David Medvedeff, CEO Aspen RxHealth, tells me about the new role of pharmacists in managing chronically ill patients. Aspen RxHealth has put together a network of independent pharmacists and a tool that allows them to select patients, call them and consult with them for their pharmacy issues. It’s kinda like the original Teladoc model but for pharmacists, while the clients are health plans keen for their patients to avoid problems with polypharmacy. They’ll be doing 200K+ consults this year and just raised $23m.
Attention digital health innovators! Do you have a health tech solution that can aid community-based care coordinators in COVID-19 vaccine screening and appointment scheduling for their underserved and vulnerable patients? Apply to the second Alliance for Better Health Rapid Response Open Call, hosted by Catalyst @ Health 2.0 & sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation!
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, the importance of ensuring health equity and access is vital. This RROC is looking for solutions to help community care coordinators and providers schedule appointments for COVID-19 vaccines for vulnerable and underserved patients who may be facing barriers to self-scheduling those vaccine appointments. The intended care providers are those working with patients who may lack resources, health literacy, or face other barriers to self-scheduling appointments. A select group of semi-finalists will have the opportunity to demo their technology. A grand prize winner will receive $15k and the opportunity to collaborate with Alliance for Better Health!
Do you have a solution that can fit this need? Apply HERE today! Applications close 2/2.
(This is the second of 2 COVID-19 RROC challenges from Alliance for Better Health. The first was for vaccine administration tracking announced on Tuesday 19th. Both are mentioned in the video from Jacob Reider, Alliance for Better Health’s CEO, which you can see below)
CEO Jacob Reider introduces the challenges
About Alliance For Better Health: Alliance For Better Health engages medical and social service providers in developing innovative solutions to promote people’s health, with a goal of transforming the care delivery system into one that incentivizes health and prevention. Established in 2015 as a Performing Provider System in the New York State Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment program (DSRIP), Alliance partners with more than 2,000 providers and organizations across a six-county area in New York’s Tech Valley and Capital Region.
Elizabeth Brown is a Program Manager at Catalyst @ Health 2.0
Attention digital health innovators! Do you have a tracking tool that can assist public health care providers in managing the two-phased COVID-19 vaccination administration? Apply to the Alliance For Better Health Rapid Response Open Call for Vaccination Administration Tracking!
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, the importance of ensuring health equity in #COVID19 vaccination administration for vulnerable and underserved populations is increasingly critical. Catalyst @ Health 2.0 is proud to host a Rapid Response Open Call (RROC) in collaboration with Alliance For Better Health. A select group of semi-finalists will have the opportunity to demo their technology. A grand prize winner will receive $15k and the opportunity to collaborate with Alliance For Better Health!
Do you have a solution that can fit this need? Apply HERE today! Applications close 1/31.
(This is the first of 2 COVID-19 RROC challenges from Alliance for Better Health. The second will be announced on Thursday 21st but is mentioned in the video from Jacob Reider below)
CEO Jacob Reider introduces the challenges
About Alliance For Better Health: Alliance For Better Health engages medical and social service providers in developing innovative solutions to promote people’s health, with a goal of transforming the care delivery system into one that incentivizes health and prevention. Established in 2015 as a Performing Provider System in the New York State Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment program (DSRIP), Alliance partners with more than 2,000 providers and organizations across a six-county area in New York’s Tech Valley and Capital Region.
Elizabeth Brown is a Program Manager at Catalyst @ Health 2.0
Andreesen Horowitz’s digital heath investor Julie Yoo has been building quite the theory of the present and future of health tech. I am going to try to write up a longer response to her but first, please view her presentation on the New Tech Stack for Virtual-First Care — a compelling 8 minute watch. And then have a quick read about how I am (trying to) put her in context.
Her first argument is that the digital services that you need to run health care (things like accounting/revenue management, network management, credentialing, pharmacy, etc, etc.) are getting really good. That means that startup digital heath companies can build services really quickly. No argument there. The second part of her argument is that incumbent organizations will also use these tools (actually already are using these tools) to improve their offerings.
Her argument is somewhere in the middle of three themes I’ve been banging on for a while.
My first argument is that too much VC money has been spent on new tech companies intending to prop up the incumbents and the incumbents by definition can’t change to become the type of virtual-primary care first chronic care management consumer friendly organizations that we need. I called this the Lynne Chou O’Keefe fallacy (which is why Julie wants one of her own!) and wrote it up on THCB about a year ago.
