Omada Health put to use part of their recent $57M funding round to acquire Physera, a musculoskeletal care company that uses telehealth and digital interventions to deliver ‘virtual physical therapy’ to those suffering from back, knee, and neck pain. How does the acquisition fit into Omada’s growth strategy? WTF Health’s Jessica DaMassa chats with both Omada Health’s CEO, Sean Duffy, and Dan Rubinstein, CEO of Physera, about the acquisition, the IPO buzz that continues to swirl around Omada, and whether or not the opportunity that COVID-19 has created for digital care will be lasting as we move forward.
Today on Health in 2 Point 00, we have more deals to cover continuing off of yesterday’s episode! Jess and I talk about Kaia Health raising $26 million in a B round led by Optum Ventures, RapidSOS gets $21 million for their emergency response tech, Abacus Insights raising $35 million, and Ready raising $48 million pairing home visits from EMTs and nurses with telehealth. In other news, Target is now offering free access to telehealth visits through CirrusMD, and Doximity is acquiring THMED (which is changing its name to Curative) to put together a database of doctors to improve healthcare staffing/recruitment.—Matthew Holt
The loss of lives and livelihoods from COVID-19 are almost too much to comprehend. And yet, slowly, conversations are emerging about the positives percolating from the pandemic.
It’s human nature to want to look for the positives in even the worst of situations, and I’ve noticed that in both my personal and my professional circles of late, people are talking about the things they hope we don’t lose when things go back to “normal.”
Chief among them, especially in my healthcare technology circles, is a level of humanity that our previously faster-paced lives, ways and organizations had perhaps too often and too easily dismissed. The humans on the frontline of care delivery, for example. The effects of social isolation on healthy people, much less those who are sick. The struggle and juggle of modern work-life balance. Inequalities in healthcare access and delivery.
We’ve long talked about technology’s ability to make some of these things easier, to close some of these gaps, but now we know just how possible they are when people, politics and policy unite in the face of a pandemic. We now know just how quickly even the largest and slowest-moving of health systems can change course and even course correct.
Until now, it’s been far easier to talk about the promise of technology, telemedicine and remote workforce scenarios than it was to actually deploy them. Because before, to deploy such solutions also meant loss; loss of control, loss of normalcy, loss of humanity. Until now.
On Episode 128 of Health in 2 Point 00, Jess and I talk about Proteus filing for bankruptcy, Walmart buying the tech from CareZone for prescription drug management for an unconfirmed $200 million, Kyruus raising another $30 million for referrals and scheduling for large health systems, Headspace raising another $47.7 million, and CareAcademy raising $9.5 million in a Series A to provide online training for professional caregivers for seniors. —Matthew Holt
I swear I’d been thinking about writing about facial recognition long before I discovered that John Oliver devoted his show last night to it. Last week I wrote about how “Defund Police” should be expanded to “Defund Health Care,” and included a link to Mr. Oliver’s related episode, only to have a critic comment that I should have just given the link and left it at that.
Now, I can’t blame anyone for preferring Mr. Oliver’s insights to mine, so I’ll link to his observations straightaway…but if you’re interested in some thoughts about facial recognition and healthcare, I hope you’ll keep reading.
Facial recognition is, indeed, in the news lately, and not in a good way. Its use, particularly by law enforcement agencies, has become more widely known, as have some of its shortcomings. At best, it is still weak at accurately identifying minority faces (or women), and at worst it poses significant privacy concerns for, well, everyone. The fact that someone using such software could identify you in a crowd using publicly available photographs, and then track your past and subsequent movements, is the essence of Big Brother.
This is one of the more unusual videos I’ve done as a THCB Spotlight. I’ve been advising Allison Martin at UDoTest for a while. Meanwhile, I met Rahul Dubey when he was running innovation at AHIP. Then I saw his name all over Twitter and everywhere else because he had let a large number of protesters into his house as the police violently broke up a BLM protest earlier this month. What I didn’t know was how well they knew each other, but I got them together late last week and it made for a fascinating conversation about society, health care, and the future. —Matthew Holt
Restrictions on elective surgical volume in hospitals across the United States are causing a dilemma heretofore unseen in the American healthcare system. Surgeons across services have large and growing backlogs of elective surgeries in an environment where operating room (OR) capacity is restricted due to availability of inpatient beds, personal protective equipment (PPE), staffing, and many other constraints. Fortunately, the U.S. is not the first country to experience and deal with this situation; for many countries, this is the normal state of medicine.
