George Boghos is CEO of Imagine Pediatrics, a company founded out of former CMS Innovation head Adam Boehler’s Rubicon Partners fund. Imagine is a wraparound tech-based service helping some of the sickest kids in America–think kids on feeding tubes, cancer, mental health conditions, autism and more. They provide telehealth and on the ground services (like EMTs) that supplement typical pediatrics offices. the goal is to improve the kids’ and parents’ experience and of course save money on emergency admissions, and hospital admissions. It’s a new idea but one that certainly is having a moment as we need to support families and improve care for kids. And hopefully do it for less money. George told me how it all works. Not simple!–Matthew Holt
THCBGang Revisited: Ian Morrison
Ian Morrison died yesterday. 4 years ago in one of the early THCB Gang’s, we had a rash of late cancellations. So I talked to Ian solo about his journey, and his views about health care. I re-listened to it this morning and thought you might enjoy it
Jonathan Bush, Zus Health
It’s always fun to chat with Jonathan Bush. You kids today may not remember that he was the first CEO to take a cloud-based (Health 2.0!) company public back in 2007! Athenahealth didn’t end up challenging Epic because a cosmically evil hedge fund took it (and him) down as it was on its way to try to do that, but Jonathan has moved on and is now building a clinical data integration company called Zus Health. We talked Zus, digital health, whether there will ever be value-based care and more. 20 mins of digital health gold right here–Matthew Holt
Peter Yellowlees, AsyncHealth
Peter Yellowlees MD is CEO at AsyncHealth–this is a new company that is doing the intake interview for a psychiatrist or psychologist session. Peter demos how the AI agent asks questions, how a patient answers in real time. Then after submitting the answers, the AI creates both a full transcript in the back end, and then a summary which the clinician can use in advance of seeing the patient. You’ll see the real time transcript and patient summary. Very accurate and impressive. That saves a significant amount of time in the intake process and helps the patent get to the right type of treatment. It’s early days for Asynch Health, but you’ll quickly get the idea about how this use of AI might change one part of care–Matthew Holt
Aniq Rahman, Fabric Health
Aniq Rahman is the CEO of Fabric Health. In basically two years Fabric has changed its name (nee Florence) bought some health tech standouts in the fields of symptom checking and asynchronous care (Gyant, Zipnosis), a medical group (Team Health’s virtual care) and the telehealth part of Walmart (MeMD). In the 2010’s Aniq built an analytics company acquired by Oracle & turned to health care after seeing his father go through the system. What he is trying to build is a company that can help providers (and now others) go from soup to nuts in helping a consumer online. He explained how those pieces fit together to match the look and feel of the customers to support their staff but also to augment them with Fabric’s people where needed. Now, with the Walmart/MeMD acquisition they are adding employers (and payers and even life science companies). There’s a lot to be done here, and we had a great chat about where consumers are going to get their care, what else Fabric needs to do (Aniq is thinking provider directories next!), and what the secrets are about General Catalyst’s work at Summa Health (sadly not much inside info!!)–Matthew Holt
Aneesh Chopra talks Cancer Navigation Challenge & more
Aneesh Chopra is the former CTO of the US under Obama. He’s now head of strategy at Arcadia, but this week is one of the driving forces behind the new challenge called “Transforming Cancer Navigation with Open Data & APIs” . I caught up with Aneesh about why the need for this type of data exchange and why caner, and also more generally about interoperability, data analysis (his day job) and the impact of AI. Aneesh is an optimist but also about the most articulate person in health care explaining what is going on the ground and in policy with the regulations and actions of data exchange, and its uses. Pay attention–Matthew Holt
Robert Krayn & Georgia Gaveras, Talkiatry
Robert Krayn is the CEO and & Dr. Georgia Gaveras the CMO of Talkiatry. Robert and Georgia are quite the dynamic duo (she says, “He’s the money I’m the medicine!”). As a relative latecomer in the online mental health world, Talkiatry is trying to differentiate itself from the other big players like Lyra, Headspace, Brightside et al. It’s focusing on using psychiatrists as opposed to psychologists, counselors or coaches. This is both as an advertisement to patients but also they’ve set up a system that is much easier for psychiatrist themselves to join as employees and they showed me the way that patients get onboarded in their system, and how they get to that first appointment–in an average of 5 days!
Brad Kittredge, Brightside Health
Brad Kittredge is CEO of Brightside Health, which he co-founded with CMO Mimi Winsberg. They are a large online mental health group that aims a providing more access with higher quality. They have built their own technology stack and medical group, and are in network for about 135m lives. They also take patients from the emergency departments of health systems–as well as direct patient outreach for “standard” mental health conditions. Brad talked to me about measurement, quality and care improvement, including how they are using their algorithms to improve their clinicians’ prescribing accuracy. I also asked him where Brightside were in the process to, err, return at least some of the $150m they’ve raised back to their investors. Matthew Holt
PatientsUseAI: Hugo, Gilles and e-Patient Dave on the race to patient autonomy — THCB Gang Special Episode 149, Thursday December 19
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.
Sara Ratner, Nomi Health
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.
