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Accolade flying flag as patient advocates

By MATTHEW HOLT

I have spent years whining that no one is doing a good job helping people navigate through the maze of health care. And a survey out last week from my old firm Harris paid for by Accolade confirms that people need help. Doctors don’t and can’t do this. 71% of people said they trusted their doctors, but only 16% said their doctors had time to understand their life circumstances. Yet last summer a touted Silicon Valley startup called Better failed to make a go of a service doing just that.

Somehow Accolade seems to be threading this needle. They’ve raised more than $125m (including another $30m late last year beyond what I discuss in this interview). While they’re helping patients they’re charging their employers and insurers for the service. Late last summer I met Accolade’s EVP Amy Loftus. In this interview she explains what they do, and how it works.

Seth Sternberg talks about Honor

By MATTHEW HOLT

Seth Sternberg was a founder at instant message service Meebo, which was acquired by Google in 2012, and like many tech guys he’s next decided to try to change the health care experience. But unlike many others the aspect he wanted to change was the in home caregiving market, following a bad experience with his own mother. Honor came out from under wraps last year, raised $20m, and is currently operating in Los Angeles and San Francisco. It’s not only a market place where you can hire caregivers for a loved one, but it also allows the client, whether they be the person receiving the care or their loved one–that daughter out of town–to manage the process end to end including booking and paying, and allows the caregiver to report on what they are doing, and follow a careplan.

But beyond that Sternberg is on a mission to “professionalize” the caregivers by not only increasing their pay, but accurately matching them to client needs, and increasing their control over their own situation. To that end Honor recently backed off the Uber independent contractor model and made its caregivers full employees (with stock options!). Very interesting guy with an interesting model. Here’s the interview:

https://youtu.be/6TsqQVlkptE

Aver: Analytics for Care Episodes –Nick Augustinos interview

By MATTHEW HOLT

Nick Augustinos was at Healtheon (later WebMD) in the early days, then at Carescience with David Brailer, and later was senior in the health care teams at Cisco and Cardinal. Given Nick isn’t as young as some health tech startup guys and did OK back in the day, you might wonder why he’d leave the cushy corporate world and take on the supervising adult role at a startup.

But he just did, with Aver–an analytics company focusing on incorporating incentives and quality improvement in bundled care. Last month it raised $13.6m in a series B and I had a quick chat with Nick to find out what Aver was up to.

David Vivero, Amino– Yes, We Need Another Doctor Search Company!

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By MATTHEW HOLT

Those of you dismayed at the dearth of recent interviews of notable health tech startups on THCB will be glad to hear I have several in the can and will be putting them up starting with Amino today. And the rest of you can move along….

David Vivero made his money at a company matching renters to apartments that ended up part of Zillow. That was too easy, so now he’s decided to match people up with the right doctor. Amino came out of stealth late last year with about $20m in funding and it has acquired large data sets (including being one of the few with official access to all CMS physician data) and some complex ways to match patients to doctors–the primary one being doctors near you that have seen a lot of patients like you. Why are they in a  market that already has several well known & well funded players like Vitals, Healthgrades, Better Doctor and more? David told me that and more in this interview.

The End Game–Live in Finland!

By Matthew Holt

some_1Today I am in Finland at the Vertical digital health accelerator, part of a really impressive network of accelerators and incubators in Helsinki. Tomorrow is the huge SLUSH festival at which I (plus Steven Krein of Startup Health) will be talking on Thursday. Today, I’m speaking and moderating a great seminar with excellent speakers at Vertical for the End Game.

The End Game is a thought leader seminar that finds answers to questions. The most insightful speakers from around the world will talk about digital health. Speakers include the Head of Health & Medical equipment division of Samsung France, the Head of Healthcare of Telia, and many others including Luis Barros VC expert from Boston.

 

The seminar is streaming live on www.endgame.fi on November 10th at 3pm Finnish time (8 am ET, 5 am PT) The video will also be available for later viewing.

Indu & Matthew talk Health 2.0 with Lisa & Dave

By MATTHEW HOLT

One of the most insightful and funniest writers in health care is recovering VC Lisa Suennen. With trusty sidekick Dave Shaywitz, she’s been doing Tech Tonics, one of these newly trendy (again) podcasts. And Sunday at Health 2.0 they interviewed my partner Indu Subaiya, and me. Want to know a little more aobut the backstory of Health 2.0? Listen in!

Qualcomm Life adds inpatient strategy with Capsule purchase

Qualcomm Life has built a big ecosystem of device partners on its 2net platform, focusing mostly on moving data from devices used by patients in their home. Today they sped up that development by buying Capsule which has a strong business on integrating data between different devices in the hospital.

I had a quick interview with Rick Valencia, GM of Qualcomm Life about their business. Two quick things to note. 1) I’m on the Qualcomm Life Advisory Board (although I knew nothing about this acquisition beforehand) and 2) I caught Rick at the end of a long day and tried to get him to talk about some recent customer data but neither of us could remember the reference. I was hoping he’d tell me more about this successful roll out of the 2net ecosystem in Northern Arizona, which is well worth a read. Meanwhile for more on Qualcomm & Capsule, watch the interview.

It’s “Slack for Health Care”- athenaText

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By MATTHEW HOLT

 

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By now it’s not a secret that EMRs are “records” and yet we’ve been trying to cram communication functions down their throat. Meanwhile the hottest tools in enterprise tech are souped up versions of AIM (remember that, you AOL fans?)– with companies like Slack & HipChat providing group-based instant messaging and changing the way teams work. As health care becomes a team sport, you’re going to see many approaches from the major EMR vendors and new entrants in the coming months to fix the communication problem. And yes at Health 2.0 this Fall I’ll be running a full panel on the topic that the Clinical User Experience Sucks–how do we fix it?

This week athenahealth, one of the few big cloud-based players in EMR-land introduced athenaText. (Don’t bother asking why there are no caps in the company name yet the simple word “text” gets a capital T in the middle of the product name! It’s as you’d expect an instant message product (rather than SMS one) but with some differences. For a start it integrates direct into the athenaClincals EMR, but it also pulls in both drug info and physician contacts from the Epocrates product that athenahealth owns (and which has several hundred thousand physicians on it). The goal is to spread the product virally (think Skype or Slack). But first things first. What is it and how does it work? I spoke with VP of UX at athenahealth, Abbe Don, to find out more and to get a demo, which you can see below.

Health 2.0 Quarterly: What’s New in Q2?

By KIM KRUEGER

Every quarter, Health 2.0 releases a summary set of data that explains where industry funding is going, which product segments are growing fastest, and where new company formation is happening. Health 2.0’s precision and clarity when it comes to market segmentation and product information make this quarterly release the cream of the freebie crop.

The major news this quarter is that funding has slowed compared to this time last year, notwithstanding a significant bump from Allscripts’ $200M investment in NantHealth on the last day of the month. Yet, we’re still seeing growth in the Health 2.0 Source Database — both in number of products and companies. We also highlight the release of the Apple Watch, the growing momentum around FHIR, some key moves in the data analytics space, and the success of the latest Health 2.0 IPOs. For more, flip through below.

Kim Krueger is a Research Analyst at Health 2.0

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