Today on Health in 2 Point 00, we have a deal so big it’s brought me out of vacation just for this episode! Amwell acquires not one, but TWO companies – DTx mental health company SilverCloud Health and chatbot company Conversa Health for a combined $320 million. In other news, mental health company Sondermind raises $150 million, bringing their total to $188 million, and femtech company Elvie raises $80 million, bringing their total to $133.9 million. —Matthew Holt
Mental Health Startup SonderMind Lands $150M to Tackle ‘THE’ Health Issue of Our Generation
By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH
SonderMind closes a $150M Series C funding round co-led by Drive Capital and Premji Invest, and we get CEO Mark Frank’s take on what sets THIS digital mental health startup apart from a pack of very well-funded competitors. SonderMind has its own behavioral health therapists, built its own tech stack, delivers care virtually AND in-person, is covered by some of the biggest health plans in the country — Aetna, Anthem, Bright Health, Cigna, Kaiser, Optum, and United Healthcare. (They can also namedrop health-tech-infamous Board member, Jonathan Bush, in an interview, but that’s beside the point!)
What’s most remarkable – and what Mark says most impressed investors this time around – is not only the health of SonderMind’s business model, but also its balance sheet. This raise marks the bulk of the total $183M the startup has raised to-date, and Mark reveals that they’ve only deployed about half of the $27M Series B funding they received in April 2020 in a round led by General Catalyst. How will such a “capital efficient” business begin to deploy these new funds? We hear Mark’s plans for nationwide expansion and improvements to that tech stack, particularly when it comes to better matching therapists and patients based on expertise and need, and more appropriately measuring process and outcomes. Two areas ripe for more tech integration as the mental health provider tackles what Mark calls THE defining health issue of our generation.
The Most Important Thing
By KIM BELLARD
Jack Dorsey has some big hopes for bitcoin. In a webinar last week, he said: “My hope is that it creates world peace or helps create world peace.” The previous week Mr. Dorsey announced Square was starting a decentralized financial services (DeFi) business based on bitcoin, joining the previously announced Square bitcoin wallet.
None of this should be a surprise. At the Bitcoin 2021 conference in June, Mr. Dorsey said: “Bitcoin changes absolutely everything. I don’t think there is anything more important in my lifetime to work on.”
I’m impressed that someone with as many accomplishments as Jack Dorsey picks something not obviously related to those accomplishments and decides it is the most important thing he could work on. So, of course, I had to wonder: what might accomplished people in healthcare say was the most important thing they wanted to be working on?
For many these days, of course, it is the COVID-19 pandemic. Not much has had a higher priority. Highly effective vaccines have been developed, COVID-19 treatments have greatly improved, supply chains have been adjusted and readjusted, and countless public health measures have been tried. Healthcare professionals have worked themselves to extremes.
For others, perhaps, it would be to address the extreme financial hardships the U.S. healthcare system can cause. A new study in JAMA confirmed what is hiding in plain sight – hundreds of billions of medical debt. Debt continued to rise despite ACA, especially in states that perversely chose not to expand Medicaid. Efforts such as requiring hospital “price transparency” have largely failed. Many large hospital systems continue to sue patients who can’t pay. These hardships are unfair, immoral, and unique to the U.S.; addressing them should be important.
However, both the pandemic and financial obstacles contributed to, but did not cause, the big health inequities in the U.S. healthcare system. People of color, people in lower socioeconomic classes, even women all face numerous inequities in the health care they receive and in the health they achieve. These may reflect broader social inequities, but no one in healthcare should look at these without wanting to address them.
Digital health has never been hotter. The pandemic reminded people how valuable telehealth can be, and investors are pouring money into digital health at astounding levels – some $19b in the first half of 2021 alone. We may be in bit of a manic phase right now, but few doubt that digital health is going to be a big part of healthcare’s future.
Then there’s artificial intelligence (A.I.). No industry in 2021 can be ignoring it. Some well-publicized mishaps with IBM’s Watson or Babylon Health notwithstanding, A.I. in healthcare has already made impressive strides, such as DeepMind’s recent protein predictions or its successes in imaging. A.I. is going to be built into our health care in the future, either in a supporting role or directly, and working on it has to be on many people’s wish list.
Continue reading…Health Care Needs A Hero
By MIKE MAGEE
Health care needs its heroes.
I came to that conclusion this week through a roundabout route.
