Today on Health in 2 Point 00, Jess and I talk about the FDA informing Owlet, whose CEO Jess interviewed about their products and business model, that they can no longer sell their socks. EasyHealth, a medicare advantage broker, gets 35 million plus 100 million credit. Luma Health gets 130 million, bringing their total up to 170 million. Calal Health gets 77 million dollars, led by Ascension Ventures. Evercore buys Dr. Chrono. -Matthew Holt
Ryan Bose-Roy
Where’s Our National Health Tech Academy
By KIM BELLARD
It has been said that if your company has a Chief Innovation Officer or an Innovation Department, it’s probably not a very innovative company. To be successful, innovation has to be part of a company’s culture, embraced widely, and practiced constantly.
Similarly, if your company has a Chief Digital Officer, chances are “digital” is still seen as a novelty, an adjunct to the “real” work of the company. E.g., “digital health” isn’t going to have much effect on the healthcare system, or on the health of those using it, until it’s a seamless part of that system and their lives.
What got me thinking about this, oddly enough, was a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) as to the advisability of a Federal Academy – “similar to the military academies” – to develop digital expertise for government agencies. As the GAO noted: “A talented and diverse cadre of digital-ready, tech-savvy federal employees is critical to a modern, efficient government.”
Boy, howdy; you could say that about employees in a “modern, efficient” healthcare system too.
Continue reading…Health in 2 Point 00, Episode 241| Papa, Sword, Trevueta, Trusted Health, Ieso, and Talkspace
Today on Health in 2 Point 00, Jess and I talk about fundraising efforts this past week, as well as leadership issues within Talkspace. Papa raises 150 million dollars, bringing their total to 240 million. Sword raises 189 million dollars, with a secondary of 26 million dollars, bringing their total to 320 million dollars. Trevueta raises 105 million, and Trusted Health raises 149 million dollars. Ieso raises 57 million dollars. Talkspace had no growth in their third quarter, and their founding team left the company while their COO resigns after a review of conduct at a company offsite event. -Matthew Holt
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THCB Spotlights: Maya Said, CEO, Outcomes4Me
Today on THCB Spotlights, Matthew Holt talks with Maya Said, the CEO of Outcomes4Me, which works in the cancer patient empowerment space. Outcomes4Me is a patient empowerment platform that helps patients diagnosed or in active treatment for breast cancer understand their situation and treatment options, as well as connect better with providers to enable meaningful shared decision making. Maya tells us about the goals of Outcomes4Me, the current needs for enabling value-based care, and what the future directions are for Outcomes4Me, which recently closed a $12 million Series A round led by Northpond.
The Kids Aren’t Alright
By KIM BELLARD
America, like most cultures, claims to love and value children, but, gosh, the reality sure seems very different. Three recent reports help illustrate this: The Pew Research Center’s report on the expectation of having children, Claire Suddath’s searing look at the childcare industry on Bloomberg, and a UNICEF survey about how young people, and their elders, view the future.
It’s hard to say which is more depressing.
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Pew found that the percentage of non-parents under 50 who expect to have children jumped from 37% in 2018 to 44% in 2021. Current parents who don’t expect to have more children edged up slightly (71% to 74%). The main reason given by childless adults for not wanting children was simply not wanting children, cited by 56% of those not wanting children. Among those who gave a reason, medical and financial reasons were cited most often. Current parents were even more likely – 63% – to simply say they just didn’t want more.
This shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. Earlier this year the Census Bureau reported that the birthrate in America dropped for the sixth consecutive year, the largest percentage one year drop since 1965 and the lowest absolute number of babies since 1979. It’d be easy to blame this on the pandemic, but, as sociologist Phillip N. Cohen told The Washington Post: “It’s a shock but not a change in direction.”
In many ways, having children seems like ignoring everything that’s going on. We have a climate change/global warming crisis that threatens to wreak havoc on human societies, we’re still in the middle of a global pandemic, and our political/cultural climate seems even more volatile than the actual climate. One Gen Xer told The New York Times: “As I think of it, having a child is like rolling dice with the child’s life in an increasingly uncertain world.”
Yikes.
