Today on Health in 2 Point 00, Jess and I are at UCSF – we’ll be providing color commentary for the UCSF Health Awards, so tune in tonight for that. On Episode 232, Jess asks me about more deals including Stellar Health raising $60 million, Cue Health going public (and stealing the HLTH ticket), and eVisit raising $45 million for its telehealth solution. Finally, Neuroglee raises $10 million in an Alzheimer’s play. —Matthew Holt
You Want to 3D Print What
By KIM BELLARD
You know we’re living in the 21st century when people are 3D printing chicken and cooking it with lasers. They had me at “3D printing chicken.”
An article in NPJ Science of Food explains how scientists combined additive manufacturing (a.k.a, 3D printing) of food with “precision laser cooking,” which achieves a “higher degree of spatial and temporal control for food processing than conventional cooking methods.” And, oh, by the way, the color of the laser matters (e.g., red is best for browning).
Very nice, but wake me when they get to replicators…which they will. Meanwhile, other people are 3D printing not just individual houses but entire communities. It reminds me that we’ve still not quite realized how revolutionary 3D printing can and will be, including for healthcare.
The New York Times profiled the creation of a village in Mexico using “an 11-foot-tall three-dimensional printer.” The project, being built by New Story, a nonprofit organization focused on providing affordable housing solutions, Échale, a Mexican social housing production company, and Icon, a construction technology company, is building 500 homes. Each home takes about 24 hours to build; 200 have already been built.
Continue reading…Nomad Health’s Next Move: $63M Raise Takes On-Demand Healthcare Staffing into Workforce Management
By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH
Not all who wander are lost: Nomad Health lands a $63M Series D round after a year of 5X revenue growth for their tech-driven healthcare staffing marketplace that helps hospitals hire nurses on-demand. This round, led by Adams Street Partners with participation from all existing investors, brings the company’s total fundraising up to $113M. Co-founder & CEO Alexi Nazem stops by to tell us how the startup is not only planning to expand its focus from nurses to other types of healthcare providers but how the process of doing so will transform Nomad from an on-demand staffing agency to “‘THE’ workforce management platform for healthcare.”
Alexi puts it this way: “In healthcare, the product is CARE. And, who is the product team? It’s the doctors, the nurses, the allied health professionals…and the fact that there’s no intentional management of this group of people who steward $1.5 trillion dollars of cost in the US every year is beyond unbelievable.”
The problem is twofold. First, there’s the way temporary staffing is currently being handled: by 2,500 different staffing agencies that take a fragmented, predominantly people-powered approach to sourcing, vetting, and hiring candidates. The cost is high to a health system looking to shore up their nursing staff, and the experience for job-seeking nurses is very opaque, with information being revealed about a job only after a significant investment of time within the application process. If the match falls apart, all the people involved in the process are left to try again.
This leads to the second issue – that, big picture, the status-quo way of temporary staffing is leaving behind a LOT of valuable data. Data about the clinician that is useful to the management of their career, and data about the workforce that would prove valuable to a hospital looking to better manage its care delivery resources.
We journey into the details behind Nomad’s business model, which is cutting costs for hospitals while also increasing pay for the 150,000+ clinicians on its platform. AND, while we’re there, we also find out how they expect their on-demand staffing approach to playing out in the booming virtual care space.
Metaverse and Health Care – A View From 50,000 Feet
by MIKE MAGEE
dystopian
[disˈtōpēən]
ADJECTIVE
1. relating to or denoting an imagined state or society where there is great suffering or injustice.
NOUN
1. a person who imagines or foresees a state or society where there is great suffering or injustice.
There are certain words that keep popping up in 2021 whose meanings are uncertain and which deserve both recognition and definition. And so, the offering above – the word “dystopian.” Dystopian as in the sentence “The term was coined by writer Neal Stephenson in the 1992 dystopian novel Snow Crash.”
One word leads to another. For example, the above-mentioned noun, referred to as dystopian by science fiction writer Stephenson three decades ago, was “Metaverse”. He attached this invented word (the prefix “meta” meaning beyond and “universe”) to a vision of how “a virtual reality-based Internet might evolve in the near future.”