First I read Maureen Dowd’s interview entitled “Dara Khosrowshahi, Dad of Silicon Valley”, in which she, with some affection, gives the reader a look behind the scenes at the personal life of the current Uber CEO. At one point, Dowd shares her conversation with Dara’s 20-year-old daughter, Chloe, a Brown student, who wants us to know her father was a seriously good dad. In support of this belief, she reports that “When she was little, her father – a fan of Joseph Campbell…would concoct children’s stories set in faraway kingdoms…”
This, of course, forced me to acknowledge that I didn’t know who Joseph Campbell was. Bill Moyers came to the rescue. His June 21, 1988 interview titled “Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth — ‘The Hero’s Adventure’”, begins with a clip from Star Wars where Darth Vader says to Luke, “Join me, and I will complete your training.” And Luke replies, “I’ll never join you!” Darth Vader then laments, “If you only knew the power of the dark side.” Moyers asked Campbell to comment.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: He (Darth Vader) isn’t thinking, or living in terms of humanity, he’s living in terms of a system. And this is the threat to our lives; we all face it, we all operate in our society in relation to a system. Now, is the system going to eat you up and relieve you of your humanity, or are you going to be able to use the system to human purposes.
BILL MOYERS: So perhaps the hero lurks in each one of us, when we don’t know it.
By then, I was aware that Joseph Campbell, who died in 1987 at the age 83, was a professor of literature and comparative mythology at Sarah Lawrence College. His famous 1949 book, “The Hero With a Thousand Faces” made the case that, despite varying cultures and religions, the hero’s story of departure, initiation, and return, is remarkably consistent and defines “the hero’s quest.” His knowledge of this quest gained him a large following that included George Lucas who was a close friend and has said that Star Wars was largely influenced by Campbell’s scholarship.
Whether health care or technology, unfettered capitalism is more than adept at breeding predatory systems that beg for redemption. Author Emily Chang spoke to this predilection in her 2018 book, “Brotopia”, describing Silicon Valley types as “secretive, orgiastic, and dark.” Dara Kharowshaki’s CEO predecessor at Uber, Travis Kalanick, was labeled one of the worst. When Dara took over, New York Times technology expert, Mike Issac asked in 2019, “Can this rational, charming chief without the edge, ego, or cult following of wacky founders succeed in today’s insane economy?”
Continue reading…#Healthin2Point00, Episode 224 | b.well, Quit Genius, Doktor.se, Sweetch, Kno2, and HealthifyMe
Today on Health in 2 Point 00, Jess and I chat about the staggering medical debt in this country before diving into some more health tech deals. First up on Episode 224, personal health record company b.well Connected Health raises $32 million, bringing their total to $57 million. Next, Quit Genius raises $64 million in a Series C, bringing the digital addiction clinic’s total to $78.6 million, and Swedish telehealth company Doktor.se raises €29.5 million – there are some interesting investors in this one. Sweetch, a Bayer G4A company, raises $20 million for its behavior change app and Kno 2 raises $15 million in a Series A in yet another interoperability play. Finally, Healthify.Me raises $75 million, bringing its total to $100 million – this is like Noom plus exercise in India. —Matthew Holt
Nasdaq’s Dario Health ($DRIO) Does Double Acquisition to Build-out Chronic Condition Care Platform
By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH
The “platform-ization” of chronic condition care continues among digital health companies and Nasdaq-traded Dario Health ($DRIO) has acquired TWO different startups in 2021 alone to augment their core diabetes management offering and keep up. Both wayForward and Upright are now under the Dario Health banner and CEO Erez Raphael reveals the strategy behind the two buy-outs — which cost the company just about $30M each and will add digital behavioral health and musculoskeletal care for chronic pain to the Dario experience.
Erez believes that the promise of digital health and digital therapeutics is hyper-personalization, and that addressing multiple conditions at the same time, in a seamless integration, is the way to deliver on that value prop. But, he’s not alone. Teladoc’s Livongo, Vida Health, One Drop, and Omada Health are well-funded competitors pitching the same promise of integrated virtual care. So, how will Dario Health stand-out? Erez points to the company’s direct-to-consumer beginnings and tech expertise as differentiators – will that be enough in the crowded US employer and health plan market OR is the total addressable market large enough for Dario to grab a significant share? We chat chronic condition care market penetration strategy with one of its few publicly traded digital health companies.
