Another quickbite from the end of last year. I caught up with Rami Karjian CEO & Pippa Shulman CMO, Medically Home. The company has grown a lot since its early days growing out of Atrius Medical Group in Boston. Now they are delivering hospital at home tools and services in 19 states and have had huge investments from Mayo, Kaiser and others. Covid, as you can imagine, helped a bit! Costs are down, outcomes are up, and 20-30% of hospital care could be heading to the home. This one looks real–Matthew Holt
Accepting your Future Avatar: Leveraging Digital Twins for Transforming Healthcare
by SMRITI KIRUBANANDAN
A possibility to do better and be better by observing yourself (your twin) reacting to various feeds and gaining the ability to gain better care and improve research, seems like a super power. The concept of a Digital Twin is the ability to replicate a person, an object or a process derived from extracting various data points from internet of things (IOT) that are attached to the original object. One can view how the digital twin responds to various feeds and give us a deeper understanding on the possibilities and impact for the real person or object. Shifting this concept into healthcare, I am going to take this up a notch and propose, what if a person has an opportunity to accept their future avatar presented to them and it is reflected and implemented immediately?
As per Research and Markets report
- Up to 89% of all IoT platforms will include digital twins by 2025
- Digital twinning will be a standard IoT feature by 2027
- Nearly 36% of executives across a variety of industries understand the benefits of digital twinning, with about half of them planning to use it in their operations by 2028
Here are some of the ways a Digital Twin would play a role in making healthcare accurate, smart and reliable while greatly improving member experience:
Delivering the right Frequency of Care
In the United States, 400,000 hospital patients experience some form of preventable harm each year, accounting for a cost of over $20 billion annually.
Giving the proper care at the right time is vital in improving patient experience and the quality of care, and reducing healthcare costs. By using the digital twin concept, we can replicate the process, understand a person’s reactions to different treatments, and help customize the frequency of care needed. That might include understanding and getting more precise with the medication doses based on the Twin’s reactions or refining a type of surgical procedure based on possible recovery and impact. It might inspire a patient to make the right decisions based on the digital twin at the right time. Accepting their future avatar might give a patient hope and psychological comfort before starting a treatment or procedure and, most importantly, could build trust with their provider.
Continue reading…Searching For The Next Search
By KIM BELLARD
I didn’t write about ChatGPT when it was first introduced a month ago because, well, it seemed like everyone else was. I didn’t play with it to see what it could do. I didn’t want it to write any poems. I didn’t have any AP tests I wanted it to pass. And, for all you know, I’m not using it to write this. But when The New York Times reports that Google sees ChatGPT as a “Code Red” for its search business, that got my attention.
A few months ago I wrote about how Google saw TikTok as an existential threat to its business, estimating that 40% of young people used it for searches. It was a different kind of search, mind you, with video results instead of links, but that’s what made it scary – because it didn’t just incrementally improve “traditional” search, as Google had done to Lycos or Altavista, it potentially changed what “search” was.
TikTok may well still do that (although it is facing existential issues of its own), but ChatGPT could pose an even greater threat. Why get a bunch of search results that you still have to investigate when you could just ask ChatGPT to tell you exactly what you want to know?
Look, I like Google as much as anyone, but the prospect that its massive dominance of the search engine market could, in the near future, suddenly come to an end gives me hope for healthcare. If Google isn’t safe in search, no company is safe in any industry, healthcare included.
Continue reading…THCB Gang Episode 111, Thursday December 22
It’s the Christmas special THCB Gang where we reviewed the year! Joining Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) on #THCBGang on Thursday December 22 were privacy expert Deven McGraw (@healthprivacy), fierce patient activist Casey Quinlan (@MightyCasey); Jennifer Benz (@Jenbenz); and medical historian Mike Magee (@drmikemagee). And then in our end of year tradition a few other gang members dropped in towards the end.
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.
HLTH 2022: Mental Health IT Infrastructure Proves Highly Fundable – Inside NeuroFlow’s $25M Series C
By JESSICA DAMASSA, WTF HEALTH
At the intersection of two (still) hot areas of health tech investment – IT infrastructure and mental health – sits NeuroFlow, 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 their annual check-ups, post-partum exams, and other routine healthcare services. The startup just added another $25 million in growth capital to its coffers in mid-October, bringing their total funding to just under $60 million. We chat with CEO Chris Molaro about how this new funding will be used to continue fueling the company’s scale-up efforts and how provider orgs are responding to the added responsibility that comes with providing this type of mental health care screening across its care teams.
