Manav Sevak is the (young and very smart) CEO of Memora Health. I must admit to thinking that their service was just a patient chatbot, but it’s a lot more than that. It’s digitizing care workflows that touch both patients and of course the clinical care teams that support them–especially outside the walls of the hospital. They also collect a lot of patient data, and then guide their patients through their complex journey. Manav dives deep into the product and shows us a tad of the secret sauce behind the relatively simple front end of the product. Memora raised $40m earlier this year ($50m total) with Transformation, A16z, Frist Cressey & more in the cap table. If you want to understand how technology is changing clinical workflows in health care, this is a fascinating session–Matthew Holt
Ryan Bose-Roy
Caring Does Not Pay
BY KIM BELLARD
Things are tough all over the job market. With a jobless rate at 3.5%, and with millions of people who left the job market in 2020 opting to not return to work, employers are having a hard time finding workers. Your favorite restaurant or retail store probably has a “Help Wanted” sign out. Checking your bag for a flight has never been more problematic, in large part due to staffing issues. Even tech companies are having trouble hiring.
But I want to focus on a crisis in hiring for three industries that take care of some of our most vulnerable populations – teaching, child care, and nursing. It seems that what we say we want for our kids and the sick isn’t at all what we actually do to ensure that.
Continue reading…Lou Lasagna and the MIC “Integrated Career Ladder” – More Than Just A “Revolving Door.”
BY MIKE MAGEE
The New York Times recently shined a light on the FDA’s top science regulator of the tobacco industry, Matt Holman, who announced his retirement after 20 years to join Phillip Morris. As they noted, “To critics, Dr. Holman’s move is a particularly concerning example of the ‘revolving door’ between federal officials and the industries they regulate…”
As a Medical Historian, I’ve never been a fan of the casual “revolving door” metaphor because it doesn’t quite capture the highly structured and deliberate attempts of a variety of academic medical scientists over a number of decades in the 2nd half of the 20th century to establish and reward an “integrated career ladder” that connected academic medicine, industry and the government.
Continue reading…#HealthTechDeals Episode 40 | Everside Health, Particle Health, Annexus Health, and Homeward
Am I having a staring contest with the future of digital health? Who’s gonna blink first? How has demand gotten so low? What is going on? Tune in to this episode of Health Tech Deals to hear Jess and I hash things out, and to hear more new deals: Everside Health raises $164 million; Particle Health raises $25 million; Annexus Health raises $33 million; and Homeward raises $50 million.
-Matthew Holt
You Need Some Smarter Clothing
BY KIM BELLARD
Much as I’d love to write about Instagram’s feud with the Kardashians over changes to the Instagram feed, and how that and proposed changes to Facebook’s feed reflect Meta’s efforts to combat TikTok’s growing influence, I’ve already given healthcare plenty of warnings about TikTok. Instead, I’ll write about something else that the Kardashians care about: fashion.
Well, not fashion per se, but clothing. If the old, sexist statement was “clothes make the man,” then soon we may be saying “clothes make your health.”
The Washington Post got my attention when it reported last week about robotic clothing, because, as anyone who has been reading me for long knows, I am fascinated by robots and their role in healthcare. One of the advances the article discussed works on “smart fluid textiles” done by Dr. Thanh Nho Do and colleagues at the University of New South Wales Medical Robotics lab.
Continue reading…The Tech Layer for Home-Based Care? Tomorrow Health Hopes To Network-ize Home Health
BY JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH
Home-based healthcare is the stuff of tomorrow – literally. Tomorrow Health just closed a $60M Series B to grow their tech infrastructure biz into what CEO Vijay Kedar hopes will ultimately streamline and optimize how home health is ordered, delivered and paid for. This is the software that *could* be the thing that not only gets patients into home-based set-ups faster (vastly improving upon the up-to-90-minutes it currently takes providers to set-up home care for patients) but also creates a system for all stakeholders to track and monitor patient outcomes with an aim at the much larger, long-term opportunity: to realign incentives on value instead of fee-for-service.
Vijay came out of Oscar Health, meaning there is definitely a payer slant to the way this software is designed and deployed. Payers are Tomorrow Health’s clients, and it offers them a way to organize (or completely create, in some cases) home care networks out of the hundreds of different small, local market suppliers and providers that get medical equipment, skilled and unskilled services, and other in-home care elements to the doorsteps of the patients who need them. For a Geisinger Health Plan or Aetna – two of Tomorrow Health’s marquee clients – the software alleviates the pain of scaling this concept in every market while also providing a way to track what’s happening with the patient and build a “bridge” back into the health system that’s leading the patient care team.
With so many other players working in the home-health space – everyone from retail players like Walgreens/CareCentrix and Best Buy/Current Health to upstarts like Signify Health, Honor, and more – how will this tech stack approach play out against others that are one-stop-shops with frontline care and coordination layered on top? Will these ultimately be Tomorrow’s next clients?? Tune in to find out.
#HealthTechDeals Episode 39 | Cleery, Health Note, Elation, and Caraway
We’ve been duped! Everyone said nothing’s been going on in digital health, but Amazon bought OneMedical! Keep watching for our thoughts and new deals: Cleery raises $192 million; Health Note raises $17 million; Elation raises $50 million; Caraway raises $10.5 million.
-Matthew Holt
At the Core, Tuskegee Has Never Been Resolved
BY MIKE MAGEE
July 25, 1972 was fifty years ago this week and it is a day that all AP Science journalists know by heart. As Monday’s AP banner headline read: “On July 25, 1972, Jean Heller, a reporter on The Associated Press investigative team, then called the Special Assignment Team, broke news that rocked the nation. Based on documents leaked by Peter Buxtun, a whistleblower at the U.S. Public Health Service, the then 29-year-old journalist and the only woman on the team, reported that the federal government let hundreds of Black men in rural Alabama go untreated for syphilis for 40 years in order to study the impact of the disease on the human body. Most of the men were denied access to penicillin, even when it became widely available as a cure. A public outcry ensued, and nearly four months later, the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” came to an end.”
Continue reading…I Was Wrong
BY KIM BELLARD
The New York Times had an interesting set of op-eds last week under the theme “I Was Wrong.” For example, Paul Krugman says he was wrong about inflation, David Brooks laments being wrong about capitalism, and Bret Stevens now fears he was wrong about Trump voters. Nobody fessed up about being wrong about healthcare, so I’ll volunteer.
I’ve been writing regularly about healthcare for over a decade now, with some strong opinions and often with some pretty speculative ideas. I’ve had a lot to be wrong about, and I hope I will be wrong about many of them (e.g., microplastics). Some of my thoughts (such as on DNA storage or nanorobots) may just be still too soon, but there are definitely some things I’d thought, or at least hoped, would have happened by now.
I’ll highlight three:
Continue reading…Quickbite Interviews: Veda
I was at the AHIP conference in Vegas late last month and caught up with a number of CEOs & execs for some quick bite interviews — around 5 mins getting (I hope) to the gist of what they & their companies are up to. I am dribbling them out –Matthew Holt
Next up is Meghan Gaffney, CEO, Veda.
