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Ofer Leidner, Happify Health

by MATTHEW HOLT

Happify Health is a online mental health company that is focused almost exclusively on scaling care by offering self-service tech solutions across the patient journey. After R&D starting in 2012, they’ve been scaling since 2017 and now are working with large employers and big health plans. What they don’t do is have their own therapists or psychiatrists. This is an interesting approach and probably much more scalable than many of their competitors. Today they raised $73m more to build out their solutions. I talked to Happify Health’s President, Ofer Leidner about how far they can go with automated self-service. He thinks it’s a long way.

Roblox and Healthcare’s Metaverse

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By KIM BELLARD

As neither a gamer nor the parent of a gamer, I’ve been proud that I’ve stayed even mildly in touch with the cultural phenomenon that gaming is.  I’ve written about, for example, the Metaverse, Fortnight, and e-sports.  Still, I somehow managed to be completely oblivious to the existence of Roblox, until they went public this week and was valued at $45b, larger than Electronic Arts (which I had heard of). 

Once again, I think there are lessons for healthcare.

P.J. McNealy, CEO of Digital World Research, described Roblox to NPR as: “Minecraft meets Nintendo, which meets Lego and mobile phones enable a whole bunch of it.”  Whatever the metaphor, Roblox is booming.  It was valued at $4b a year ago, but the pandemic was very, very good for it. 

Half of America children use Roblox.  Two thirds of its users are 16 and younger, and most of them were spending lots of time at home last year.  It is now estimated to have 37 million unique daily users, spending some 30 billion hours on the site last year.  It is available in 180 countries, in 11 languages.

What makes Roblox particularly unique is that it is not a game developer; it is a platform where users develop the “experiences”.  Roblox describes its mission thusly:

Roblox’s mission is to bring the world together through play.  We enable anyone to imagine, create, and have fun with friends as they explore millions of immersive 3D experiences, all built by a global community of developers.

It claims 8 million developers have created 20 million experiences — and that it paid over $300 million to them.  The games are free but users can buy and spend an in-game virtual currency (Robux), which can be exchanged for actual money (Roblox shares 30% of the revenue with developers).  At least one developer made over $1 million in a single year; over 1200 made at least $10,000, with over 300 making over $100,000. 

Mr.  McNealy believes the IPO will allow Roblox significant expansion:

This money will either give them an opportunity to build more content for the for the platform or to go to adjacent platforms like music or partnering with Spotify or movie service.  That’s where this is going to go.

CEO and co-founder David Baszucki isn’t content with the younger market, wondering: “So how do we make it possible for Roblox to connect with everyone in the world?”  Alex Hicks, cofounder of Roblox studio Red Manta, sees such potential, telling Polygon: “Lots of kids already know what Roblox is, but they’re just scratching the surface with the older audience.” 

Continue reading…

THCB Gang Episode 46, Thursday March 11

THCB Gang featured lawyer & privacy expert Deven McGraw, (@Healthprivacy), Health IT girl and WTF Health Host Jessica DaMassa (@jessdamassa), and policy expert consultant/author Rosemarie Day @Rosemarie_Day1). We’ve had far too many Y chromosomes on lately but also joining Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) for this one will be futurist Ian Morrison (@seccurve) and Fard Johnmar (@fardj), from digital health consultancy Enspektos.

We dove into the health care implications of the new $1.9 trillion stimulus bill, and had a great chat about where health and digital health go next.

If you’d rather listen to the episode, the audio is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels

THCB Gang Episode 45, Thursday March 4, 1pm PT – 4pm ET

Joining me, Matthew Holt (@boltyboy), on this week’s THCB Gang will be THCB regular writer Kim Bellard (@kimbbellard), medical historian Mike Magee (@drmikemagee),  policy & tech expert Vince Kuraitis (@VinceKuraitis),  patient safety expert and all around wit Michael Millenson (@MLMillenson), and consumer expert and current President of the Medical Board of California, Denise Pines.

Vaccines at warp speed, some “Neanderthal” state governors opening up, but also a pandemic bill passes the house with some health policy implications. Plus lots of fun and games in the world of digital health and startup health plans. We should have something to discuss!

You can see the video below live and the audio will be on our podcast channel (Apple/Spotify) from Friday

Wanna Buy Some Bitcoin

By KIM BELLARD

To healthcare organizations, digital currency is the thing you’re forced to deal with when your systems are held for ransomware.  To the rest of the world, it’s increasingly starting to look like the future.

Tesla caused somewhat of a stir last month when it disclosed that it had bought $1.5b of bitcoin.  It also said it would start accepting bitcoin payments for its cars.  CEO Elon Musk added to the furor, saying: “I do at this point think bitcoin is a good thing. I’m late to the party, but I am a supporter of bitcoin.” 

Most of us are late to the digital currency party. 

Bitcoin’s market cap hit $1 trillion in mid-February, although it now hovers just over $900b, with Ethereum another almost $200b.  Tesla is making more money from its bitcoin investment than from its core businesses.  In the scheme of global financial markets, digital currencies are still small, but are not something any CFO should be ignoring.  

Tesla is not the only major company accepting digital currencies; Overstock, Starbucks and Twitch do, as three wildly different examples.  Twitter is thinking about paying vendors or even employees with bitcoin.  Facebook expects to launch its own cryptocurrency this year. 

I’m not aware, though, of any major healthcare companies accepting or paying with digital currencies.  No Tesla-type breakthroughs in healthcare. 

Continue reading…

Can You Trust Digital Health Firms To Trust You?

By MICHAEL MILLENSON

What kind of health care organization would let a 10-year-old child make an instructional video for patients? And what might that decision teach health tech companies trying to gain the trust of consumers? 