#Healthin2Point00, Episode 223 | Carbon Health, Woebot, Eight Sleep, Aidoc, and OM1
Today on Health in 2 Point 00, Jess has finally reclaimed her Twitter account! On Episode 223, Jess asks me about Carbon Health raising $350 million, this is a big competitor for One Medical with retail clinics plus telehealth. Next, for digital mental health care, Woebot gets $90 million for its mental health chatbot. Eight Sleep raises $76 million working on sleep fitness, with lots of celebrities in this one. Aidoc raises $66 million in a round led by General Catalyst, using AI to analyze medical images for chronic conditions. Finally, real world evidence company OM1 raises $85 million, bringing their total to $170 million. —Matthew Holt
Ginger for Teens Puts “Full-family Approach” to Mental Health Care in Hands of Employers
By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH
Digital mental health unicorn Ginger has just launched ‘Ginger for Teens’ in an effort to help the 1-in-5 teens currently suffering from mental health disorders, amid what’s being called a “teen mental health crisis.” No doubt parents are at their wit’s end searching for care, and Ginger is hoping that its teen-friendly bundle of self-guided content, behavioral health coaching, and video therapy will support a “full-family” approach to mental health care that will help everyone feel a bit better.
Ginger’s Chief Clinical Officer, Dr. Dana Udall, and Adolescent Services Coordinator, Dr. Dena Scott, share their insights on the teen mental health crisis, including the myriad factors they had to consider as they re-tooled Ginger’s offering to meet the needs of this new client base. Ginger for Teens will roll out to all of Ginger’s nearly 650 employer clients by the end of the year, helping teens gain access via their parents’ health plans at work. And beyond Ginger’s employer-sponsored health plan base? Will Ginger for Teens roll out to its health plan clients too? Don’t think we forgot about that first-of-its-kind national contract with Cigna and the potential that partnership could hold to help millions of families nationwide. So, what are the big plans for bringing up the supply-side of teen mental health care? Find out more by tuning in…
Biden Should Extend a “Public Option” as a Message to “Health Care Royalists”
By MIKE MAGEE
In this world of political theatrics, with Democratic legislators from Texas forced into exodus to preserve voters’ rights, and Tucker Carlson rantings about Rep. Eric Swalwell riding shirtless on a camel in Qatar streaming relentlessly, Americans can be excused if they missed a substantive and historic news event last week.
On Friday, July 9th, President Biden signed a far-reaching executive order intended to fuel social and economic reform, and in the process created a potential super-highway sized corridor for programs like universal healthcare. In the President’s view, the enemy of the common man in pursuit of a “fair deal” is not lack of competition but “favoritism.”
To understand the far-reaching implications of this subtle shift in emphasis, let’s review a bit of history. It is easy to forget that this nation was the byproduct of British induced tyranny and economic favoritism. In 1773, citizens of Boston decided they had had enough, and dumped a shipment of tea, owned by the British East India Company, into the Boston Harbor. This action was more an act of practical necessity than politics. The company was simply one of many “favorites” (organizations and individuals) that “got along by going along” with their British controllers. In lacking a free hand to compete in a free market, the horizons for our budding patriots and their families were indefinitely curtailed.
Large power differentials not only threatened them as individuals but also the proper functioning of the new representative government that would emerge after the American Revolution. Let’s recall that only white male property owners over 21(excluding Catholics and Jews) had the right to vote at our nation’s inception.
Over the following two centuries, power imbalances have taken on a number of forms. For example, during the industrial revolution, corporate mega-powers earned the designation “trusts”, and the enmity of legislators like Senator John Sherman of Ohio, who as Chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, led the enactment of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.
He defined a “trust” as a group of businesses that collude or merge to form a monopoly. To Sen. Sherman, J.D. Rockefeller, the head of Standard Oil, was no better than a monarch. “If we will not endure a king as political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation and sale of any of the necessities of life”, he said. The law itself stated “[e]very contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal.”
Continue reading…#Healthin2Point00, Episode 222 | Funding for Availity, VisiQuate, Truveta, and Bayesian
Today on Health in 2 Point 00, Jess and I cover Availity raising $50 million bringing their total to $200 million and a valuation at over a billion. Revenue cycle management company Visiquate raises $50 million, bringing their total to $70 million. Truveta raises $95 million for its data analysis platform, and finally Bayesian gets $15 million using AI to predict sepsis. —Matthew Holt
