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Category: Health Tech

Future of Big Data in Health? LexisNexis® Risk Solutions Says Next-Gen Tokenization & Health Equity

BY JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH

Data-juggernaut LexisNexis® Risk Solutions is making a big data play in healthcare, launching a new capability that allows for unprecedented accuracy in the kind of de-identified data that payers, providers, and pharma are clamoring to use for everything from cutting admin expenses to improving patient outcomes and health equity.

Jeff Diamond, President & General Manager of The Health Care Business of LexisNexis® Risk Solutions and Andrea Green, Director of Healthcare Strategy, SDoH, drop in for a chat about all things VERY big data, including this concept of “next-gen tokenization” which leverages LexisNexis’s massive amount of consumer data as a way to connect data “personas” to create a much more accurate, actionable, and longitudinal view of a patient.

The thing to understand is just how much health data LexisNexis® Risk Solutions is working with and who they are working with it for: 90% of commercial payers in the US; 8 of the Top 10 pharma manufacturers; 10 of the Top 10 retail pharmacies; and hundreds of hospital systems.

So, how is this data “turned” into insightful and actionable information that appeals to this top-tier clientele? Jeff and Andrea walk through use case after use case that demonstrate the ‘business of healthcare’ applications of the LexisNexis data processing platform (think patient safety, risk stratification, claims analytics, provider directory, etc.) with special emphasis on how their new analytics suite, focused on Social Determinants of Health data, is helping with such clinical initiatives as improving diversity in clinical trials and providing predictive insights about patients who might need mental healthcare support. The data comes to life in this one. Watch now!

How Is Salesforce a Catalyst for the Consumerization of Healthcare? The Magic Formula is CRM + EMR

By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH

How is Salesforce thinking about the healthcare consumer? I had the chance to ask Salesforce’s SVP & GM of Health & Life Sciences, Amit Khanna, about it from both a product — and a lexicon – standpoint at Dreamforce 2022.

Words matter. So, Salesforce’s use of “customer” when talking about our usual “patients” or “health plan members” or “clinical trial participants” is a bit jarring at first, in the sense that it forces the issue of “patient centricity” to the extreme… to a “customer is always right” place, at least for me. I ask Amit about that terminology, its intentionality, and how he thinks his clients across the healthcare ecosystem are doing when it comes to embracing this new term and the new way of thinking it requires in order to truly activate it.

On the product side, we dive into Salesforce’s BIG launch this year: Salesforce Genie. This is cool in the Health & Life Sciences biz for a number of reasons, mostly because it is the manifestation of that consumerization idea. Real time data, a holistic “customer profile” (aka longitudinal patient record) – these are the things that consumers are used to across industries, says Amit, and the new product release focuses on integrating these for payers, providers, med tech companies, pharma and more. How could these features drive change in the healthcare ecosystem? Amit gives a glimpse of what Salesforce thinks is the ‘big win,’ specifically when it comes to that “wholistic customer profile” and the idea that an EMR and CRM can co-exist to serve different purposes in healthcare.

NEW Today! Health System Patient Comms Startup Well Health Becomes Artera

BY JESSICA DaMASSA

Gotta love a new name! Well Health, arguably one of the best-funded digital front door and patient communications startups you’ve never heard of (they’ve raised just under $100 million with little to no fanfare) is today announcing their new moniker, Artera.

Founder & CEO Guillaume de Zwirek breaks the news with us and talks about the strategy behind the name change from both a brand and a business standpoint. Artera is in the (still) hot health tech infrastructure space, selling a platform that health systems can easily integrate into their EMR systems, patient portals or other practice management software to easily send text messages, emails, or other communications to patients.

We get into the details about Artera’s business model, 500+ provider org client base (and what Gui is hearing about their current business challenges) and find our way into a big discussion about digital health funding, that whole bubble thing, health tech startup layoffs, and where Gui thinks the market is headed next. Bottom line: Some interesting comments here (starting around 18.30 mark) about how this might actually help healthcare in the long run.

