Joining Matthew Holt on #THCBGang on Thursday December 19 at 1pm PST 4pm EST are three leaders in the patient movement Hugo Campos (@HugoCampos); Gilles Frydman (@GillesFrydman); and ePatient Dave deBronkart (@DavedeBronkart). They will be bring us up to speed on the very latest in patients using AI.
You can see the video below live (and later archived) & if you’d rather listen than watch, the audio is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels.
Danielle Vaeth is Head of Growth and Strategic Development at Qbtech, a company that helps diagnose ADHD, working mostly with virtual providers. They use facial recognition and tracking to do this. Qbtech can diagnose 50% more patients than self-reporting and has approval from a big NHS study, the FDA and many peer-reviewed studies. They raised $6.8m in 2022 & have just tested their millionth patient. Plenty more to go!–Matthew Holt
Sara Ratner is President of integrated Programs at Nomi Health. They work with employers and health plans to connect them to a network of providers (both telehealth and physical) who accept steep discounts in return for immediate payment. The employees in turn get no co-pay/no coinsurance. In addition they have an analytics company called Artemis which recommends care paths and a PBM to lower drug prices. Sara is trying hard to integrate mental health into their program too. Nomi raised $110m in 2022 and also made a decent amount in covid testing earlier in its life before pivoting.
Joining Matthew Holt on #THCBGang on Monday December 16 at 1pm PST 4pm EST are patient safety expert Michael Millenson, physician, entrepreneur and technologist Shantanu Nundy; and Digital Health and Emerging Med-Tech Practice Co-Founder at Marsh & McLennan, Beracah Stortvedt.
You can see the video below live (and later archived) & if you’d rather listen than watch, the audio is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels.
Kris Engskov is CEO of Rippl, a General Catalyst-funded company developing a wrap around care model around the primary care doctor for people with dementia. Their process is to help the family caregiver who is looking after the dementia patient and gives a ton of support to those caregivers which helps them be successful taking care of the patient at home. They start with diagnosis and use care navigators to build a care model face to face with patients. They’ve raised $52m and are nearly 2 years into serving a very neglected group of patients and caregivers–Matthew Holt
Colby Takeda is CEO of Pear Suite which has developed a system that helps organizations employing community health workers to track and pay for their work. These community health workers are in multiple social and health organizations. Increasingly states Medicaid and health plans are paying directly to community organizations and Pear Suite is building the capacity for those organizations to contract and bill the plans and states. The community health workers are now out helping engage patients, particularly around preventative services, housing, food access and much more. This includes those people in the health system and is saving health care organizations money, and is improving HEDIA and Star scores. Pear Suite has been doing this since 2023 and has over 100 clients already, and has even built its own network of community health workers. A niche, but a very impactful one-Matthew Holt
By TREVOR VAN MIERLO
In 2021, digital mental health and substance use startups attracted a record-breaking $5.1 billion in funding. Despite the surge, the promise of scalable, transformative digital health platforms remains unfulfilled.
Following the surge, investment plummeted. Unlike other industries that have been revolutionized by digital-first solutions, digital health struggles with models that fail to address cost, complexity, and access.
What we’re left with entering into 2025 are a smorgasbord of solutions clamoring to attach themselves to traditional enterprise incumbents (Health Insurance Providers, Electronic Health Records, Hospital Systems). These incumbents have achieved scale – but not the type of scale that digital health needs to flourish.
Incumbents Build Deep, Startups Go Wide
Incumbent scale is infrastructure-heavy, slow, and linear, and focuses on deep integration within their established markets.
In contrast, startups aim for technology-driven, exponential, and global scale, leveraging digital platforms to serve millions of users quickly. While startups have the speed advantage, achieving scale similar to incumbents requires win-win partnerships and fundamental shifts away from established business models.
The investment market does see the tremendous opportunity: a massive, growing global customer-base proactively demanding help as social stigma decreases. And as time passes, this customer-base grows exponentially with technology pervasiveness.
What investors see is unmet demand for mental health and substance use treatment, and a historic opportunity for digital health to step up and deliver solutions that are scalable, accessible, and affordable.
However, the delivery mechanism to these populations, though digital, is obfuscated through the blurred lens of incumbent purchasing power. We can’t get past incumbents’ size, their reach, and their connection to patients. In this common view, incumbents are the customer. This view is promoted by both industry and academia.
Continue reading…Shama Rathi MD is the co-founder of LunaJoy, a mental health company that works exclusively for women. It started with pregnancy (pre- and post- partum) and now is working with women in midlife for nearly a third of its cases. Shama believes that women have been ignored and LunaJoy has built out specific care pathways for women. They are moving into the market starting with Medicaid, the payer responsible for a large number of births, mostly doing it in conjunction with OBGYN clinics. It’s an interesting and necessary niche play for a large underserved group–Matthew Holt
Joining Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) on #THCBGang on Thursday December 5 at 1pm PST 4pm EST are patient safety expert Michael Millenson, patient advocate & entrepreneur Robin Farmanfarmaian; futurist Jeff Goldsmith; and employer & care consultant Brian Klepper.
You can see the video below live (and later archived) & if you’d rather listen than watch, the audio is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels.
By KIM BELLARD
Everything’s about AI these days. Everything is going to be about AI for a while. Everyone’s talking about it, and most of them know more about it than I do. But there is one thing about AI that I don’t think is getting enough attention. I’m old enough that the mantra “follow the money” resonates, and, when it comes to AI, I don’t like where I think the money is ending up.
I’ll talk about this both at a macro level and also specifically for healthcare.
On the macro side, one trend that I have become increasingly radicalized about over the past few year is income/wealth inequality. I wrote a couple weeks ago about how the economy is not working for many workers: executive to worker compensation ratios have skyrocketed over the past few decades, resulting in wage stagnation for many workers; income and wealthy inequality are at levels that make the Gilded Age look positively progressive; intergenerational mobility in the United States is moribund.
That’s not the American Dream many of us grew up believing in.
We’ve got a winner-take-all economy, and it’s leaving behind more and more people. If you are a tech CEO, a hedge fund manager, or a highly skilled knowledge worker, things are looking pretty good. If you don’t have a college degree, or even if you have a college degree but with the wrong major or have the wrong skills, not so much.
All that was happening before AI, and the question for us is whether AI will exacerbate those trends, or ameliorate them. If you are in doubt about the answer to that question, follow the money. Who is funding AI research, and what might they be expecting in return?
It seems like every day I read about how AI is impacting white collar jobs. It can help traders! It can help lawyers! It can help coders! It can help doctors! For many white collar workers, AI may be a valuable tool that will enhance their productivity and make their jobs easier – in the short term. In the long term, of course, AI may simply come for their jobs, as it is starting to do for blue collar workers.
Automation has already cost more blue collar jobs than outsourcing, and that was before anything we’d now consider AI. With AI, that trend is going to happen on steroids; jobs will disappear in droves. That’s great if you are an executive looking to cut costs, but terrible if you are one of those costs.
Continue reading…
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