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Category: Health Tech

Scaling Health Insurance Disruption | Ali Diab, Collective Health

By JESSICA DAMASSA, WTF HEALTH

Ali Diab, CEO & Co-Founder of Collective Health, wants to talk about healthcare affordability and the fact that consumerism doesn’t really exist when it comes to healthcare because we don’t really have a functioning market. The “Real” buyers — from the federal government to large employers — have no idea what things cost in traditional health plans and are making healthcare purchases for their constituents without full price transparency. So, what has he and Collective Health learned now that they’re 6 years into trying to offer these buyers an alternative to that traditional health plan experience? Nothing is more complex than health insurance innovation, but Collective Health is making significant headway and, according to Ali, has made it past the “homicide phase” of being a digital health startup.

Filmed at HLTH 2019 in Las Vegas, October 2019.

Jessica DaMassa is the host of the WTF Health show & stars in Health in 2 Point 00 with Matthew Holt.

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. 

Will ‘Digital-First’ Health Plans Usher in Telehealth At-Scale? | Danielle Russella, American Well

By JESSICA DAMASSA, WTF HEALTH

Is healthcare on the way to ‘telehealth at-scale?’ We checked in with American Well’s Danielle Russella, President & GM of Health Plan Solutions, to rumor-check the buzz we’ve been hearing about “digital-first health plans” and what that means for the future of health plan coverage for telehealth services. From provider uptake and payment parity to patient awareness and utilization, Danielle weighs in on the state-of-play of telehealth/health plan relations and how digital health seems to finally becoming part of payer strategy talks within the C-suite. At American Well, that’s meant more growth in last 2 years than in the previous 8 years, says Danielle. Is that why we’re hearing those IPO rumors? Tune in to find out if there’s any merit to that chatter.

Filmed at HLTH 2019 in Las Vegas, October 2019.

The Lynne Chou O’Keefe Fallacy

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By MATTHEW HOLT

Rob Coppedge and Bryony Winn wrote an interesting article in Xconomy yesterday. I told Rob (& the world) on Twitter yesterday that it was good but wrong. Why was it wrong? Well it encompasses something I’m going to call the Lynne Chou O’Keefe Fallacy. And yes, I’ll get to that in a minute. But first. What did Rob and Bryony say?

Having walked the halls and corridors and been deafened by the DJs at HLTH, Rob & Bryony determined why many digital health companies have failed (or will fail) and a few have succeeded. They’ve dubbed the winners “Digital Health Survivors.” And they go on to say that many of the failures have been backed by VCs who don’t know health care while the companies they’ve invested in have “product-market fit problems, sales traction hiccups, or lack of credible proof points.”

What did the ” Survivors” do? They have:  

“hired health care experts, partnered effectively, and have even co-developed their models alongside legacy players. Many raised venture capital from strategic corporate investors who have helped them refine their product, accelerate channel access, and get past the risk of “death by pilot.”

Now it won’t totally shock you to discover that Rob heads Echo Health Ventures, the joint VC fund from Cambia Heath Solutions (Blues of Oregon) & BCBS of N. Carolina, and Bryony runs innovation at BCBS of N. Carolina. So they may be a tad biased towards the strategic venture = success model. But they do have a point. Many but not all of their portfolio are selling tools and services to the incumbents in health care, which mostly includes health plans, hospitals and pharma.

And now we get to the Lynne Chou O’Keefe fallacy. (You might argue that fallacy is the wrong term, but bear with me).

Continue reading…

Consumerism, washing machines, big data & health care

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“all your stuff works together” Really!

By MATTHEW HOLT

Those of you who remember my BestBuy washer & dryer installation saga from a couple of weeks back may want to gird your loins. Because the saga continues. And it has even more relevance for consumerism in health care. So catch up on the prequel and come back.

When you left the story your hero had just arranged for Best Buy to attempt delivery on Tuesday afternoon last week. I was in SF for the “can’t miss” Rock Health Summit. I was waiting at the apartment when I got about 4 calls from the same random number in 3 minutes but when I answered no one was there. I called back, no answer. Then I got a voicemail saying the delivery team was outside. I ran outside! No they weren’t! At that point I gave up and had lunch. But then for now the 5th time I called Best Buy and lined up a new delivery. I stressed about 10 times that the delivery team could NOT leave next time without seeing me. There may have been some shouting…..

