Today on Health in 2 Point 00, Jess claims that I am to blame! But for what?? On Episode 219, Jess and I talk about home care software company AlayaCare raising $225 million CAD. Next, Health Catalyst acquires Twistle for $104 million and Hims acquires teledermatology company Apostrophe. Finally, Spiras Health raises $14 million for at-home chronic care management. —Matthew Holt
Health in 2 Point 00, Episode 135 | Amazon’s primary care entry, UnitedHealth’s digital DPP & more
Today on Health in 2 Point 00, it’s the 4th shoe! On Episode 135, we’ve got Amazon’s entry into primary care through its pilot program with Crossover Health, UnitedHealth Group launching Level2, their own digital health diabetes prevention program, Health Catalyst acquiring healthfinch, Truepill raising $25 million and then investing in Ahead, a company which matches psychiatrists to patients. —Matthew Holt
Health Catalyst’s New Data-Driven Life Sciences Business | Sadiqa Mahmood, Health Catalyst
By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH
As if an IPO weren’t enough big news for Health Catalyst in 2019, the company also launched a brand-new life sciences business, basically setting forth a new solution for a completely new set of healthcare clients. Sadiqa Mahmood, Senior VP for Medical Affairs, explains how Health Catalyst is building off their deep expertise analyzing clinical care data and adding to it the molecular data typically collected by pharma companies, biotechs, med device manufacturers, and even digital health companies in order to open up a new era of precision medicine. The idea is to enable these innovators to better define patient cohorts for targeted therapies by creating a more robust data-set that integrates clinical measures. Was this strategy part of Health Catalysts’ larger plan to go public? How have life sciences companies responded so far? Sadiqa gives us some insight on Health Catalyst’s growth plans.
Filmed at Frontiers Health in Berlin, Germany, November 2019.
HardCore Health Podcast| Episode 3, IPOs, Privacy, & more!
On Episode 3 of HardCore Health, Jess & I start off by discussing all of the health tech companies IPOing (Livongo, Phreesia, Health Catalyst) and talk about what that means for the industry as a whole. Zoya Khan discusses the newest series on THCB called, “The Health Data Goldilocks Dilemma: Sharing? Privacy? Both?”, which follows & discuss the legislation being passed on data privacy and protection in Congress today. We also have a great interview with Paul Johnson, CEO of Lemonaid Health, an up-and-coming telehealth platform that works as a one-stop-shop for a virtual doctor’s office, a virtual pharmacy, and lab testing for patients accessing their platform. In her WTF Health segment, Jess speaks to Jen Horonjeff, Founder & CEO of Savvy Cooperative, the first patient-owned public benefit co-op that provides an online marketplace for patient insights. And last but not least, Dr. Saurabh Jha directly address AI vendors in health care, stating that their predictive tools are useless and they will not replace doctors just yet- Matthew Holt
Matthew Holt is the founder and publisher of The Health Care Blog and still writes regularly for the site.
Health in 2 Point 00 Episode 89 | IPOs, Oscar and Fitbit
Today on Health in 2 Point 00, it’s IPO day! On Episode 89, Jess asks me about the recent IPOs, Oscar Health getting into Medicare Advantage, and Fitbit accuracy in people of color. Jess asks me to weigh in on whether Livongo’s IPO was better than we expected and it’s safe to say that they are growing fast. On the flip side, the “silent” IPO that no one seems to be talking about is Health Catalyst, which is also doing quite well with a $1.6 billion valuation although they are not growing as fast as Livongo is. Next, Oscar Health decided to enter into Medicare Advantage, which is not surprising because that’s where the real money is in the insurance side. Finally, Fitbits and other wearables may not be tracking heart rates accurately in people of color, so what does this mean for the wearables industry—and their potential use for medical purposes? —Matthew Holt
Those Digital Health IPOs—Flipping the Stack & Filling the Gap
By MATTHEW HOLT
I’ve been driven steadily nuts by a series of recent articles that are sort of describing what’s happening in health tech or (because the term won’t die) digital health, so I thought it was time for the definitive explanation. Yeah, yeah, humility ain’t my strong suit.