By combining the accumulated experience of health systems around the world with cutting-edge technologies, it is possible to make this crisis manageable for perioperative leadership and, potentially, to improve upon the preexisting models for managing OR time.
The first step in creating an equitable system that can garner widespread buy-in is to agree upon a method for categorizing cases into priority levels. Choosing a system with strong academic backing will help to reduce the influence of intra-hospital politics from derailing the process before it can begin.
Why Cases Should Be Prioritized
If your hospital has a mix of surgeons who perform highly time-sensitive cases — cases where patient quality of life is substantially impacted — as well as cases with minor health or quality of life outcomes, it is important to make sure there will be enough capacity to get the higher urgency cases done within a reasonable amount of time. This allows cases in the backlog to be balanced against new cases that are yet to be scheduled and will help to optimize the flow of patients through the OR.
Stacie Ruth left mega conglomerate Philips when she ran into the chance to revolutionize drug delivery via nebulizers, and co-founded AireHealth. Along the way she realized that changing care for patients with respiratory conditions was actually a bigger problem and opportunity. In April she met Nirinjan Yee from Breath Research who had built an AI system that took lung sounds to predict exacerbations. Last week they merged their companies, and I spoke to them about what the new AireHealth will be doing. —Matthew Holt
By VINCE KURAITIS, ERIC PERAKSLIS, and DEVEN McGRAW
This piece is part of the series “The Health Data Goldilocks Dilemma: Sharing? Privacy? Both?” which explores whether it’s possible to advance interoperability while maintaining privacy. Check out other pieces in the series here.
A worldwide dialog about COVID-19 contact tracing is underway. Even under the best of circumstances, the contact tracing process can be difficult, time-consuming, labor-intensive, and invasive — requiring rigorous, methodical execution and follow-up.
COVID-19 throws curve balls at the already difficult process of contact tracing. In this post we will provide some basic background on contact tracing and will list and describe 10 challenges that make contact tracing of COVID-19 exceptionally difficult. The 10 unique challenges are:
1) COVID-19 is Highly Contagious and Deadly
2) Contact Tracing is Becoming Politicized
3) We Lack Scientific Understanding of COVID-19
4) Presymptomatic Patients Can Spread COVID-19
5) Asymptomatic Patients Can Spread COVID-19
6) Contact Tracing is Dependent on Availability of Testing
7) Contact Tracing is Dependent on New, Extensive Funding
8) Contact Tracing is Dependent on an “Army of Tracers” and Massive Support for Patients
9 ) The Role of Technology is Unclear — Is it Critical Support or a Distraction?
10) The U.S. Response Has Been Fragmented and Inconsistent
The thrust of this post is about traditional boots-on-the-ground contact tracing conducted by public health agencies. We will touch on a few aspects of digital contact tracing (e.g., smartphone apps), but we’ll go into much more depth on digital contact tracing in future posts.
How does contact tracing relate to the theme of this series — The Health Data Goldilocks Dilemma? It’s about obtaining the right amount and types of information — not too much, not too little. Not too much data so that privacy rights or civil liberties are infringed, or that contact tracers are overwhelmed with useless data; not too little data so that public health agencies aren’t handcuffed in protecting our safety in tracing COVID-19 cases.
Today on Health in 2 Point 00, Jess asks Matthew about AireHealth merging with BreathResearch, adding machine learning-based diagnostics to their respiratory health remote monitoring devices, Sharecare acquiring behavioral health platform MindSciences, the “digital One Medical” telemedicine company PlushCare raising $23 million in a Series B, and PatientPing raising $60 million to expand their e-notifications network to achieve greater interoperability and coordinated care.—Matthew Holt
