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Virtual Care Regulatory Round-Up: Ro’s Z Reitano & Virtual-First’s Power to Control the Care Journey

by JESSICA DAMASSA, WTF Health

“What happens when there is a massive shift of where the beginning of a journey occurs…that sort of affords the opportunity for everyone after that to be disintermediated.” So says Zachariah “Z” Reitano, co-founder & CEO of Ro, arguably one of the most successful OG virtual-first care companies which has been providing telehealth-plus-testing-plus-pharmacy-delivery (and now a whole lot more) via its Roman and Rory brands since 2017.

As health tech companies – and now, more and more incumbent orgs and retail health providers – evolve their own “omnichannel” strategies, we talk to Z about Ro’s direct-to-patient care model, and what we can learn from its successful operation and expansion as one of the first “digitally native” healthcare providers.

To Z, the technology is just an enabler to a larger shift in how people are ultimately gaining more control over their health. Technology can turn luxuries into commodities, he says, and, at Ro, that’s translating into a concept they’re calling “goal-oriented healthcare,” which is basically providing the “luxury” of giving a patient what they want, when they want it; easily, conveniently, and affordably.

In short, Z explains: “Patients come to us, and they say what they want to achieve: ‘I want to lose weight…I want to have a child…I want to improve my mental health…I want to improve my skin…I want to have better sex.’ And then, we help them from beginning to end in the most convenient and effective way possible.”

The role of digital in all this is critical. It allows for costs to be stripped out, for providers to be able to practice at the top of their licenses, and for data to be shared between provider and patient asynchronously (aka conveniently.) But, it sounds like what’s most exciting about ‘virtual-first’ to Z is the “first” part – having the opportunity to initialize the relationship with the patient, then “raise the standard of where we guide people afterwards, and have the opportunity to disintermediate and really heavily influence the entire patient journey.”

Oooohh – can’t hear enough about this! Tune in to find out more about how Z sees virtual-first care as changing patients’ relationships with the healthcare system AND, because we had to talk a little policy too, get his thinking on how barriers like state licensure that are often looked at as constraints to ‘virtual care at-scale’ might also be evolving to help enable that shift.

* Special thanks to our series sponsor, Wheel – the health tech company powering the virtual care industry. Wheel provides companies with everything they need to launch and scale virtual care services — including the regulatory infrastructure to deliver high quality and compliant care. Learn more at www.wheel.com.

And you thought Mastadons were extinct…

by KIM BELLARD

Until last week, for me, “mastodon” only meant the giant animal that went extinct several thousand years ago (I was, it appears, unaware of the heavy metal band Mastodon). Now, as the result of Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, many Twitter users are being forced to take a look at alternatives, such as the social networking site Mastodon.

It’s possible that we are about the witness the Myspace-ization of Twitter, brought down by competition, bad management, and bad product decisions. In my usual “there must be a pony in here somewhere” fashion, there may be some lessons in the Twitter saga that healthcare might want to pay attention to.

As most know by now, Mr. Musk has been a Twitter power user for many years, and a frequent critic. In March of this year he started discussions about purchasing it. In short order, he threw out a bold bid, was rejected then accepted by Twitter’s board, tried to get out of the deal, was sued by Twitter, and closed the deal late last month. 

Then things got really rocky.   

Mr. Musk tried to reassure squeamish advertisers, only to make them and others even more nervous when he retweeted some disinformation. After a spike in hate speech on the site, he promised that, as much as he was buying Twitter out of his love for free speech, Twitter “cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!” Then he shocked observers (and Twitter employees) by suddenly laying off half the workforce, including much of the content moderation staff. Some are now being asked back, being told they were laid off “by mistake.”   

He then floated a balloon about charging $20 a month for Twitter’s blue verification, had a tweet argument with Stephen King about it, then went forward with a $7.99 plan, only to be punked by users illustrating the flaws. At this writing, the plan now appears to be on hold, at least until Tuesday’s mid-term elections. 

Advertisers appear to be fleeing, or at least curtailing spending.

As The Wall Street Journal put it: “In Elon Musk’s first week at Twitter Inc., he flouted much of the advice management gurus have dished out for decades.” It’s no wonder many Twitter users are looking at Mastodon.

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I’m trying to get AI to write this!

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By MATTHEW HOLT

So it’s a new world in blogging about health care, and when I want to write about Digital Health or primary care, I’ve been told that this system at Lex.Page can do it for me

So here goes and lets see what it says about Digital Health or primary care

Digital Health is one of the most rapidly growing and important sectors in health care today. It is a broad term that encompasses the use of technology to improve health and health care.

OK so it wrote that. Which isn’t bad but not too helpful

Perhaps I can ask it whether it thinks that digital health will have a big impact on the future of primary care

The system at Lex writes that it does think digital health will have a big impact on the future of primary care.

So now it’s just spitting back at me what I asked it. Not too sure how to get it to write more for me

I then asked it to follow this sentence — The biggest challenges for primary care are

-Access to care

-Cost of care

-Quality of care

So it seems that digital health can help with all of those things. By providing tools that help patients better self-manage their health, digital health can help to improve access to care. By providing tools that help to lower the cost of care, digital health can help to make care more affordable. And by providing tools that help to improve the quality of care, digital health can help to make

That is pretty damn good given it’s a machine just guessing what I want it to write, even if it didn’t finish that last sentence. I can imagine that pretty soon I’ll be able to spit one of my talks into it and it will be able to write an article out of it quickly. I’ll be playing around with Lex and I can give some invites — if you want one, let me know.

Patient Journey or Customer Journey? How Salesforce’s CRM Aims to Reposition the EHR

BY JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH

While at Dreamforce 2022, one of most thought-provoking things I heard was that, in order to really meet the needs of the healthcare consumer, we in healthcare need to once-and-for-all let go of the idea that there will be “one tech system to rule them all” and adopt an “and both” approach that integrates both the EHR and a CRM. The EHR is how we’ll “know the patient” and the CRM is how we’ll “know the customer.”

Dr. Geeta Nayyar, Salesforce’s SVP & Chief Medical Officer and Amit Khanna, SVP & GM of Salesforce’s Health & Life Sciences business join me to unpack this “and both” approach to infrastructure technology and talk all-things healthcare consumer. The paradigm shift that comes with this duality – we are at times “patients”, we are at times “customers” – is a big one. Especially in healthcare.

Dr. G speaks to the strategy that Salesforce is operating under to take its tech further into the healthcare and life sciences space, while Amit introduces us to some of the new Healthcare 360 product features launched at Dreamforce that fully show-off Salesforce’s expertise at integrating different technology solutions (Slack, MuleSoft, telehealth) and making perfect sense of massive amounts of real-time data (longitudinal record, health scoring).

As Salesforce advances further into the health market with more care-forward features in its CRM and a strategic focus on healthcare-important issues like improving equity and access to care, will our traditional view of the importance of the EHR change? What if the replacement tech comes with ‘self-service at-scale’ and more ‘seamless experiences?’ Could we head away from “and both” and choose CRM “instead of?” Tune in – the EHR IT infrastructure may have finally met its match!

Sylvana Sinha, CEO, Praava Health

Sylvana Sinha is CEO of Praava Health, a primary & specialty care network based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. While the average American may only think about Bangladesh when there’s some disaster on the news it’s a country of 165m+ people with a GDP per capita exceeding India’s. It lacks excellent health services for its growing middle class, and that’s the gap Praava Health is filling. I learned a lot about Sylvana, Bangladesh, and Praava in this quick interview —Matthew Holt

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.

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