The second is the rather longer theme that I (with Indu Subaiya) have been banging on about called “Flipping the Stack”. The basic idea is that health care services now have the potential to go from an event-driven, encounter-driven acute-care delivery model to one where technology is able to measure, manage, message and monitor patients wherever they are, and that virtual services and physical interventions are layered over the top.
The third is my idea about the “continuous clinic” which is an attempt to describe the activities that an organization needs to run a 24/7 patient management organization. (I’ve presented on this many times but haven’t totally written it up–a version of how it might work for COVID patients is here).
Somewhere in what Julie is doing and in my fumbling towards new models is the idea of what a new health system will do and what it will look like.
Of course the related question is who will be the players? While we have United Healthgroup buying anything that moves and the incumbent hospital systems collectively sitting on an Apple/Google sized mountain of cash reserves, it’s hard to see the current system being changed dramatically by the people running it now.
On November 19th, six teams competed in two virtual pitch events for the finals of two Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Innovation Challenges, one for Emergency Response for the General Public and the other for Emergency Response for the Health Care System.
The teams – binformed | covidata, CovidSMS, and Fresh EBT by Propel for the General Public Challenge and Path Check, Qventus, and Tiatros, Inc., for the Health Care System Challenge – presented in front of expert judging panels, who evaluated the entries on impact, UX/UI, innovation/creativity, scalability and strength of presentation. (You can see the demos for all teams on yesterday’s post here)
binformed | covidata and CovidSMS tied for first place in the RWJF Emergency Response for the General Public Challenge and were each awarded $17,500.
Meanwhile, Qventus was declared the winner of the RWJF Emergency Response for the Health Care System Innovation Challenge and received $25,000.
After they had a chance to catch their breath and enjoy their wins, Catalyst caught back up with the three winning teams – hear the winners’ reflections below:
binformed | covidata – RWJF Emergency Response for the General Public Innovation Challenge Winner’s Interview
CovidSMS – RWJF Emergency Response for the General Public Innovation Challenge Winner’s Interview
Qventus – RWJF Emergency Response for the Health Care System Innovation Challenge Winner’s Interview
In mid-June, Catalyst launched the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Emergency Response Innovation Challenges. These Challenges, one for the General Public and one for the Health Care System, asked innovators to develop a health technology tool to support the needs of individuals as well as health care systems affected by a large-scale health crisis, such as a pandemic or natural disaster.
The Challenges saw a record number of applications— nearly 125 applications were submitted to the General Public Challenge and over 130 applications were submitted to the Health Care System Challenge. Over the course of several months and with the help of experts and industry leaders who evaluated the submissions, these applications were narrowed down to five and then again until only three teams per Challenge remained. These teams were:
Emergency Response for the General Public Finalists:
Binformed Covidata– Binformed is a clinically-driven comprehensive desktop + mobile infectious disease, epidemic + pandemic management tool targeting suppression and containment of diseases such as COVID-19.
CovidSMS– CovidSMS is a text message-based platform providing city-specific information and resources to help low-income communities endure COVID-19.
Fresh EBT by Propel– A technology tool for SNAP families to address food insecurity & economic vulnerability in times of crisis.
Emergency Response for the Health Care System Finalists:
Path Check– Path Check provides privacy first, free, open source solutions for public health to supplement manual contact tracing, visualize hot spots, and interfaces with citizen-facing privacy first apps.
Qventus– Qventus is a patient flow automation solution that applies AI / ML and behavioral science to help health systems optimize resources for Covid, create effective capacity, and reduce frontline burnout.
Tiatros– A mental health and social support platform that combines clinical expertise, peer communities and scalable technology to advance mental wellbeing and to sustain meaningful behavioral change.
These six teams competed in the finals, a virtual pitch event, on November 19th in front of expert judging panels, who evaluated the entries on impact, UX/UI, innovation/creativity, scalability and strength of presentation. (Also re-introduced during this event was Catalyst’s SourceDB, a health tech tracking database – more on that in a separate blog post here!)
In the Health Care System Innovation Challenge, judges awarded first, second, and third place to Qventus, Path Check, and Tiatros, Inc., respectively, with these teams receiving, in order, $25,000, $15,000, and $5,000. However, there was a tie for first in the General Public Innovation Challenge between binformed | covidata and CovidSMS. These two teams split the first and second place prizes and received $17,500 each, and Fresh EBT by Propel in third place received $5,000.
