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Particle Health, Complete Patient Records & ‘The Business’ of the Information Blocking Rule

By JESSICA DAMASSA

Particle Health’s CEO Troy Bannister stops by to not only talk about the API platform company’s $25M Series B, but to also explain exactly what’s going on in that patient data ‘exchange-standardize-and-aggregate’ space that, these days, looks poised to pop as the 21st Century Cures Act Information Blocking Rule stands ready to make hospitals share data like never before.

Troy calls Particle a “network of networks” and what that means is that their API pulls patient records from organizations and businesses that are already aggregating them (so aggregating the aggregators) to get all the lab data and medical data a clinician would want to in order to have a more complete picture of their patient. For clients like One Medical or Omada Health, who deliver value-based care and take on risk, having such a robust historic data set on patients – along with a more complete picture of their comorbidities – helps improve decision making and outcomes.

So, how is Particle Health working now – and what will change – as the Information Blocking Rule gets implemented? Troy’s written about this for Forbes, and explains what has him fired up here too. Turns out their model has room to accommodate a big pivot: giving patients access to their own ‘network of networks’ record. Find out what sets Particle off in this new B2B2C direction and how they will be using that Series B funding to build out deeper analytical tools to help everyone make better sense of what the data in all those records can show us.

Link to Troy’s Forbes piece on Anti Information Blocking Rules

Link to Jess’s chat with Micky Tripathi, the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at HHS, on Anti Information Blocking & TEFCA:

Long COVID cardiac studies: More questions than answers.

BY ANISH KOKA

The NIH recently announced $1.2 billion dollars in funding for research on Long COVID. This is in part because of a faction of scientists that have mined electronic health record databases to find evidence that the long term impacts of COVID on a variety of different organ systems is significant.

I have some concerns when it comes to the cardiac complications discussed related to Long COVID.

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HealthTechDeals Episode 41 | Cera, Birdie, Theator, Tebra, Diagnostic Robots

It’s a tale of two markets: on one side we have layoffs, sinking stock prices, and all sorts of trouble, but on the other side we’ve got some good bills passed and some pretty great fundraising! In this episode, Jess and I dive more into the dual nature of the state of health tech. Is it the best of times and the worst of times? We find out, and talk through some recent multimillion-dollar deals: Cera raises $320 million; Birdie raises $30 million; Theator raises $24 million; Tebra raises $72 million; Diagnostic Robotics raises $45 million.

-Matthew Holt

#HealthTechDeals Episode 40 | Everside Health, Particle Health, Annexus Health, and Homeward

Am I having a staring contest with the future of digital health? Who’s gonna blink first? How has demand gotten so low? What is going on? Tune in to this episode of Health Tech Deals to hear Jess and I hash things out, and to hear more new deals: Everside Health raises $164 million; Particle Health raises $25 million; Annexus Health raises $33 million; and Homeward raises $50 million.

-Matthew Holt

Jenny Schneider on Homeward’s $50M Series B, 30K-Patient Partnership with Priority Health

By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH

Just FIVE MONTHS after launch, rural health startup Homeward is proving its potential for growth with MORE funding – today announcing its $50 million Series B (that’s $70 million total for the folks keeping score at home) – AND a huge 30,000-patient partnership with Priority Health. Co-founder & CEO Dr. Jennifer Schneider is here to breakdown both bits of news and give us some context about what they indicate about the rural healthcare market.

There are a couple surprising facts in this one that add up to why investors like ARCH Venture Partners and Human Capital (co-leads), General Catalyst (which led the Series A), and Lee Shapiro and Glen Tullman (old buddies and former Livongo colleagues who went in on this with personal funds outside of their fund 7wireVentures) were excited to jump into a quick Series B.

Surprising Fact 1: 90% of all rural Medicare beneficiaries are covered by just 7 payers, which makes the Priority Health deal a bigger deal than even that massive 30K patient population might indicate.

Surprising Fact 2: Homeward’s market of rural Americans is actually TWICE as large as the diabetes market that spurred the investment and growth of Livongo.

For all the math, the details on how the business actually works five months in, and how Homeward is actually going to market as a ‘healthcare infrastructure’ provider rather than just a next-gen medical group, you’re going to have to give this one a watch!

