Pete Hudson is one of the OGs of digital health. As an emergency room doc he was fed up with his friends bothering him with their medical problems and he created a tool called iTriage, which helped patients figure out what condition they had, and where to go to deal with it. This was fifteen years ago and we’re now starting to see the evolution of that. Pete is now a venture capitalist and an investor in Transcarent–the sponsor of a new video series on THCB. We had a long conversation about the evolution of digital health, what went right, what opportunities got missed, and what to expect next. This is part one of our conversation, and allows two guys who were there close to the start of this world to survey what’s happened since–Matthew Holt
THCB Gang Episode 140, Thursday October 3
OK we are really back.! Following last weeks special with the Women Healthcare Leaders for Progress, the “regular” THCBGang is coming back for the Fall, mostly but not always at the 1pm PT 4pm ET timeslot on Thursdays.
Joining Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) on #THCBGang on Thursday October 3 at 1pm PST 4pm EST are futurist Jeff Goldsmith: delivery & platform expert Vince Kuraitis (@VinceKuraitis); author & ponderer of odd juxtapositions Kim Bellard (@kimbbellard);
You can see the video below & if you’d rather listen than watch, the audio is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels
THCB Gang Special! Women Healthcare Leaders for Progress talk about health care & the election
THCB Gang is back! (I know you’ve all missed it) and we started with a bang. I met with five powerhouse women leaders in health care who’ve just issued a public statement signed by another 500+ women leaders in support of the Harris/Walz campaign.
On the Gang are Missy Krasner, digital health veteran most recently at Amazon and Redesign Health but wayback on the founder team at ONC; Molly Coye, who ran Medicaid in NJ and CA and has had every role in health innovation know to womankind; Miriam Paramore, investor board member and operator at many, many health tech companies; (Lori Evans Bernstein, founder of Caraway, Health Reveal & many more but also at ONC back in the day, who actually couldn’t make the call); Laurie McGraw, EVP at Transcarent, formerly at AMA, Allscripts, etc; and Audrey Mann Cronin, communication advisor to CEOs and Founder, Say it Media.
Despite my obvious political leanings, this wasn’t be a push over. Do we need this group? What does Harris want to do about health care? What can she do? I am on record as saying “not much”. This was great discussion, and I was (virtually) ducking alot! — Matthew Holt
Phil Fasano, Recuro Health
Phil Fasano is CEO of Recuro Health. Phil was CIO at Kaiser Permanente in the glory years when it rolled out Epic/Health Connect, which was at the time the biggest roll out of an EMR and was instrumental in creating Kaiser’s system of virtual care. A decade+ later the concept of telehealth and virtual care has been battered around, notably in the stock price of Teladoc and others. However, Phil is now leading a smaller organization called Recuro Health which is delivering extensive primary hybrid care to small & medium employers, has more then 1 million lives on the system, and is profitable. Is this the future of digital health? Maybe, and it’s well worth listening to his approach–Matthew Holt
Josh Reischer, Health Note
Health Note takes the patient history from the patient and includes it in the EMR. It’s another piece of the puzzle in trying to fix the patient/physician encounter. Health note also does the basic information for intake that companies like Phreesia does but it also gets the patient to answer questions about their health so that the physician has more time in the encounter to focus on what to do about it. But they also add their history into Epic in a very specific and complex way. CEO Josh Reischer showed me a detailed demo about what the patient and provider experience is. Quite the advance on asking and typing as happens in 95% of visits today!–Matthew Holt
Welldoc–Anand Iyer & Marina Dorotheo demo the latest!
Welldoc is a consumer facing tool that has been around a long, long time in the diabetes management space. It was the first company to be certified by the FDA as Software as a Medical Device, and it has moved into wide range of diseases as the consumer front-end for many organizations. Welldoc itself is hiding behind the scenes in most of these relationships but it has grown steadily and not had to raise money since 2016. A few weeks back I grabbed Anand Iyer, Chief Analytics Officer and & Marina Dorotheo, Chief Marketing Officer who also runs strategy. We had a long chat about the state of the market, the company and they showed me an extensive demo (9.40-32.00). If you haven’t caught up with this sector lately, this is well worth a detailed look.
Roy Schoenberg, CEO, AmWell
AmWell is a now veteran telehealth platform. It used its IPO money to re-architect its entire platform and add companies like Conversa AI chat service and mental health service Silvercloud, as well as integrating deeply with EMRs & more. That change hit its earnings….so can they recover? Roy Schoenberg, CEO, tells you why this is good for AmWell and what happens next.–-Matthew Holt
Lucienne Ide, Rimidi
Lucie Ide is a physician running Rimidi, a company helping health systems manage patients with chronic conditions. They extract data from EMRs and transfer this into workflow for care teams, predominantly at ACOs and other risk bearing organizations, but also increasingly with FFS groups using RPM to manage those patients. Their current moves are to continue to extend from their first patient group (diabetes) to all types of chronic patients. We chatted about her company, but also about the wider move (or lack of it) to better manage patients in the US system–Matthew Holt
Raj Singh, Accolade
Earlier this month I caught up with Raj Singh, the CEO of Accolade. The “navigation” company is publicly traded and now offering its own telehealth, primary care & second opinions as well as helping patients access both digital health services and brick & mortar health systems. How is Accolade dealing by both offering primary care and helping patients manage through complex care situations? And why isn’t this available to everyone, yet? Raj told me how it works and what the likely future will be, including work with health plans, and how Accolade is on a path to a $1b in revenue in 5 years.–Matthew Holt
Kota Kubo, Ubie
Kota Kubo is the CEO of Ubie, a Japan-based symptom-checking company. Ubie has raised over $75m including a $45m round in 2022. They were focusing on the Japanese market but have been available in the US since 2022, and are expanding their presence there dramatically in 2024. It’s a direct to consumer product with a business model of helping pharma companies understand their patients better–while of course not letting them have patients’ private or identifiable information. This is a little different than most symptom checkers who tend to work with providers or plans, and I met Kota in Tokyo late last year to discuss the business and get a little demo–Matthew Holt