Due to @jessdamassa being lost in America and my totally crap internet in the Sierras, there is no #HealthIn2Point00 this week.
So I’m going to write out a few things we would have said:
1. @OscarHealth raises another $140m and files to IPO. SPAC or no SPAC, a bunch of these startup health plans are going to try to get out the door while the window is open! 420,000 members ain’t a lot–I mean there are 5-6 Medicaid plans bigger than that in CA alone! I still predict someone big buys them but whether pre- or post crash I don’t know.
2. @LyraHealth is raising another $175m (apparently). That’s the 3rd trip to the well THIS YEAR! Mental health is sexy these days. Just how many online mental health cos can make it? I think Lyra needs to use these $$ for automated self-service tech, cos psychiatrists don’t scale, and they currently sell themselves as having a better network than anyone else.
3. @kyruus buys @HealthSparq (from @Cambia). No $$ announced. Unclear why a company that makes $$ routing patients to doctors within systems (& prevents “leakage”) needs a transparency tool that explains who’s charging what. But maybe an overall pivot to serving health plans?
4. @h1insights raises $58m (total is over $70m). It’s a database of doctors sold to drug companies to help them better target their marketing. Good to know that in the new world of health tech, helping big pharma push pills is a reliable way to make bank.
OK, so that’s what I would normally have covered in 2 mins on #HealthIn2Point00 yes, it’s much better with @jessdamassa on video and running the show while poking fun at me. Hopefully the internet works next week! #MerryChristmas2020
After receiving applications from 115 people (across every continent except Antarctica!) and 50 organizations, including 35 academic institutions, the judges have declared DeepOutbreak, a team with members from Georgia Tech, the University of Iowa, and Virginia Tech as the winner of COVID-19 Symptom Data Challenge.
Second place was awarded to K&A, a Russia-based team working with the World Bank and the Higher School of Economics. $75,000 in prizes will be awarded to the winners.
The winners and the other three finalists will present their prototypes at the COVID-19 Symptom Data Challenge Showcase on Wednesday, December 16th, from 4-5:30pm ET. Registerhere!
The program’s distinguished speakers include
Dr. Tom Frieden, President & CEO of Resolve to Save Lives, an initiative of Vital Strategies & former director of the CDC
Dr. Mark McClellan, director of the Duke Margolis Center for Health Policy
Dr. Farzad Mostashari, CEO of Aledade & former National Coordinator for Health IT at the Department of Health and Human Services, and
Kang-Xing Jin, Facebook’s Head of Health.
Chrissy Farr, Principal and Health-Tech Lead at OMERS Ventures and former technology and health reporter for CNBC.com, will serve as emcee.
Register for the COVID-19 Symptom Data Challenge Showcase on Wednesday, December 16th, from 4-5:30pm ET here
It’s a wacky world today. Lynne Chou O’Keefe’s Devine Ventures has done 4 deals this week. Calm raises $75m it doesn’t seem to need, Story Health takes on navigation around specialty care, Centivo gets $34m to start a Collective Health rival, Ro moves into the home (literally) bringing diagnostics and Softbank money is back! The lucky recipient of their $80m is DTx company Pear Therapeutics about whom I have almost no opinion… Matthew Holt
I was a little surprised to find out that PointClickCare, a Canadian-based EMR that has a big market share in SNFs and long term care was buying Collective Medical, a Utah-based interoperability-sniffer (that’s a term I just made up). Collective specializes in extracting data from acute care EMRs to find where patients have received care (think: ERs), and transmit that information (think: meds & diagnoses) to other providers. (Press Release here). The logic is that the “post acute” landscape is getting more complex and better integrated with the rest of care, and Collective Medical will help get PointClickCare’s SNFs and the hospitals & home care agencies they work with much more accurate tracking of patient movements between them. Given the mess that sector is experiencing with COVID-19 right now, this should be a good idea.
I spoke to PointClickCare’s Dave Wessinger & Collective Medical’s Chris Klomp about the deal. They of course wouldn’t tell me the price, but Blake Dodge at Business Insider sniffed it out and thinks it’s $650m. Moody’s reports that PointClickCare raised $550m in debt to help–although I doubt those cunning Canucks handed over too much of that cash, and they certainly sound like they want to keep the whole Collective Medical team around.
FOLLOW US
THCB's Podcasts
Listen to them on Itunes or Spotify
Subscribe to our mailing list
Want to Partner with THCB?
View our Advertisement & Sponsorship Prospectus here