You Need Some Smarter Clothing

BY KIM BELLARD

Much as I’d love to write about Instagram’s feud with the Kardashians over changes to the Instagram feed, and how that and proposed changes to Facebook’s feed reflect Meta’s efforts to combat TikTok’s growing influence, I’ve already given healthcare plenty of warnings about TikTok.  Instead, I’ll write about something else that the Kardashians care about: fashion.

Well, not fashion per se, but clothing. If the old, sexist statement was “clothes make the man,” then soon we may be saying “clothes make your health.” 

The Washington Post got my attention when it reported last week about robotic clothing, because, as anyone who has been reading me for long knows, I am fascinated by robots and their role in healthcare.  One of the advances the article discussed works on “smart fluid textiles” done by Dr. Thanh Nho Do and colleagues at the University of New South Wales Medical Robotics lab.

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US Cardiac electrophysiologists meet reimbursement reality and don’t like it.

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By ANISH KOKA

It’s been a while but Anish Koka, a one time regular writer on THCB and occasional THCB Gang member, is back publishing up a storm on his Substack channel. You may recall that his political and clinical views don’t always mesh with some of the wooly liberals we feature on THCB (cough, cough, me), but we are delighted to be back publishing some of his pieces–this one is on reimbursement.–Matthew Holt

The subspecialty of Cardiology known as electrophysiology has seen explosive growth over the last few decades in large part because of a massive expansion in the suite of procedures now offered to patients. It used to be that electrophysiologists would spend the majority of their careers implanting pacemakers and defibrillators, but the last 2 decades saw an explosion in electrophysiology procedures known as ablations. Ablations essentially involve burning cardiac tissue in a strategic manner to get rid of arrhythmias that may be afflicting a particular patient. The path humans took from first taking an electrical picture of the heart with a surface ECG to putting catheters into the heart to map and treat dangerous arrhythmias is one of the great achievements of the modern era.

Giants of the field like the recently deceased Mark Josephson essentially created a field by going where no humans had gone before. Dr. Josephson did much of his work in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania publishing seminal papers that lead to a greater understanding and eventual treatment of previously incurable malignant arrhythmias. As is true of all trailblazing work in medicine , there were no reimbursement codes in the beginning , just desperate patients with no place to turn.

The procedures being embarked on were rare and the patients were very complex. The renumeration that was awarded from Medicare was reflective of this. But two things almost always happen once a highly reimbursed procedure code comes on line – technological advances makes the procedure easier, and the population that the procedure is intended for massively balloons.

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#HealthTechDeals Episode 39 | Cleery, Health Note, Elation, and Caraway

We’ve been duped! Everyone said nothing’s been going on in digital health, but Amazon bought OneMedical! Keep watching for our thoughts and new deals: Cleery raises $192 million; Health Note raises $17 million; Elation raises $50 million; Caraway raises $10.5 million.

-Matthew Holt

THCB Gang Episode 99, Thursday July 28

This was a special early in the day edition of #THCBGang. It was at 9.15am PT/ 12.15 pm ET (so if you are coming at 1pm it won’t be live today at the normal time as it’s already happened!). It was part of the Primary Care Transformation Summit which has been running since Monday and continues to the end of Friday. It’s a who’s who of everyone in primary care. You can check out the wider agenda but we were on immediately before the day 3 keynote from head of CMS Innovation, Liz Fowler.

Joining Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) to discuss primary care and more were are WTF Health host & Health IT girl Jessica DaMassa (@jessdamassa); futurist Jeff Goldsmith; & Dan O’Neill (@dp_oneill) who is now at primary care group Pine Park Health.

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.

I Was Wrong

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BY KIM BELLARD

The New York Times had an interesting set of op-eds last week under the theme “I Was Wrong.”  For example, Paul Krugman says he was wrong about inflation, David Brooks laments being wrong about capitalism, and Bret Stevens now fears he was wrong about Trump voters.  Nobody fessed up about being wrong about healthcare, so I’ll volunteer.  

I’ve been writing regularly about healthcare for over a decade now, with some strong opinions and often with some pretty speculative ideas.  I’ve had a lot to be wrong about, and I hope I will be wrong about many of them (e.g., microplastics).  Some of my thoughts (such as on DNA storage or nanorobots) may just be still too soon, but there are definitely some things I’d thought, or at least hoped, would have happened by now.

I’ll highlight three:

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