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Tag: Andreesen Horowitz

Will ‘DoorDash for Lab Draws’ Startup Sprinter Health Be What Speeds Up Virtual Care’s Growth?

By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH

Sprinter Health bills itself as “the “DoorDash for lab draws” – sending nurses and phlebotomists out to patients’ homes to collect blood samples and urine samples, check vitals, and even perform Covid tests. Their model has been received with some skepticism (most notably by my Health Tech Deals co-host and legendary health care curmudgeon Matthew Holt) so we get down to the bottom of what’s REALLY going on with CEO Max Cohen.

The long-term play is NOT to just rove the streets like some nomadic Quest Diagnostics; it’s to support the emerging market of virtual care and telehealth-based next-gen healthcare companies that will, ultimately, be limited in their abilities to diagnose-and-treat unless they can easily – and inexpensively – get patients lab tests.

Sprinter hopes to be that logistics company, extending the ‘value of virtual’ so it can live up to its promise of providing less expensive, more convenient care to patients. Max says only 15-20% of their business is made up of consumer-directed concierge calls; instead, the focus is on having a provider – think home health providers, specialty labs, virtual-first primary care clinics – dispatch Sprinter instead. Their pricing is built to attract these kinds of providers, giving Sprinter an advantage over, say the kind of medical transport services that are typically engaged to bring home health patients to the lab instead of the other way around.

Less than one-year old, Sprinter has already raised more than $37 million and counts health-tech-famous funds like Andreesen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Accel, Google Ventures – and even the real DoorDash’s co-founder and CEO Tony Xu – as investors. So, what’s ahead in the short-term to expand services out of LA, San Francisco, and Sacramento? We talk geographic expansion (hello, Texas and Georgia) and how Max is planning to continue to expand the utility and value of virtual care without increasing cost.

New Cancer Care Navigator Thyme Care Starts Out with $22M Series A & Big Name Backing

By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH

Thyme Care is a cancer navigation platform that is looking to use technology to make the kind of high-touch care coordination usually only found at Centers of Excellence available to oncology practices across the country. The navigation we’re talking about is typically quarterbacked by experienced oncology nurse navigators, and is known to have a direct impact on a patient’s experience and their health outcomes. Thyme Care’s platform not only scale-ups this expertise, but also augments it with analysis of claims data and EMR data to help those navigators quickly detect which patients might be at higher risk for poor outcomes and which interventions might help mitigate those risks – whether that be addressing social determinants of health issues like transportation to appointments, or just more quickly spotting gaps in care.

Thyme Care’s President & Chief Medical Officer Bobby Green (an oncologist himself) introduces us to the tech platform and explains how, among a competitive field of tech-enabled care navigators, it’s managed to stand apart enough to win Medicare Advantage plan Clover Health as an early client and to gain a $22 million dollar Series A investment from platform-savvy investors like Andreessen Horowitz and AlleyCorp. (Frist Cressey Ventures, Casdin Capital and Bessemer also participated in the round, which was announced in October 2021.)

As the business looks to scale, what’s to make of all its connections to Flatiron Health, arguably health tech’s best-known cancer care platform? Lots of alumni on the cap table and in the biz, including Bobby himself! Find out more about expansion plans and points of differentiation in this quick get-to-know-you chat.

#Healthin2Point 00, Episode 237 | Horowitz and Tiger Global, Medable, Zerigo Health, and more deals

Today on Health in 2 Point 00, Jess and I talk about Andreessen Horowtiz’s new ventures and the reemergence of Tiger Global in Health Tech. Some big deals for Episode 237: Medable receives 304 million in Series D bringing their total up to $521 million; Zerigo health gets $43 million, bringing their total up to $67 million; Click Therapeutics receives 52 million, but with side deals their total rises to $100 million; Workit Health gets $112 million, bringing their total to $138 million. Among Horowtiz’s new ventures, Patina gets 57 million despite not having launched yet, and Marley Medical gets $9 million. – Matthew Holt

Health Care Reform Gangnam Style

So I read an article the other day about a new company called Rap Genius. The company consists primarily of a website that relies on crowdsourcing to explain rap lyrics to the masses who are not down with the urban vibe (aka, people over 30).  The company takes lyrics such as these from Kanye West’s Gold Digger….

She was supposed to buy your shorty Tyco with your money
She went to the doctor got lipo with your money
She walking around looking like Michael with your money.”

…and explains that they mean, to wit:  The ex-wife was supposed to buy your baby some toys with the child support money but instead spent it all on so much plastic surgery that she looks like Michael Jackson (presumably before he died―my edit).

Here’s another example:  Nelly’s song Grillz gets explained thusly:  “Got 30 down at the bottom, 30 more at the top, all invisible set in little ice cube blocks” refers to the fact that Nelly is wearing “grillz” aka jewelry worn over the teeth, which are worth $30,000 on the top and another $30,000 on the bottom, with diamonds set right into the gold.  So now you know.

According to the article about the $15m investment that venture fund Andreesen Horowitz put into Rap Genius, the company’s goal is to “annotate the Internet” and, beyond rap music, “the company is slowly spreading to other categories such as literature, political speeches, and science papers.”  Let me just digress for a moment and say that the website I would love to see is the one that turns political speeches into rap lyrics―wouldn’t it be sublime to see Joe Biden and Paul Ryan speak jive?

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