HLTH 2022: Market State-of-Play with Stephanie Davis of SVB Securities
By JESSICA DAMASSA
“If last year was EUPHORIA…‘We made it! Digital health is relevant!’ This year, it’s a little more panic. More, ‘Are we okay???’” SVB Securities’ Senior Managing Director Stephanie Davis says that she’s been getting asked for a lot of advice this year, so we jump on the bandwagon. Should digital health and health tech be worried? What about exits? What areas of health innovation are still hot? Which are not? And, what the heck is “creative destruction” and why is it her favorite buzz phrase from HLTH 2022?
Stephanie answers all our questions, reassures us of the healthcare market’s resiliency, and offers up some high-level perspective on which “wallet” (payer, pharma, or provider) startups will want to align with to weather the short-term.
Bad Backs & Deductibles
It’s time again for me to use my bad back as a case study in why American health care has such crazy incentives.
About a month ago at the HLTH conference in Vegas, over the course of a few hours I developed debilitating leg pain. To quote from my earlier twitter thread on my time in Vegas, “After 3 days of excruciating pain, my wife insisted I went to the ER. The public policy person in me was horrified but we had already spent our deductible, so the cost was actually lower than paying cash for an MRI”
What actually happened was that after 3 days of dreadful pain & inability to walk (including getting myself home from Vegas using multiple wheelchairs, and being that guy who crawls off the plane onto a wheelchair), I got in to see my chiropractor. He said, you need an MRI to figure out what’s wrong with you. The alternatives were
1) Get insurance to pre approve the MRI. His guess was that that would take a few days or more. I actually called One Medical‘s urgent care video line and the PA I spoke to told me that usually insurance would only approve an MRI after I had done 6 weeks of physical therapy.
2) Pay $500 cash for a free standing MRI that could probably get me in during the next few days
3) Go to the ER
Now the “incentives” part of this starts to really matter.
Continue reading…HLTH 2022: Health Tech Market Check-Up with Lux Capital’s Deena Shakir
By JESSICA DAMASSA, WTF HEALTH
Deena Shakir, General Partner at Lux Capital, shares her take on the market state-of-play for healthcare innovation amid these “tumultuous” economic times. As an investor, Deena has been a passionate advocate for women and children’s health and her fund, Lux Capital, invests broadly in health tech – pre-seed to pre-IPO, from virtual-first care delivery businesses like women’s health clinic, Maven, (on whose Board Deena sits after Lux co-led their $110M Series D) to health tech infrastructure businesses like Commure and Tendo and those working in AI, ML, and robotics.
We get into which types of emerging health businesses Deena thinks are still “hot” despite the downturn, specifically talking about what’s changing in women’s health including current care gaps, health IT infrastructure and its “moment” this year, and how the opportunities in mental health investing are starting look more compelling on the diagnostic side of things.
Overall sentiment: Deena says, “As Venture Capital investors we have long time horizons. We want to invest in things and have a 10-year plus outlook, so it’s actually an incredible time to be doing early-stage investing.” But, what if you’ve sailed past your Series A? Well…tune in to find out what Deena has to say about her experience with later-stage startups and those who thought they may have had an exit planned this year.
HLTH 2022: Health Gorilla & Interoperability’s New TEFCA-Fueled Future
Health Gorilla is in the business of health data interoperability and the double-backflip this startup is doing to both make clinical data an easily accessible commodity – while also making sure that access to that data adheres to the privacy rules established by the US government – takes a minute to understand, but is critically important for the future of many health tech businesses.
CEO Steve Yaskin takes on the tough job giving us a brief overview of TEFCA (the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement) which is meant to establish once-and-for-all a common ground for data interoperability. Then, we get into QHINs – a specially designated group of “qualified health information networks – and how his business is applying for this certification to further build “the bridge” between the public sector and the private sector and what’s needed to achieve compliance for data exchange.
Phew! No wonder this startup has landed nearly $80 million dollars in funding! We talk about the basis for the business model – but, more importantly, the real market need – and find out what’s in store for all of us in the next chapter of data interoperability.
THCB Gang Episode 110, Thursday December 15
Joining Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) on #THCBGang on Thursday December 15 were patient safety expert and all around wit Michael Millenson (@mlmillenson); policy expert consultant/author Rosemarie Day (@Rosemarie_Day1); writer Kim Bellard (@kimbbellard), consumer expert Lygeia Riccardi (@Lygeia) radiologist Saurabh Jha (@RogueRad), and Olympic rower for 2 countries and all around dynamo Jennifer Goldsack, (@GoldsackJen). It was a full house and lots of fun, with a lot wrapped round the theme of protecting consumers (or not) online.
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.
