Although egg freezing was only approved for general use six years ago, the business is fertile ground for disruption according to Jen Lannon, co-founder of website Freeze.Health.
Jen and her co-founder, Sidonia Swarm, started the site when, through their own consumer research, they found that egg freezing could cost anywhere from $4,000 to $18,000 — at clinics in the same market!
Now that ‘social egg freezing’ is a thing among Millennial women who want to delay motherhood, Freeze.Health hopes to become the go-to resource for price shopping, medical information on the process, and details on the patient experience. Believe it or not, but women rallying around #NoBabiesNow don’t exactly feel like they belong at fertility clinics with so many baby pictures on the walls.
Get a glimpse of the future of healthcare by meeting the people who are going to change it. Find more WTF Health interviews here or check out www.wtf.health.
I know we have been bombarding you all with a bunch of videos and announcements, but there are some really interesting pieces of health tech that are launching and events that are happening in the Fall. Today I wanted to spotlight another really cool startup that Matthew met with at #TechCrunchDisrupt18 called CY-5 (pronounced Sci-5, trust me Matthew & I kept calling it C-Y-5). Their company is developing biometric temporary tattoos to track your vitals. Right now their tattoos can measure your heart rate and your inter-cranial pressure. Also, strangely enough, their tattoos are designed and printed onto a special paper that conducts electricity- that means it requires no exterior electricity source to monitor your biometrics! It is all in the design of the product that powers the tattoo. Their focus right now is to test their product out in the elderly population. For all of you out there that can’t get real tattoos, this would look really cool plus it would track your vitals and keep you healthy- double win.
Zoya Khan is the Editor-in-Chief of THCB as well as an Associate at SMACK.health, a health-tech advisory services for early-stage startups.
“If we just shop for healthcare like we shop for everything else…we would take care of a lot of the problems…”
So says Glen Tullman, CEO of Livongo, a very hot startup with a chronic condition management platform that has been batting away IPO rumors since earlier this year when it closed a $52.M round funded by existing investors.
Glen has just literally written the book on consumerizing healthcare and stopped by to talk about it at the HIMSS TV set on location at Health 2.0’s Fall Conference (where I was guest hosting interviews!)
Called On Our Terms the book tries to push us toward thinking about the buying-and-selling of healthcare the same way we’d think about buying-and-selling anything else. Glen argues it’s possible if we start looking at healthcare as an ‘information business’ – and pivot our thinking and our business models accordingly to provide greater access to that information.
Are we as consumers ready for all this responsibility? Is the healthcare system ready for us and our purchasing power? Is anyone doing this right?? Glen fires back with some strong examples of where he already sees this working, and gets real about who’s in trouble if they don’t pivot and pivot fast. (We’re looking at you, payers.)
Bonus Intel: Will Glen take Livongo to an IPO like he did Allscripts? It’s a multi-million dollar question…
Get a glimpse of the future of healthcare by meeting the people who are going to change it. Find more WTF Health interviews here or check out www.wtf.health. Filmed at Health 2.0’s Fall Conference in Santa Clara, September 2018.
“Healthcare is a journey for patients. Just helping them with one piece of it — it just doesn’t get the job done…”
That’s Brian Roberts of Venrock talking about how he and Bob Kocher have moved on from investing in one-trick-pony health tech point solutions. What are they favoring now? Well, they’re not alone in seeking out platforms…especially those that solve big work flow, patient journey, or systems issues.
The underlying motivator here is, of course, money. Or rather, as Roberts puts it, the fact that “no one in the healthcare system makes any real money.”
ROI is different in healthcare. And they encourage startups — and those health systems, health plans, and provider groups that buy their solutions — to really consider what that means.
Kocher explains that what’s often overlooked is how quickly relationships turn over in healthcare. Patients can change insurance plans every year, or they may switch doctors or hospitals based on when they can get an appointment. This thwarts development of any real customer loyalty, and worse for startups, creates a situation where they need to prove tangible cost savings or increased revenue in a short 1-2 years.
What’s an entrepreneur or investor to do? Listen in for more ROI talk and advice for pivoting a point solution startup.
Get a glimpse of the future of healthcare by meeting the people who are going to change it. Find more WTF Health interviews here or check out www.wtf.health. Filmed at Health Datapalooza in Washington DC, April 2018.
The phrase ‘consumer health’ doesn’t mean what it used to. And, when you really think about it, neither does the word ‘consumer.’ We’ve changed. Wielding the power of our smart phones, wearable devices, and proximity to CVS Minute Clinics – and armed with expectations of near-instant gratification thanks to the Amazons and Ubers of the world – we’re more demanding, exacting and impatient of the health system than ever before.