Monday was the next available day for delivery and it was day that Best Buy was going to finally get it right. I got an email saying they’d be there at 1.30pm

I was across town in a meeting at 12.30 and noticed 4 missed calls from the same number. Being of a very suspicious nature, I called the number, and yes it’s the delivery team. They were outside the apartment, and they were 60 mins early!  Thankfully the delivery crew agreed to wait, and I went over to meet them. So at 6th time of asking, the crew was there, the equipment was there, I was there, and we all went into the apartment.

What could possibly go wrong!?

Continue reading…

12 Rules for Health Tech Startups

By MATTHEW HOLT

Last week Mark Cuban tweeted out 12 rules for tech startups and Jessica DaMassa challenged a bunch of people to respond for health care. VC and general health care wit Lisa Suennen came out with quite the list (she got to 13) but I thought someone ought to write the real rules…

1. Never start a health tech company if you can sucker someone into giving you a real job

2. When VCs at conferences say raising money isn’t a problem, throw a milkshake at them

3. Never work with a technical co-founder who won’t give you the last M&M in the packet

4. When a clinician wants to quit their job and co-found with you, remember that the good ones could be making $500K a year reading X-rays and be on the golf course at 4pm

5. Do the 50/2 diet. Starve for 50 weeks of the year then eat and drink as much as you possibly can at HIMSS & JP Morgan parties when someone else is paying

6. When the incubator/accelerator/matchmaker says that they “chose you from 700 applicants” remember that there are roughly 700 of them and every company applies to each one

7. When you get the elusive partnership deal with the big hospital system, tech company or corporate, you’re going to expect to work at the speed of the startup and the scale of the corporate. It’ll be the reverse . (I stole this from Michael Ferguson at Ayogo)

8. After your first few clients and funding rounds you’ll be losing money at a exponential rate that matches what you had for revenue on the hockey stick chart in your pitch deck

9. Hopefully you’ll eventually be able to start making the money the health care way, by establishing a monopoly that can arbitrarily raise prices to the moon and stick it to your customers. If not, start prepping for the really big Oscar/Collective/Clover type round. 

10. Pray to whatever God you follow that Softbank is still in business when #9 happens.

11. If after a decade or so of slog, you finally get the IPO, or semi decent exit, try to ignore the fact that the Instagram guys sold for $1 billion 11 months after they founded the company

12. Hope that you can disrupt health care, but remember that UnitedHealth Group’s revenue is $220 billion and CMS spends $900 billion a year and they both appear mostly powerless to make anything better.

Matthew Holt is publisher of The Health Care Blog and advises startups at SMACK.health using these principles and a few others too!

Whole Genome Sequencing Heads for Consumers – Rodrigo Martinez of Veritas Genetics

By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH

DNA testing companies like 23andMe and Ancestry have made DNA testing mainstream, with adoption skyrocketing among consumers. Meanwhile, health tech startups like Veritas Genetics are starting to push the trend even further – from genotyping to whole genome sequencing. What’s the difference? Well, genotyping looks at less than half of 1% of your genome, while whole genome sequencing looks at over 99% of your genome.

Veritas is betting that consumers are ready for what’s revealed by looking at more than 6.4 billion letters of DNA and are promising that the value of that information will only get richer as time goes on and the science that makes sense of our genome achieves new breakthroughs.

In fact, Veritas is positioning their $999 test as “a resource for life” and Rodrigo Martinez, their Chief Marketing & Design Officer who I chat with here, shares a vision for the future that includes asking Alexa to scan your genome before taking medications or risking allergic reactions to foods.