Continue reading…THCB Spotlights: Lindsay Jurist-Rosner, Wellthy
Today on THCB Spotlight, Matthew sits down with Wellthy’s CEO Lindsay Jurist-Rosner to talk about the healthcare system’s need to support caregivers. Wellthy works in the caregiving space, and Lindsay tells us about the company’s mission to provide a software and platform experience that offers organization and structure to support those who are caring for a loved one. Lindsay also talks to us about her personal inspiration for starting Wellthy and how their business model operates. Wellthy has raised $50 million in total and has closed up $35 million this summer.
988: A New Lifeline for Mental Health Emergencies
By BEN WHEATLEY
Miles Hall, a 23-year-old Black man experiencing a psychotic episode, was shot and killed by police after 911 received calls of a disturbance in his Walnut Creek, California neighborhood. His mother Taun Hall had taken steps to warn the local police that her son had been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and that he might be prone to mental health crises. She believed she had done enough to ensure that, in the event of a crisis, her son would be treated with care. But when the crisis came, authorities viewed Miles’ behavior through the lens of public safety, not through the lens of mental health, and it cost him his life.
Continue reading…Healthcare Not a Part of the US Inflation Surge: Who Knew?
By JEFF GOLDSMITH
When I first appeared in The Health Care Blog fourteen long years ago, it was to decry the policy community’s obsessive search for bad news about the health system: https://thehealthcareblog.com/blog/2007/10/03/the-perpetual-health-care-crisis-by-jeff-goldsmith/. So while we struggled with the COVID pandemic, we continued hearing regularly about pharmaceutical price gouging, anti-competitive hospital mergers, bad labor relations, and provider burnout. Thus, we can expect to hear nothing whatsoever about the failure of the health system to participate in the current outburst of inflation in the US economy.
The Washington think tank Altarum Institute tracks such things, and in its November 16 report https://altarum.org/sites/default/files/uploaded-publication-files/SHSS-Price-Brief_November_2021.pdf, we learn that healthcare prices rose by an annualized rate of just 2% in October 2021 compared to the Consumer Price Index’s 6.2% and the Producer Price Index’s 8.6%. Altarum commented that this was “surprising given that many of the same factors impacting economywide prices (labor shortages, supply chain issues, and increased demand for economywide services) would be expected to impact health care as well.”
THCB Spotlights: Chris Gervais, CTO of Kyruus
Today on THCB Spotlight, Matthew talks with Chris Gervais, the CTO of Kyruus, which began in the world of fixing scheduling for hospital systems. Chris talks more about their recent acquisition of HealthSparq in the last year and what this acquisition means for the future of Kyruus and the audience it serves. Kyruus’ original concept was having good rich accurate and complete provider data. Ultimately, the aim is to build out a rich provider directory spanning a large number of the US provider population, as well as all these other care options for patients to find, that builds transparency and trust.
Rumor Check with Vida Health’s CEO: Buyer Sentiment on Virtual Care, At-Risk Models, Mental Health
By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF Health
To hear Vida Health’s CEO Stephanie Tilenius talk about what she’s hearing from payers, providers, and employers about at-risk value-based models, the shift to virtual care, and the growing importance of mental health services as a culture-builder for businesses forced into a part-virtual-part-in-office world, you get a sense of how her past work leading the various payments and commerce businesses of Google, eBay, and PayPal probably comes in handy. For example, the shift to virtual care, she says, is, “like the Internet in 1999…It’s happening.”
We get an update on exactly how Vida Health is making it happen themselves, and how they expect their newly expanded at-risk model will help. Vida’s always been fees-at-risk on physical outcomes related to diabetes management, hypertension, etc. BUT the mental health side of their offering (which experienced 6000% growth year-over-year during the pandemic) is now at-risk on outcomes too. With so much happening across the industry to move to value-based models, we deep-dive with Stephanie to hear what she’s hearing from her clients, including client-and-investor Centene and hear about growth in the employer market where she sees a major shift in how employers are thinking about healthcare as the new sexy job perk. “Instead of snacks or transportation or other benefits,” says Stephanie. “It’s all about healthcare.”