As all of this starts to change demand, supply, and (fingers crossed) our entire industry, it’s tempting to focus on what the new guys are doing. I’m as guilty as any for being fixated on the doings of the big tech companies and sexy little startups that are coming into our space. But, the reality is that the greatest amount of change will have to come from those stalwarts of the ‘healthcare establishment’ – the health systems and the payers that ARE the system in and of itself.
So, how are they thinking about the consumerization of healthcare? What does it mean to ‘empower consumers’ when your organization is bearing the risk associated with caring for their lives? Lucky for us, Dr. Rasu Shrestha, Chief Innovation Officer of health-system/payer-system giant UPMC can break it down.
Warning: This interview is long and heady, but, man, is it ever worth it. Rasu talks about the macroeconomics of shifting risk from insurers to providers and consumers, business model implications for all players involved, and how the ‘free the data’ movement feeds into all this. Last but not least, he talks about the kinds of startups he’s hoping will help payers and providers usher in this new consumer-driven era.
If you’re doing any kind of business in healthcare today, you’ll want to give this a listen. And, if Rasu wants to add another doctorate to his name, this interview analyzing ‘the macroeconomics and shifting risk environment of the consumerization of healthcare’ might be the start of his dissertation. We’ll look for our @wtf_health footnote.
Get a glimpse of the future of healthcare by meeting the people who are going to change it. Find more WTF Health interviews here or check out www.wtf.health. Filmed at the Bayer G4A Accelerator Launch in NYC, May 2018.
If you’re a health tech startup, should you be building for your exit? Does that really lead to the greatest possible success for your business…if you know how to get out?
Here’s some advice from someone who should know. Glen Tullman is ‘the guy’ who took Allscripts public via a wildly successful IPO in the late-90s. He’s now the CEO of Livongo, a chronic condition management startup that rang in 2018 with a $105M mega-round raised internally among its current pool of investors – at more than two times the company’s previous valuation.
When I caught up with Glen earlier this year, it was just after his round closed, the company acquired Retrofit, and rumors had started swirling about Livongo going public. Needless to say, our conversation turned toward ‘the exit’ and I had the chance to ask what he would tell other startup founders about going IPO. What comes next is a passionate discourse about what it takes to not only exit – but raise and scale – a startup in healthcare. For being a money guy, Glen is no sell-out; young startups would be wise to take his two cents and invest them.
Get a glimpse of the future of healthcare by meeting the people who are going to change it. Find more WTF Health interviews here or check out www.wtf.health. Filmed at HLTH in Las Vegas, May 2018.
Today’s cholesterol test is about to be disrupted. Nightingale Health, a five-year-old startup based out of Finland, has built a better blood test that – among other things – is about to disrupt the cholesterol test of today.
Their blood test collects 50 times more biomarker data than the standard test – boasting a 20% better prediction rate for diabetes and cardiovascular disease – and they’re offering it at the same price point as the existing industry standard. Why does this matter? Well, for clinicians, researchers, or those working on new drug development, the Nightingale test is not only offering an unprecedented amount of metabolic data, but it’s an unprecedented amount of AFFORDABLE metabolic data that can impact the health care cost curve as far as the eye can see.
What’s more – and this has gotten investors’ blood pumping – they haven’t even fully realized the full potential of their panel. Listen in as Kristiina Tolvanen talks with me about the company’s priorities to build their evidence base and find out what else their biomarker analysis platform can potentially displace. Freshly funded with a $30M round – and a very prestigious partnership with the UK Biobank to analyze 500,000 blood samples – this is one to watch.
Filmed at Upgraded Life Festival in Helsinki, Finland, June 2018. Find more interviews on health and technology here or check out www.wtf.health.
Today we have a humming economy and insane politics. In early 2009 we were in economic meltdown and were about one week into the sanest, soberist Administration and even Congress over many recent decades. In February 2009 they passed a stimulus bill that had a huge impact on the health IT market (and still does). At that time there was much debate on THCB about what the future of health IT policy should look like and how the stimulus “Meaningful Use” money should be spent. My January 2009 summary of that whole debate introduced the notion of “Cats and Dogs in health IT”. They’re still around today. We’re reprinting it here as part of our 15-year THCB birthday party–Matthew Holt
Those of you paying attention for the past few days might have noticed on the one hand a sense of optimism and unity as Barrack H. Obama, somewhat somberly, began his presidency.
