Patrick Quigley is the CEO of Sidecar Health. It’s a start up health insurance company that has a new approach to how employers and employees buy health care. Sidecar is betting on the radical pricing transparency idea. Instead of going down the contacting and narrow network route, Sidecar presents average area pricing and individual provider pricing to its members, and rewards them if they go to lower cost providers (who often are cheaper). How does this all work and is it real? Patrick took me through an extensive demo and explained how this all works. There’s a decent amount of complexity behind the scenes but Sidecar is creating something very rare in America, a priced health care market allowing consumers to choose–Matthew Holt
Glen Tullman, Transcarent
A couple of weeks back Transcarent completed its $630m acquisition of Accolade. But CEO Glen Tullman calls it a merger for a reason because Accolade brings people, products and clients that Transcarent didn’t have. Glen got in deep about Transcarent’s new product set in terms of its AI fueled navigation, primary care, weight management, cancer care and partnerships. Where is it going in terms of more with employers (yes!), Medicare (not yet) and aggressive expansion of services? And what can employers and their employees expect in terms of improving customer service from the health care system? Glen and his team have a big vision, big capital backing, and he is definitely intending to move the needle on care access, quality and cost.–Matthew Holt
Roon – the Demo and Interview
I was a little surprised that in the days of limitless content, AI, and all types of medical information being online a company could raise $15m to create a platform where actual doctors could answer specific questions that patients might have. Vikram Bhaskaran, the CEO is ex Pinterest and knows the consumer world well. Rohan Ramakrishna is a neurosurgeon who is worried about the level of misinformation that he saw showing up in his clinic daily. So Roon is trying to build what might be the impossible, a free personalized (mostly video) guide for health powered by the world’s best experts. They gave me a tour of what they have built so far, and it’s both impressive, ambitious and has a way to go. It’s an interesting demo and it raises some interesting questions about how that knowledge will be shared in the very near future–Matthew Holt
Elevare Law launches!
There’s a new health innovation law firm in town! Rebecca Gwilt & Kaitlyn O’Connor have started Elevare Law to help health tech companies. We spent a little time talking about the new firm and who it’s going to work with, and a lot about the different legal and regulatory challenges facing digital health companies. Deep dives into the regs around RPM, RTM & more, and also a lot about what we might expect from the FDA and the rest of the chaos in the new Administration. Plus a little about how AI helps lawyers be more efficient and a lot about how AI may or may not be influenced by health care regulation (TL:DL, it’s going to be slow & state by state) –-Matthew Holt
Bevey Miner, Consensus Cloud Solutions
Consensus is taking fax data, received by rural clinics, post acute, substance abuse clinics, home health et al, and helping them put it into their systems of records–which are in general not FHIR-enabled. They allow those facilities & services to receive referrals from acute care hospitals. By 2027 many of these standards are going to need to be FHIR enabled. Bevey Miner, EVP at Consensus, is a health care veteran who is working on both a policy and technology level to improve access to care, and thinks a lot about what unstructured data means in a world where we are trying to use data for AI and more. Super interesting chat about the murky backwaters of health care data and services. As Bevey says, “Not everyone is going to be Epic to Epic to Epic”–Matthew Holt
The Life365 Demo
Kent Dicks, CEO, and Kendall Paulsen, Telehealth Solutions lead, at Life 365 showed me their comprehensive set of tools and services for remote patient monitoring, or what I call the “continuous clinic”. Kent did this with MedApps, later acquired by Alere. But at Life 365 he’s building a new approach to getting the tools and platforms easy to use for patients, and also getting that collected data ready for AI systems to monitor patients and enable more immediate care. And Kent & Kendall not only talk about it but they show a deep-water demo with both devices and dashboards of both the monitoring and drug adherence devices. A glimpse into where health care ought to be and hopefully is going!–Matthew Holt
Tanay Tandon, Commure
Tanay Tandon is CEO of Commure, which is essentially a startup conglomerate which includes the original Commure, Tanay’s company Athelas, ambient scribe Augmedix, the Strongline staff safety product, Memora Health’s workflows and more. HCA, the big for-profit chain, is one of the biggest customers and an investor in Commure. I grabbed Tanay at HIMSS earlier this month to understand what Commure was building and what he thinks co-pilots/auto-pilots can eventually do in the hospital. Tanay’s aiming for a time when the combo of all the products mean doctors don’t have to touch their keyboard. But what does this have to do with the EMR? And what does their major backer, General Catalyst, intend to do with Commure and its other companies? Hopefully after this things are becoming a little clearer!–Matthew Holt
Linus Health–In-depth demo of cognitive health tool
The decline in cognitive health, especially that leading to Alzheimer’s and other brain diseases, is one of the most feared conditions by patients and their families. It’s also one of the most expensive. But if we can predict it early there are things we can do to prevent or ameliorate it. The issue has been finding an easy and comprehensive way to monitor it as part of primary care. The team at Linus Health has been building a diagnostic solution for exactly that and claims that it’s now the right time to roll it out as part of general primary care. CEO David Bates, John Showalter, Chief Product Officer (a primary care doc) and Alvaro Pascual Leone, a neurologist and Chief Medical Officer, took me through an extensive end to end demo. This is a long and fascinating look at the state of play in neurology diagnosis, and discussion about what the future of brain health looks like. Matthew Holt
Stuart Blitz, Hone Health
Stuart Blitz is COO and founder of Hone Health. He comes from a long career in health tech, notably at diabetes device pioneer Agamatrix. Stuart’s been working on his aggressive social media career, but in the background he co-founded Hone Health in the male health online telehealth/pharmacy space in March 2020 (great timing!). It’s now raised real money ($33m last month), has expanded to the other half of the population (women, too!), and is finding a space for itself in the cash-pay space where HIMS, Roman et al are well known. We had a great conversation about how that space is playing out and what Stuart thinks will work there, and what it means for health care overall–Matthew Holt
Natalie Schneider, Fort Health
Natalie Schneider is CEO of Fort Health, a relatively new entrant into the children’s mental health market. Fort Health’s modus operandi is to partner with (i.e. market via) pediatricians to get them to refer patients. They are delivering integrated care and something called collaborative care…a newer model that has more frequent and shorter interventions and is more affordable. Natalie is concerned that only 20% of current psychiatric care for pediatric patients is currently evidenced-based and measured. Part of their secret sauce is through a partnership with the Child Mind Institute, and they also deliver a series of educational offerings for parents. Fort Health has raised $16m & they’re pursuing a market by market expansion working with those pediatricians starting with New Jersey–Matthew Holt