This is fascinating proposition for the future of health (investors are jazzed too, having poured $50M into the company), but ethical questions abound. How do you make this information useful and actionable? How do you handle situations where major health issues are reveled? And what about data privacy? This is about as personal as personal health information can get. Rodrigo weighs in…

Ridesharing Startup Cuts Medical Costs with Innovative Service | Mark Switaj CEO of RoundTrip

By JESSICA DAMASSA, WTF HEALTH

The future of healthcare includes ridesharing, according to startup CEO Mark Swita of RoundTrip. 1 in 5 patients misses or delays care due to transportation issues, which creates costly problems that are much more expensive to treat later. RoundTrip is disrupting the medical transportation industry by providing on-demand medical transportation for hospitals, healthcare organizations, transportation organizations, and health plans.

Filmed at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, CA, January 2019.

Jessica DaMassa is the host of the WTF Health show & stars in Health in 2 Point 00 with Matthew Holt.

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. 



Amazon, Google, Microsoft Healthcare Takeover | Dr. Rasu Shrestha, Atrium Health

By JESSICA DAMASSA, WTF HEALTH

One of the fastest growing chronic condition management companies in healthcare, Livongo just made some big new hires and minted a new category in health tech called “Applied Health Signals.” What’s this? Well, if your new health solution ties together devices, data science, coaching, and clinical management, YOU might be an Applied Health Signals company. CEO Glen Tullman walks us through the new concept, shares his insight on the good & bad of consumer tech companies heading into health… then explains the strategery behind changes to the company’s C-suite and confronts the rumors I’ve been hearing about an IPO.

Filmed at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, CA, January 2019.

Jessica DaMassa is the host of the WTF Health show & stars in Health in 2 Point 00 with Matthew Holt.

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. 

SCOOP: Facebook enters EMR business

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by MATTHEW HOLT

Big news out of Mountain View, California today as Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg announced that the social networking giant was going to formally enter the EMR business. Sandberg explained that Facebook already has all Americans and most of the world’s population on its system and that adding a little bit of information about their health would be trivial given that it’s easy with AR to abstract that information from their profiles, not to mention that everyone’s phone is already sending data back to Facebook.

In particular, Sandberg highlighted the fact that Facebook has already captured almost all the personal health information of many people with cancer and plenty of other rare diseases in the thousands of health communities that it has been pushing hard over the past few years. Not only have those individuals not known what Facebook is allowing third parties to do with that data, or which hackers have already stolen it in a SICGRL hack, but they have also found it impossible to extract themselves or their data from those groups. As Sandberg says “We already have the EMR business model down, now we just have to provide the products”

When it was pointed out to Sandberg that Facebook didn’t actually have any professional EMR tools that could be used by clinicians or doctors, a scruffily dressed guy hiding his bad haircut under a hoodie grabbed the mike and shouted “We’ve seen the schlock that Epic, Cerner and the rest put out–my wife has to use it and she spends every evening catching up on her data entry. Shouldn’t be too hard for our engineers to knock that off–just ask those guys at Snapchat.” Sandberg commented that while EMR vendors move slowly and break things, Facebook has shown over the years that it can do that much faster. “Have you seen what we did to American democracy or the EU?”

Later today Cerner stock was trading off 25%. When asked, an Epic spokesperson commented that even if you added their ages together, Sandberg and Zuckerberg were far too young to run a proper EMR company.

Matthew Holt is the Publisher of THCB

The Future of Genome Sequencing | Veritas Chief Marketing & Design Officer Rodrigo Martinez

By JESSICA DAMASSA, WTF HEALTH

DNA testing companies like 23andMe have opened the genome market in the last decade, with adoption skyrocketing on both consumer and clinical sides. Now the trend is pushing even further, from genotyping technology to whole genome sequencing and the health implications are massive. While genotyping looks at less than half of 1% of your genome, whole genome sequencing looks at over 99% of your genome. That’s about 6.4 billion letters of DNA! With elite awards from MIT, Fast Company, and more, Veritas Genetics is not only designing great, user-friendly experiences for people to engage with their personal genome information, but taking it a step further by providing actionable insights that actually result in a healthier life.

Filmed at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, CA, January 2019.

Jessica DaMassa is the host of the WTF Health show & stars in Health in 2 Point 00 with Matthew Holt.

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. 

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