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Category: THCB Spotlights

Ami Parekh & Ankoor Shah, Included Health

Ami Parekh is the Chief Health Officer & Ankoor Shah, is VP, Clinical Excellence at Included Health. I had a long conversation with them about the philosophy of how we are doing population health and how we fix the system that we have today. I’m arguing for more primary care, but Ami restated it and says, you need somone you trust who is an expert who can help you make decisions. And this might not be a human! How do we change the system, and how does telehealth work now and how will it change? Defining health from the person perspective, not the way the health system wants to define it! Matthew Holt

This was such a great discussion I wanted to publish the transcript. The way I do that is to copy the Youtube generated transcript and drop it into Claude to smooth it over. I then read it and if I think it’s made an error, dip back into the video and listen to what actually happened and make a correction. This is all code therefore for me saying I think this transcript is pretty accurate but it might have a bunch of AI and human generated mistakes.

THCB Spotlight: The Future of Primary Care and Virtual Health Delivery

A Conversation with Ami Parekh, Chief Health Officer, and Ankoor Shah, VP of Clinical Excellence, Included Health

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Steve Brown, CureWise — AI for patients

Steve Brown is a genuine digital health OG. Starting with video games for kids with diabetes he eventually turned Health Hero into one of the first disease management companies. It was used in the VA to manage patients at home with CHF, diabetes and more and eventually sold to Bosch. Steve left health care for 15 years, but then at the start of this year had his own health issue. Which turned out to be cancer. He turned to AI and has built an amazing early stage patient facing AI doctor, called CureWise. It essentially has turned LLMs into multiple doctors. He gave me a full and fascinating demo. This is clearly the future but it’s also the present for Steve who is patient zero and the first user as well as the CEO. Amazing stuff. — Matthew Holt

V Bento, Sword Health

I got to interview V Bento the CEO of Sword Health. We had been in a little back and forth on Linkedin but this was the first time we actually had talked. Almost all of their business is in the US in MSK but they have recently added mental health and V is not shy in talking about the other areas they are heading into. They have had some controversial moments. They just raised money at an amount ($4 Bn) higher than larger rival MSK health outfit Hinge Health is trading at on the public market. Then I used it a year ago via Blue Shield of CA, and found it effective but expensive. Finally, there’s a lawsuit from the folks at Aging 2.0 who claim that they are owed equity from an accelerator Sword was part of in the 2010s.

V talked about all of these, specifically about how they are now charging their clients, and why he thinks they are worth their valuation–which apparently has no special terms for general Catalyst which invested at that valuation. He wouldn’t talk about the lawsuit other than to say he was happy with his position. But we had a good discussion and got to hear about their new tech, including their use of AI, and why V is so bullish on the company moving beyond MSK. Matthew Holt

Dominique Wells, Conduit Health Partners

Dominique Wells is COO of Conduit Health Partners which is a spin off from the (now) Bon Secours Mercy Health system. Their role is to provide back up for nursing staff for health systems in very specific areas, notably patient transfer operations, nurse triage and patient communications. Dominique and her team showed me a brief demo of how the transfer operation works. We also got into the conversation about the role of AI in nursing, and how nursing has changed since the pandemic. An interesting discussion about how the most vital role in health care is changing and how new services are being developed to adapt to it—Matthew Holt

Anmol Madan, RadiantGraph

Anmol Madan is CEO of RadiantGraph. He’s building an end to end solution that goes from data ingestion to applications to consumer connection via text/email and voice in order to let payers quickly roll out patient engagement plans. His idea is that plans/payers don’t need to fix their data, RadiantGraph’s AI can take the messy data and and then add an AI layer, and on that create specific applications–Anmol showed me a comprehensive demo. I also asked him if they are doing too much, or conversely if they need to do more!–Matthew Holt

Ariel Katz, H1

H1 has raised over $200m to build out a very comprehensive data set of physicians internationally. Those products were primarily aimed at pharma. Now they are moving into the world of managing physician data for plans and providers, primarily via the 2025 acquisitions of Ribbon Health and Veda Health. I spoke with CEO Ariel Katz, and he took me through a demo of their system. I’ve had a nerdy interest in physician data for quite a while (I actually sketched out this product on a whiteboard at Microsoft in 2009!!) and what H1 has built is very impressive–Matthew Holt

Roy Schoenberg, AileenAI

Last week longtime AmWell CEO Roy Schoenberg announced, in the New England Journal of Medicine no less, that he was building a companion AI for the elderly called Aileen. We took a dive into the state of play for digital health, what happened at AmWell, and what the goal is for the AI companion. It’s early days but Roy has an interesting idea for how AI will work in the future to be the underlying platform to manage the elder consumer experience. Always a great conversation with Roy and this is no exception–Matthew Holt

Owen Tripp, Included Health

Owen Tripp is CEO of Included Health. It started way back in the 2010s as a second opinion service but now has added telehealth, continuous primary care, behavioral health and guidance for its populations. He’s taken to calling what they do all in one personalized healthcare. Underlying all this is a data integration and analytics platform that’s now being used by some of the biggest employers including Walmart, Comcast, CALPers and more. Essentially Included Health is building the new multi-specialty medical group. Owen & I really got into the details and had a great conversation about how we develop a “3rd way” between the payers and providers–Matthew Holt

Patrick Quigley, Sidecar Health

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

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