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Health in 2 Point 00 — with no video!

By MATTHEW HOLT (without JESS DAMASSA!)

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

COVID-19 Symptom Data Challenge Showcase Event — WEDNESDAY 4pm ET!

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. Register here!

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

#Healthin2Point00, Episode 173 | Calm, Story Health, Centivo, Ro & Pear

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

PointClickCare buys Collective Medical

By 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.

This is Your Brain on Microwaves

By KIM BELLARD

Those of us of a certain age well remember the 1987 ad campaign from the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. It equated frying an egg to what drugs did to our brains. The ad certainly impacted awareness, but it is less clear that it impacted drug use or, for that matter, that it actually was like what drugs did to our brains.

Well, it turns out that there is something that can scramble our brains, but it’s microwaves, and it appears that “malevolent actors” are using them to do just that. We’re now in the age of “directed, pulsed radiofrequency energy.” 

There were reports coming out of Havana in 2016 of State Department employees complaining of mysterious symptoms, including dizziness, fatigue, headaches, memory loss, balance issues, and hearing loss. Over the next couple years there were more reports, in Cuba and in other countries, including China and Russia, with CIA officers also seemed to be common targets. It has been labeled “the Havana syndrome.”

As least 44 people from Cuba and 15 from China were treated at Center for Brain Injury and Repair at the University of Pennsylvania, with more believed to have been treated elsewhere. No one could pin down exactly what was happening. 

Now the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine has issued a report concluding that the directed, pulsed microwave bursts were “the most plausible mechanism” to explain what happened. They evaluated but ruled out other mechanisms, such as background microwaves, chemical agents, infectious diseases, and even “psychological issues.” 

Committee chairman David Relman, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, said:

The committee found these cases quite concerning, in part because of the plausible role of directed, pulsed radiofrequency energy as a mechanism, but also because of the significant suffering and debility that has occurred in some of these individuals.  We as a nation need to address these specific cases as well as the possibility of future cases with a concerted, coordinated, and comprehensive approach.

One thing in particular that concerned the Committee was the presence of persistent symptoms in many victims – “persistent postural-perceptual dizziness (PPPD), a functional (not psychiatric) vestibular disorder that may be triggered by vestibular, neurologic, other medical and psychological conditions and may explain some chronic signs and symptoms in some patients.”  i.e., not only can you be impacted by such an attack, but the impairment can last an indefinite time. 

Continue reading…

RWJF Emergency Response Challenges Video

On November 19, 2020 Catalyst @ Health 2.0 hosted the finals of the RWJF Emergency Response Challenges, one for tools for the General Public and the other for the Health System. The promise of the tools that have been built as part of these challenges is immense in the battle against this COVID-19 pandemic and the ones yet to come. The finalists for the General Public challenge were:

Binformed Covidata– A clinically-driven comprehensive desktop + mobile infectious disease, epidemic + pandemic management tool targeting suppression and containment of diseases such as COVID-19. The presenter was veteran health IT expert Rick Peters.

CovidSMS– A text message-based platform providing city-specific information and resources to help low-income communities endure COVID-19. In contrast to Rick, CovidSMS’ team were undergraduates at Johns Hopkins led by Serena Wang

Fresh EBT by Propel– A technology tool for SNAP families to address food insecurity & economic vulnerability in times of crisis – highlighted by Michael Lewis on his Against the Rules podcast about coaching earlier this year. Stacey Taylor, head of partnerships for Propel presented their solutions for those in desperate need.

The finalists for the Health System challenge were:

PathCheck– A non profit just spun out of MIT. It has a raft of volunteers and well known advisors like John Brownstein and John Halamka among many others, and is already working with several states and countries. Pathcheck provides privacy first, free, open source solutions for public health to supplement manual contact tracing, visualize hot spots, and interface with citizen-facing privacy first apps. MIT Professor Ramesh Raskar was the presenter.

Qventus– A patient flow automation solution that applies AI / ML and behavioral science to help health systems create effective capacity, and reduce frontline burnout. Qventus is a great data analytics startup story. It’s raised over $45m and has lots of health system clients, and they have built a suite of new tools to help them with pandemic preparedness. Anthony Moorman, who won the best facial hair of the day award, showed the demo.

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. They’ve done a lot of work with soldiers with PTSD and as you’ll see entered this challenge to get their tools to another group of extremely stressed professionals–frontline health care workers. CEO Kimberlie Cerrone and COO Seth Norman jointly presented.