It won’t have escaped your attention that, after five years during which Castlight Health more or less single-handedly killed the IPO market for new health tech companies, suddenly in the middle of July 2019 we have three digital health companies going public. While Livongo, (FD-a THCB sponsor) Phreesia and Health Catalyst are all a little bit different, I’m going to use them to explain what the last decade of health tech evolution has meant.
Don’t get carried away by the precise details of the IPOs. Phressia is already out with a market cap of $845m. Yes, it’s true that none of the three are profitable yet, but they are all showing decent revenue growth at an annual run rate of $100m+ and Livongo in particular has been on a client acquisition and annual triple digit revenue growth tear. It’s also the newest of these companies, founded only in 2014, albeit by buying another company (EosHealth) founded in 2008 that had some of the tech they launched with. Going public doesn’t really mean that the health care market will swoon for them, nor that they are guaranteed to change the world. After all, as I pointed out in my recent somewhat (ok, very) cynical 12 rules for health tech startups, UnitedHealth Group has $250 Billion in revenue and doesn’t seem to be able to change the system. And anyone who remembers the eHealth bust of 2000-2002 knows that just because you get to the IPO, it’s no guarantee of success or even survival.
But just by virtue of making it this far and being around the 1/10th of 1% of health tech startups to make it to IPO, we can call all three a success. But what do they do?
They are all using new technologies to tackle longstanding health care problems.
Health in 2 point 00, Episode 24
In this edition of Health in 2 point 00, Jessica DaMassa asks me about enterprise sales (Qventus, Medicity, Health Catalyst), DTC vs Enterprises as a market, the VA allowing nationwide telehealth,, and the TEAP & TEFCA frameworks (that last answer may have overran the 2 minutes a tad!) — Matthew Holt
Health Catalyst: Dale Sanders on what’s next for analytics & big data
One of the more interesting guys in health tech is Dale Sanders who’s been data geek/CIO at multiple provider organizations (InterMountain, Northwestern, Cayman Islands), was in the nuclear weapons program in the US Air Force back in the day, and now is the product visionary at Health Catalyst. Health Catalyst is a very well-backed date warehousing and analytics company that has Kaiser, Partners, Allina and a host of other providers as its customers and investors (and has been a THCB sponsor for a while!). I’ve interviewed CEO Dan Burton a couple of times (here’s 2016) if you want to know more about the nuts and bolts of the company, but this chat with Dale at HIMSS17 got a tad more philosophical about the future of analytics–from “conference room analytics” to “embedded decision support.” I found it great fun and hope you do too!
Matthew Holt Interviews Health Catalyst CEO, Dan Burton
One in a series of interviews that should have been posted months ago, but Matthew Holt is just getting to now.
Health Catalyst has emerged to be a dominant player in data warehousing and analytics to support quality (and business) enhancement for huge providers like Kaiser, Partners and Allina, and many more. They’ve also raised over $220m from a stack of noted VCs. Back in February Matthew Holt caught up with CEO, Dan Burton at HIMSS to see what the latest plans for the company were.
Priya Kumar is an Intern at Health 2.0, and a student at George Washington University
Speak Softly and Carry (Good) Data
After a recent talk, a client came up to me with a puzzled expression.
We made small talk. We talked about the weather. We talked about sports. Finally, he got to the point.
“When are you going to talk about Big Data?” he asked somewhat impatiently.
“I’m not,” I responded.
It transpired that he was expecting to hear about all of the miraculous things Big Data was going to do for his healthcare system. He had come expecting to hear my Big Data talk.
Apparently, this was something he had been looking forward to all week. He was to be disappointed.
As a matter of fact, I almost never talk about Big Data.
And for the most part, nobody at my company, HealthCatalyst, does either.
Which might seem a little strange for a company in the data and analytics business. You’d think we’d be singing the praises of Big Data from morning till night. But we aren’t. There’s a reason for that, which I think is important.