“Metaverse” is all the rage today, referenced by the leaders of Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple, but also by many other inhabitors of virtual worlds and augmented reality. The land of imaginary 3D spaces has grown at breakneck speed, and that was before the self-imposed isolation of a worldwide pandemic.
But most agree that the metaverse remains a future-facing concept that has not yet approached its full potential. As noted, it was born out of science fiction in 1992, then adopted by gamers and academics, simultaneously focusing on studying, applying, and profiting from the creation of alternate realities. But it is gaining ground fast, and igniting a cultural tug of war.
Continue reading…I am Dr. Groot
By KIM BELLARD
The healthcare world is abuzz with Dr. David Feinberg’s departure from Google Health – another tech giant is shocked to find healthcare was so complicated! – while one of those tech giants (Amazon) not only just surpassed Walmart in consumer spending but also is now planning to build its own department stores. Both very interesting, but all I can think about is robots.
Most of the recent publicity about robots has come from Elon Musk’s announcement of the Tesla Bot, or the new video of Boston Dynamic’s Atlas doing more amazing acrobatics, but I was more intrigued by Brooks Barnes’s New York Times article Are You Ready for Sentient Disney Robots?
Like many industries that serve consumers, healthcare has long been envious of Disney’s success with customer experience. Disney even offers the Disney Institute to train others in their expertise with it. Disney claims its advantage is: “Where others let things happen, we’re consistently intentional in our actions.” That means focusing on “the details that other organizations may often undermanage—or ignore.”
You’d have to admit that healthcare ignores too many of the details, allowing things to happen that shouldn’t.
One of the things that Disney has long included in its parks’ experience were robots. It has had robots in its parks since the early 1960’s, when it introduced “audio-animatronics” – mechanical figures that could move, talk, or sing in very life-like ways. Disney has continued to iterate its robots, but, as Mr. Barnes points out, in a world of video games, CGI, VR/AR, and, for heaven’s sake, Atlas robots doing flips, its lineup was growing dated.
Mr. Barnes quotes Josh D’Amaro, chairman of Disney Parks, Experiences and Products, from an April presentation: “We think a lot about relevancy. We have an obligation to our fans, to our guests, to continue to evolve, to continue to create experiences that look new and different and pull them in. To make sure the experience is fresh and relevant.”
Enter Project Kiwi.
In April, Scott LaValley, the lead engineer on the project, told TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino: “Project KIWI started about three years ago to figure out how we can bring our smaller characters to life at their actual scale in authentic ways.” The prototype is Marvel’s character Groot, featured in comic books and the Guardians of the Galaxy movies (he is famous for only saying “I am Groot,” although apparently different intonations result in an entire language).
By 2021, they had a functioning prototype:
Yes, Shit
By KIM BELLARD
The Conversation had a provocative article by Stanford professor Richard White about how America has a bad pattern of wasting infrastructure spending. In light of the surprisingly bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure bill recently passed by the Senate, this seems like something we should be giving some serious thought to.
I’ll posit that we’re doing it again, by not adequately addressing the potential that our excreta, to be polite, offers to detect health issues, including but not limited to COVID-19.
No shit: excrement can be an important tool in public — and personal — health.
Take wastewater monitoring. It is not a new concept – for example, to track polio – and has been used during much of the current pandemic. According to the COVIDPoops19 dashboard, run by UC Merced’s School of Engineering, there are 55 countries with 89 dashboards monitoring the wastewater in 2,428 sites for signs of COVID-19. The project even has its own Twitter handle (@CovidPoops19).
According to Kaiser Health News, the University of California San Diego’s program has identified 85% of COVID-19 cases over the last year, using a largely automated monitoring system. Infected people shed virus particles long before they show symptoms, allowing such programs to act as an early detection system.
“University campuses especially benefit from wastewater surveillance as a means to avert COVID-19 outbreaks, as they’re full of largely asymptomatic populations, and are potential hot spots for transmission that necessitate frequent diagnostic testing,” said UCSD study first author Smruthi Karthikeyan, PhD. Any university debating vaccine or mask mandates in order for students to return to campus should seriously be considering this kind of monitoring mechanism.
Similarly, the University of Minnesota has been sampling the wastewater of 65% of the state’s population, and has correctly predicted the rise and fall of each of the three waves in the last year. North Carolina has also had success.