We also presented the Catalyst @ Health 2.0 Covid19 SourceDB between the two competitions. Please enjoy the video

THCB Book Club: Rosemarie Day – Marching Towards Coverage

Rosemarie Day has been a long time health care consultant and operator, most prominently as the COO of the Massachusetts Health Connector–the first real state exchange that was created as part of Romneycare (which with a few twists later became Obamacare!) Following the 2017 Women’s March, Rosemarie decided to write her own book, Marching Towards Coverage. It’s really four books in one. A personal patient & caregiver journal; a history of the slow march towards universal health care; a policy document; and a primer on how to become an activist. All in less than 200 pages! For the November THCB Book Club Jessica DaMassa and Matthew Holt talked with Rosemarie about what we can all do to really get to better health care for everyone.

#Healthin2Point 00, Episode 169 | They’re real and they’re SPACtacular!

Today on Health in 2 Point 00, It’s a whacky SPACy world, as a new SPAC rolls “UpHealth” and has me singing Bob Marley, meanwhile there’s $91m for remote clinical trial software player Medable, $76m more for Spring Health joining the throng of mental health companies, while K-Health gets $42m to introduce chat bot front ends to Korean pop music…or something like that. —Matthew Holt

RWJF Emergency Response Challenge Results!

by MATTHEW HOLT

Yesterday Catalyst @ Health 2.0 hosted the finals of the RWJF Emergency Response Challenges, one for tools for the General Public and the other for the Health System. It was a great session, sadly virtual and not at a conference with cocktails afterwards. But the promise of the tools that have been built as part of these challenges is immense in the battle against this COVID-19 pandemic and the ones yet to come.

The finalists for the General Public challenge were

  • Binformed Covidata– A clinically-driven comprehensive desktop + mobile infectious disease, epidemic + pandemic management tool targeting suppression and containment of diseases such as COVID-19. The presenter was veteran health IT expert Rick Peters.
  • CovidSMS– A text message-based platform providing city-specific information and resources to help low-income communities endure COVID-19. In contrast to Rick, CovidSMS’ team were undergraduates at Johns Hopkins led by Serena Wang
  • Fresh EBT by Propel– A technology tool for SNAP families to address food insecurity & economic vulnerability in times of crisis – highlighted by Michael Lewis on his Against the Rules podcast about coaching earlier this year. Stacey Taylor, head of partnerships for Propel presented their solutions for those in desperate need.

The finalists for the Health System challenge were

  • PathCheck–  A non profit just spun out of MIT. It has a raft of volunteers and well known advisors like John Brownstein and John Halamka among many others, and is already working with several states and countries. Pathcheck provides privacy first, free, open source solutions for public health to supplement manual contact tracing, visualize hot spots, and interface with citizen-facing privacy first apps. MIT Professor Ramesh Raskar was the presenter.
  • Qventus–  A patient flow automation solution that applies AI / ML and behavioral science to help health systems create effective capacity, and reduce frontline burnout. Qventus is a great data analytics startup story. It’s raised over $45m and has lots of health system clients, and they have built a suite of new tools to help them with pandemic preparedness. Anthony Moorman, who won the best facial hair of the day award, showed the demo.
  • Tiatros Inc– 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. They’ve done a lot of work with soldiers with PTSD and as you’ll see entered this challenge to get their tools to another group of extremely stressed professionals–frontline health care workers. CEO Kimberlie Cerrone and COO Seth Norman jointly presented.

Videos of the whole session and the demos will be up soon.

And the winners were…

A tie in General Public challenge between CovidSMS & BInformed, who split the $25,000 first prize (and the $10,000 second prize!)

Qventus in the Health System challenge who take home $25,000

But there were no losers. A great culmination of a lot of work to get tech solutions to help us deal with the pandemic.

Matthew Holt is Publisher of THCB and also Co-Chairman at Catalyst @ Health 2.0

THCB Gang Episode 33, Thursday 11/19

Episode 33 of “The THCB Gang” was live-streamed here Thursday, November 19th. You can watch it below.

Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) was joined by some of our regulars: CEO of Day Health Strategies Rosemarie Day (@Rosemarie_Day1), data privacy expert Deven McGraw (@healthprivacy), patient safety expert Michael Millenson (@MLMillenson) and health futurist Ian Morrison (@seccurve). While the chaos of the post election legal shenanigans goes on, we chatted what the Biden team might and can do, and look at the pre- and post-vaccine COVID-19 future of health care.

If you’d rather listen to the episode, the audio is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels.

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