Meanwhile, over the past few weeks the fur has been flying among the electrons on THCB while some very knowledgeable and opinionated health care wonks and geeks have been battling it out about what exactly we should be doing in terms of federal health care IT spending.
Given that even among you smart THCB readers this may be all a little perplexing, I’m going to try to try to make what I hope are some elucidating comments to put this argument in context. I’m doing this partly because I’m perplexed too, but also because I think that there is some hope for a middle road.
First the basics: As sometime THCB contributor & uber-CIO John Halamka makes clear in this excellent post about The Greatest Healthcare IT Generation, some $20 billion of the soon to be passed “spend it as fast as you can” stimulus package is going to be targeted towards health care IT. Now, that’s by no means the biggest part of the $800 billion or so package, and it’s not even the biggest part of the health care spending in the bill. Nearly $87 billion or so is going to support Medicaid, although that will mostly will be replacing cuts being forced on states.
In July 2005 George W Bush had relatively recently won a Presidential election in which the Republican won the popular vote (something that will likely never happen again) & the Republicans controlled all three branches of Government. Those of us liberals at the bottom of a dark trench were wondering if and how we’d get to health reform. So in another reprint to celebrate THCB’s 15th birthday, here was my then take on what went wrong in 1994 and what would happen next–Matthew Holt
There are lots of versions about what killed the 1993-4 health care reform effort. Hillary Clinton has now decided that the problem was the lack of incrementalism in her plan. Last week the New York Times said that since becoming a Senator:
“She has deliberately avoided the major mistake she made as first lady, namely trying to sell an ambitious plan to a public with no appetite for radical change. <SNIP>. She summed up her approach in the first floor speech she delivered in the Senate about four years ago, when she unveiled a series of relatively modest health care initiatives. “I learned some valuable lessons about the legislative process, the importance of bipartisan cooperation and the wisdom of taking small steps to get a big job done,” she said, referring to the 1994 defeat of her health care plan.”
On the other hand, some people are still claiming victory for the plan’s defeat even if they were at most modest bit players. Here’s what one fawning bio says about former New York Lt Governor Betsy McCaughey
“A 35-year-old senior fellow named Elizabeth McCaughey…wrote an article for The New Republic on what she discovered in a close reading of the 1,431-page document containing the Clinton Health Care Plan: Namely, that it would put every citizen in a single government-operated HMO. That one article shot down the entire blimp, and Betsy McCaughey became a 35-year-old Cinderella. One of the richest men in America chose her as his wife, and George Pataki made her lieutenant governor of New York.”
Ignoring the fact that McCaughey spent her time thereafter putting poor New Yorkers into those HMOs she so despised, and then went off the deep end en route to divorce from Pataki, the rich guy, and reality (not necessarily in that order), it’s not really true that one article in The New Republic can be quite that influential. (Sorry Jon!). Even if the overly geeky Clintonistas in the White House did feel that they had to come out with a point by point rebuttal. And anyway, the article only came out in January 1994 by which time the die was more or less cast the other way. Again we have to look elsewhere for the explanation.
If you want to go back and spend a few minutes wallowing in the era of trial balloons and secret task forces, there’s a very interesting time line of the whole process on the NPR website, as well as a briefer information over at the Clinton Health Plan Wikipedia site.Continue reading…
How are teens and young adults engaging with digital health? Results of a national survey asking just that were released today by Susannah Fox (Former CTO at US Dept of HHS) and her research partner, Victoria Rideout.
You can check out the full report of the findings here, but I spoke with Susannah in April, just as she and Victoria were starting to draw some insights from their work.
Hearing her talk about the survey at this stage of synthesis is not only unique (most researchers won’t talk until the findings are published) but more so because it adds a layer of understanding to the final results now that they’re here.
We get her candor about how teens and young adults are a wildly viable – yet very overlooked – market for digital health…
We see how she’s trying to formulate a much larger hypothesis about what healthcare can learn about social media from a generation that has never lived without it and, more importantly, view it as having a positive impact on their well-being…
And, probably most inspiring to me, we see an approach to health data that stands out for its warmth. For it’s love, really. In a world of big data and clinical trials, it’s endearing to hear from someone who is taking a more anthropological approach and who has fallen absolutely, head-over-heels in LOVE with the personal side of her dataset.
As we all clamor for a patient-centered end, we’d be remiss to underestimate the value of a human-centered starting point. Watch Susannah Fox for a strong model of how this can be done in health research.
Filmed at Health DataPalooza, Washington DC, April 2018. Find more interviews with the people pushing healthcare to better tomorrow at www.wtf.health.
By MATTHEW HOLT