Salesforce for SDOH: Health Equity is Taking Center Stage in Salesforce’s Real-Time Health Data Play

By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH

At Dreamforce 2022, Salesforce’s big annual user conference, “real-time data” was THE topic of conversation as the tech company launched a brand-new platform across its lines of business to help make this type of data integration-plus-analytics “magically” easy. I caught up with Salesforce’s EVP & CRO of Global Health & Life Sciences, LaShonda Anderson-Williams, just after her division’s keynote to find out more about how the new platform (called Customer 360 for Health) is intended to impact what we can do with health data, particularly in the realm of improving health equity and access to care.

Never mind the actual new product features – telehealth integration, health scoring, longitudinal patient records, marketing integrations, etc. – the sum-total of their potential impact is intended to not only improve the way healthcare understands its patients as health consumers, but to also enable it to better meet their nuanced needs with more personalized “seamless” experiences.

LaShonda and I chat about how this type of work is already happening at CVS Health and Moderna – the two marquee customer stories shared during the keynote – as well as how other healthcare organizations can benefit from “putting data at the center” of their health equity initiatives. Her best advice for health and life sciences businesses as they work on improving health access for all? Tune in to find out!

The Digital Health Update from Europe: Startups, Funding, Frontiers Health & More

BY JESSICA DaMASSA

Roberto Ascione, CEO of European marketing and innovation consultancy, Healthware Group, and Chairman of Europe’s premier digital health conference, Frontiers Health, literally has a front-row seat to all the happenings in Europe’s scaling digital health, digital therapeutics, and telehealth markets.

With juuuust enough time for American investors and innovators to snag their own ticket for a seat at Frontiers Health in Milan on October 20-21, 2022, we check in with Roberto to see if European health tech startups are fairing any better than their US-based counterparts, if EU-based investors are just as flush with funding as they have been through the pandemic, and if enthusiasm is still high for virtual care and digital health among government healthcare organizations, their health systems, and their patients.

Europe is NOT the same market as the US, and Roberto details some notable differences in the state-of-play and top-of-mind issues facing health tech across the pond. Many of these topics will take center stage at Frontiers Health, including some important governance conversations around digital therapeutics. For the gossip on what’s happening in health tech in Europe, check out this interview and for more on what’s on the agenda at Frontiers (which can be attended virtually for those averse to Milan 😉) head on over to www.frontiers.health.

NeuroFlow & The Tech that Jumps the Care Gaps Between Physical Check-ups & Mental Health Care

By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH

Mental health infrastructure company, NeuroFlow, is a tech platform that integrates into care management systems and EHRs to help clinicians and care managers identify behavioral health conditions in patients as they are getting physical health exams like annual check-ups, post-partum exams, and more. Founder & CEO Chris Molaro joins us from NeuroFlow’s new headquarters just hours before their grand opening to talk about how the startup – which has raised a total $32 million, including a $20 million Series B led by Magellan Health – is helping health systems and health plans integrate and automate workflows so they can better identify, risk-stratify, and serve patients who need mental health services.

Right off the bat, Chris starts out by explaining what NeuroFlow IS by what it IS NOT; NeuroFlow is not a telehealth company and it doesn’t directly deliver mental health care to any patients. Instead, it is a platform that makes it easier for those who are working with patients to be able to more consistently screen for mental health issues, provide follow-up support, and transition patients to the right level of mental health care via a step-care model complete with referral pathways.

The care management component of NeuroFlow gets splashier from here, with the ability to integrate and analyze data from wearable devices and free-form data sources like text messages with providers to flag anomalies in everyday behaviors that might be clues that could indicate that someone may in distress. How else does the tech help build a bridge from physical check-up to mental health care providers, particularly in an era where the supply-and-demand imbalance for mental healthcare is so off? We talk all things scaling-up, how the “modular” business model works, AND we find out why NeuroFlow’s new offices are so important to the company and its Philly roots. Watch now!