I found myself pondering those questions while listening to Dr. Peter Margolis, co-chair of a National Academy of Medicine committee on health data sharing and stakeholder trust and a speaker at the recent (virtual) Health Datapalooza annual conference. Margolis is also co-director of the Anderson Center for Health Systems Excellence at Cincinnati Children’s, the institution that allowed 10-year old kids with a condition necessitating a feeding tube to create videos showing other children how to insert one. Parents, meanwhile, were recruited to help develop new technology to help their child.

The payoff for this and similar efforts by the shared learning communities Cincinnati Children’s has birthed has been significantly improved outcomes and national renown. But for this type of initiative to succeed, Margolis told me when I visited a few years ago, clinicians and administrators “have to be comfortable with a very different kind of role.” 

As consumers gain access to information once limited to medical insiders, that advice seems increasingly prescient. Federal rules requiring providers to make electronic health data available to patients at no cost take effect April 5.  Meanwhile, voluntary electronic sharing of physician clinical notes is rapidly morphing from the unthinkable to the unremarkable, while apps to make all this data actionable are proliferating. As a result, long-simmering issues related to transparency and trust and are coming to the fore.

Continue reading…

Buoy Health Wins Over Three Health Plans, Turns Symptom Checking into Patient Decision-Making

By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH

Symptom checker startup Buoy Health’s $37.5M Series C caught a lot of attention among health tech market watchers because of the collaborative support the funding round garnered from health plans. THREE payor orgs – UnitedHealth’s Optum, Humana, and Cigna – participated in the round, and co-founder and CEO Andrew Le is here to tell us why.

What’s interesting is how the health tech startup’s model has evolved past “symptom checking” and into patient decision-making to better solve the underlying uncertainty that typically causes a patient to “shotgun into care” that’s often a poor fit clinically AND financially. “If you don’t solve the clinical uncertainty first,” says Andrew, “then nothing else matters.” Health plans, though, are likely also seeing the potential of making sure that their members are routed to the right kind of “covered” care. And Buoy’s big plan is to help that along with a full-on marketplace of curated solutions – think telehealth, digital health apps, digital therapeutics, and so on – that round out the benefit design of a traditional health plan. Suddenly, symptom checking seems a means to a very different end…

THCB Gang Episode 44, Thursday Feb 25, 1pm PT – 4pm ET

Joining me, Matthew Holt (@boltyboy), on this week’s THCB Gang were consultant/author Rosemarie Day @Rosemarie_Day1),  Suntra Modern Recovery CEO JL Neptune (@JeanLucNeptune), and health futurist Jeff Goldsmith (@JeffcGoldsmith) and a late add Ian Morrison (@seccurve).

We will also had a special guest who is possibly the most successful corporate venture capitalist in health tech–Merck’s Bill Taranto. He had a decent run last decade– you may have heard of Livongo which he was a big investor in! We talked with Bill about the future of investing, what role investing in digital health has for drug business and what he’s expecting in the big health care realignment. Apparently Merck treasury took all the cash he made with Livongo so he couldn’t give it to us, but he has $500m+ top spend and as he said, “you want a Billion Dollar exit? Put me on the board”

You can see the video below live and the audio will be on our podcast channel (Apple/Spotify) from Friday

THCB Gang Episode 43, Thursday Feb 18, 1pm PT – 4pm ET

THCB Gang was broadcast live on Thurs Feb 18

Joining me, Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) were THCB regular writer Kim Bellard (@kimbbellard), patient advocates Grace Cordovano (@GraceCordovano) and Robin Farmanfarmaian (@Robinff3), newly-minted VC Marcus Whitney @marcuswhitney, and medical historian Mike Magee @drmikemagee.

We touched on the impact of the extremes of global warming on health! And in a pandemic nonetheless!. Plus the wild world of SPACs, more funding for mental health, and the sausage making of health care’s place in the upcoming stimulus bill. But I’m not sure the group is ready for the big policy move that the pandemic may give us the opportunity to pursue! A great conversation nonetheless.

The video is below but if you’d rather listen to the episode, the audio is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels.

The Habit Change Provider? Newtopia & the Case for a New Category of Healthcare Provider

By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH

Chronic disease prevention is often lumped into chronic disease management – but should it be? Aren’t there different nuances to preventing diseases than to treat them? Making the case that healthcare’s “primary prevention” businesses deserve their own category is the CEO of Newtopia, Jeff Ruby. Newtopia’s just announced the creation of a new category of healthcare provider, the Habit Change Provider, in effort to more accurately describe the role of companies working to change the way people behave in their everyday lives. What they eat, whether or not they exercise, how they deal with stress and anxiety – in short, this is the business of influencing the many micro-decisions that, cumulatively, add up to our overall health and whether or not we’ll be impacted by “lifestyle diseases” like diabetes, obesity, heart disease, mental health issues, and more.

Newtopia’s been in this business for over a decade, starting its path to commercialization with Aetna and a three-year randomized control trial of more than 2,800 Aetna employees that proved the power of prevention: physical risk reduction, clinical cost savings, and the “holy grail” of any population health model, in-year ROI. So confident is Newtopia in their approach that the company goes at-risk on outcomes, a compelling enough value proposition to attract clients like Accenture, JP Morgan Chase (and it’s now defunct joint-venture with Amazon and Berkshire Hathaway, Haven) and the whole of CVS Health (which acquired Aetna.)

Is this starting to sound different than those chronic condition management companies yet? Listen in to hear more about the details behind Newtopia’s approach, which even leverages genetic testing to “remove blocks for habit change” by helping people identify what they’ve inherited from their parents (slow metabolism, difficulty processing fats, body’s ability to handle stress signals) so they can get past blaming themselves and start developing healthy lifestyle improvements.

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