Continue reading…Health Care You Do Not See
By KIM BELLARD
Within a mile from my home in one direction, there are two pharmacies and a primary care office. In another direction, there’s a multi-specialty physician practice, complete with lab and pharmacy. And in a third direction, an urgent care center. Widen the circle another mile, and there are more physician offices, a plethora of other health care professionals, another urgent care, a retail clinic, and an imaging center. Add a couple more miles and hospitals – plural – to start show up.
I’m not sure that’s a good thing.
Admittedly, not everyone has so many options. If you live in a rural area or a disadvantaged neighborhood, there may not be so many choices. Chances are, though, even in those places, whenever you find retail activity, some portion of it is probably healthcare-related.
Retail clinics helped blur the lines between retail and healthcare, and early moves by retail giants like Walmart or Kroger to incorporate first pharmacy, then primary care, into their stores made getting care easier for millions. All in all, probably a good thing.
Still, though, you know when you’ve gone from shopping for home goods or groceries to getting your healthcare. You know because there’s more waiting. You know because there are more forms to fill out. You know because you don’t know what will happen to you.
And you definitely know when you are getting health care services. You get an injection, you take a pill, you have an image taken, your body is invaded by a tube or a scalpel. That’s why we go, isn’t it? We go because we fear something may be wrong and we want someone to do something about it. Advising us to make lifestyle changes is all well and good, although usually not effective; we want some concrete treatment.
Continue reading…Let’s Meet in the Metaverse
By KIM BELLARD
I really wasn’t expecting to write about the Metaverse again so soon, after discussing it in the context of Roblox last March, which itself followed a look at Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney’s vision for the Metaverse last August. But darn that Mark Zuckerberg!
Not many noticed when Mr. Zuckerberg told Facebook employees in June that the company would become focused on building a metaverse, but he got some attention when he expanded on his vision for The Verge in late July. Then last Monday Andrew Bosworth, Facebook’s head of AR/VR, confirmed a product group had been formed to bring it about. And, finally, in an earnings call last Wednesday, Mr. Zuckerberg and his executive team couldn’t stop gushing about the importance of the metaverse to the company, and the world.
So, yeah, the metaverse is in the news. And, once again, I worry healthcare is going to be late to the party.
I won’t go into too much detail about what the metaverse is; for those who want a deep dive, there’s Matthew Ball’s nine part primer, or you could just read Ready Player One. Mr. Zuckerberg described it to The Verge as follows: “you can think about the metaverse as an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content — you are in it.” In the earnings call, he clarified: “The defining quality of the metaverse is presence – which is this feeling that you’re really there with another person or in another place.”
Depending on your age/preferences, the concept of “an embodied internet” is either chilling or thrilling. Maybe both.
It’s potentially a big deal. Gene Marks, writing in Forbes, says, “business interactions will forever change.” The Conversation’s Beth Daley goes further, stating “creating a virtual world for users to interact with their friends and family is not just a fancy vision, it is a commercial necessity.”
It’s not VR, it’s not AR, it’s not 3D internet, although all those may be part of it. It’s not gaming, it’s not entertainment, it’s not social network, although all of those will be part of it too. Mr. Zuckerberg promises: “It’s going to be accessible across all of our different computing platforms; VR and AR, but also PC, and also mobile devices and game consoles.” Not to overstate it, but he sees the Metaverse as the “next generation of the internet.” Mr. Zuckerberg also described it as “the next computing platform.”
He is openly telling people that the goal is for Facebook to transition to a metaverse company, “within the next five years or so.” Analysts on the earnings call pressed Facebook to confirm an estimate of a $5b investment, but only got an admission that, yes, the investment was “billions.”
Significantly, for Facebook, Mr. Zuckerberg believes: “this is going to be not something that one company builds alone, but I think it is going to be a whole ecosystem that needs to develop.” As Mr. Zuckerberg said in The Verge interview, “Hopefully in the future, asking if a company is building a metaverse will sound as ridiculous as asking a company how their internet is going.”
Continue reading…#Healthin2Point00, Episode 225 | Amwell acquires SilverCloud & Conversa – plus more deals
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
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…
