

Continue reading…

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