THCB Gang Episode 105, Thursday September 22 at 1pm PT, 4pm ET

Joining Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) for #THCBGang on Thursday September 22 are delivery & platform expert Vince Kuraitis (@VinceKuraitis); THCB regular writer and ponderer of odd juxtapositions Kim Bellard (@kimbbellard); and in a quick late switch everyone’s favorite cynical radiologist Saurabh Jha (@RogueRad) joins us too

You can see the video below & if you’d rather listen than watch, the audio is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels.

The Future of Clinical Trials at Pfizer

BY JESSICA DaMASSA

From de-centralized clinical trials to real world data (RWD), real world evidence (RWE), and even social media, the future for clinical research at Pfizer sounds increasingly tech-enabled and focused on meeting and engaging patients where they are.

Pfizer’s Head of Clinical Trial Experience, Judy Sewards, and Head of Clinical Operations & Development, Rob Goodwin, drop in to chat about what Pfizer’s approach to clinical research looks like now, after the rapid evolution it underwent to “lightspeed” the development of the Covid-19 vaccine.

The big change? Rob says they are “obsessed” with de-centralized trials, with nearly 50% of clinical trial visits still happening virtually. And, beyond the convenience factor, both point to de-centralization as a critical factor in being able to recruit more patients into trials as well as improve the diversity of their participant groups. In the end, the decentralized approach, says Judy, is “not just a matter of equity, but good science as well.”

And what about improvements to the cost of drug development? Is it too soon to tell if de-centralization will make an impact on the bottom line? Innovation may be expensive to implement at first, but, explains Rob, “If you can recruit your trial faster, overall, the cost of development goes down and speed to the patient goes up.”

We chat through the full suite of benefits that de-centralized clinical trials are bringing Pfizer and its patient populations, and get into the utility of real-world data, which also saw new notoriety when the Covid-19 vaccine was being developed. How is RWD impacting clinical research even when it’s not being used as evidence in a regulatory approval process? Watch and find out more about how data innovation is shaping the future of pharma!

Ribbon Health & Provider Data’s Holy Grail: The Accurate Provider Directory

BY JESSICA DaMASSA

It’s one of the greatest mysteries of the era of health data digitization: Why is provider directory still so hard to get right?? Ribbon Health’s co-founder & CEO Nate Maslak explains how Ribbon (which started out in the symptom-checker biz) pivoted to take on, once-and-for-all, the miserable state of provider data management to not only fix provider directories (which are still wrong 50% of the time!), but also referral management systems, health plan enrollment data, and now, thanks to those new price transparency rules, price lists.

“All of the different use cases we focus on around enrollment, referral management, provider data management for directory…” explains Nate, “These are actually the same problem that use different words to describe it because of the different parts of the ecosystem that we’re in.” So, as Ribbon gets the process right for provider directory by building an underlying tech platform that uses predictive analytics and network effect methodologies to work its magic to validate-and-verify that kind of healthcare data, then it can apply that framework to ANY healthcare data to the same end. And, maybe one day, layer member-facing services – like instant-booking with a doc – on top of them.

Backed by nearly $54 million from Andreesen Horowitz and General Catalyst, and we get into what makes this startup’s take on one of the oldest healthcare infrastructure issues so appealing. From platform to business model (which serves a mix of health plans, provider orgs and patient-facing solutions) to grand plans for the future (which include figuring out how “API as a platform” can further productize provider data management and power care decisions) we chat with Nate on all things Ribbon Health.

THCB Gang Episode 104, Thursday September 15 at 1pm PT, 4pm ET

Joining Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) on #THCBGang on Thursday September 15 patient safety expert and all around wit Michael Millenson (@mlmillenson); Suntra Modern Recovery CEO JL Neptune (@JeanLucNeptune); fierce patient activist Casey Quinlan (@MightyCasey); delivery & platforms expert Vince Kuraitis (@VinceKuraitis); &  policy expert consultant/author Rosemarie Day (@Rosemarie_Day1);

You can see the video below & if you’d rather listen than watch, the audio is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels.