Omada Health put to use part of their recent $57M funding round to acquire Physera, a musculoskeletal care company that uses telehealth and digital interventions to deliver ‘virtual physical therapy’ to those suffering from back, knee, and neck pain. How does the acquisition fit into Omada’s growth strategy? WTF Health’s Jessica DaMassa chats with both Omada Health’s CEO, Sean Duffy, and Dan Rubinstein, CEO of Physera, about the acquisition, the IPO buzz that continues to swirl around Omada, and whether or not the opportunity that COVID-19 has created for digital care will be lasting as we move forward.
“This pandemic highlights why we need that free flow of healthcare data. So that we can make better decisions sooner.”
In the way that Covid-19 has proven the utility of telehealth as a means for health systems to reach their patients, has the pandemic also become the final argument for healthcare data interoperability? Has this pandemic been the worst case scenario we needed to make our best ‘case-in-point’ for why U.S. healthcare needs a national health data infrastructure that makes it possible for hospitals to share information with one another and government health organizations?
Interoperability advocates have been clamoring for this for years, but Dan Burton, CEO of data-and-analytics health tech company, Health Catalyst, says this public health crisis has likely created an inflection point in the interoperability argument.
“I think that the baseline platform of telehealth adoption created a whole springboard opportunity for the plethora of digital health companies that are out there eager to get into the space and grow their businesses. I think the industry as a whole now is a whole lot more receptive to looking at things like that then they were eight weeks ago.”
Among those in the industry very open to digital health, digital therapeutics, precision medicine, and virtual care solutions in this time of covid19 is GuideWell, which counts Florida Blue and four other healthcare businesses among its subsidiaries.
The national healthcare company is looking to bring together health tech startups around five different kinds of healthcare challenges created by the coronavirus pandemic via its Covid-19 Innovation Collaborative. With the application deadline set for Friday, May 8, we caught up with GuideWell Innovation’s Executive Director, Kirstie McCool, about the details behind the unique model for the Collaborative, its non-dilutive funding awards, and what happens to the startups that are selected to participate. (Hello, other Blues plans!)
If the Collaborative’s areas of focus aren’t enough to clue you in on where the healthcare giant is interested in rounding out its own array of services as a payer, provider, and innovator, we asked Kirstie point-blank to tell us what she thinks is next in terms of supporting the traditional healthcare system with outside-in innovation. Tune in around the 15:20 mark for that part of the conversation, and a final word-to-the-wise for any startup looking to work with a large healthcare enterprise.
“The mental health system was completely broken before COVID. The supply-demand imbalance was wildly upside down. Now, that’s just all exacerbated.”
On-demand mental health startup Ginger has watched usage of their app climb 130% over the last 4-week period. The conversations people are having with clinicians are growing more intense (there’s an internal metric for that) and amid all of this the late-stage startup has re-run its ‘Workforce Attitudes’ survey to find out what’s really going on with the mental health of the employee populations it serves.
CEO Russell Glass dives into some of the findings of that report, which are pretty revealing in terms of understanding how we as a population are dealing with our stress around COVID-19 when we’re seeking professional help with it. Nearly 70% of respondents confessed this was the most stressful period of their career — five times more stressful than the financial crash of 2008 — and there are some surprising differences with how this is all unfolding across gender lines, especially with working from home.
With inbound interest from employers up 4X over the past month, we get Russ’s input on whether or not the demand for telehealth will sustain once the crisis is over and if the temporary regulatory and reimbursement changes will become permanent. Says Russ: “This is like a great experiment of the efficacy of telehealth versus non-telehealth.”
As healthcare systems around the world grapple with the coronavirus, ‘virtual-first healthcare’ is fast becoming the global response of private and public healthcare systems alike. In Australia, the federal government recently committed to investing $500M to built out its country’s ‘virtual-first’ healthcare infrastructure, so we caught up with Louise Schaper, CEO of the Australasian Institute of Digital Health (AIDH), to find out what that means for telehealth, remote monitoring, and digital health companies looking to capitalize on the market opportunity in Australia.
With a population of 25 million people (roughly the number of people in Florida) and a set of newly-minted reimbursement codes that makes telehealth available to all of them via the government-funded public healthcare system, the appetite for investing in new health tech solutions has grown ravenous.
Says Louise, “Anyone who has solutions that are already market-tested and approved, I’d actually expand your networks globally now. There’s not a section of the globe that hasn’t been impacted by [covid19] and we’re all needing to work out how to deliver healthcare differently.”
As in other parts of the world, the government codes reimbursing telehealth and other virtual-first services are temporary (Australia’s are set to expire September 30, 2020), but organizations like the AIDH, the Australian Medical Association, and others are advocating for their permanence and are optimistic.
The prevailing sentiment is that, like in the US, the benefits of virtual care to healthcare consumers and clinicians are going to be difficult for the government to ignore. Add to that the potential of linking virtual care to the Aussie government’s AUD$2 billion dollar build of its MyHealthRecord system — a centralized, cloud-based EMR that holds the healthcare data of 90% of all Australians — and the prospect grows even more appealing.
Join us as we talk through the basics of the Australian healthcare system and get an insider’s look at the demand for digital health, remote monitoring, and telehealth Down Under.
COVID-19 testing in grocery store parking lots. Clinicians crossing state lines to practice in hard-hit hospitals miles away from their health system. ICU doctors made to shore up shortages of ventilators by adapting medical equipment from its intended purpose. Are these just medical malpractice suits waiting to happen?
Margaret Nekic, CEO of Inspirien, a hospital-and-physician-owned medical malpractice and worker’s comp insurance company, reveals what’s happening behind-the-scenes as professional liability carriers hurry to adapt to the changing circumstances of a healthcare system thrown into crisis-mode.
While new legislation is emerging to somewhat safeguard healthcare workers from bearing the risk of some of the pandemic’s unprecedented circumstances, what happens when the immediate surge has passed? Will costs for medmal insurance go up? And, what happens from a worker’s comp standpoint if a healthcare worker becomes infected with COVID-19?
As healthcare delivery in hospitals continues to change — and, at the same time, more and more care extends outside the traditional doctor’s office by way of an uptick in use of digital health and telehealth options among non-COVID patients — it seems the pandemic might ultimately also accelerate changes in the way healthcare organizations think about risk management and their insurance coverage for it.
As hospitals focus on taking care of COVID-19 patients, the American Hospital Association is stepping up its advocacy for hospitals, fighting on their behalf for everything from PPE to reimbursement for uninsured patients. AHA’s Policy Director, Akin Demehin, dives into the top issues facing U.S. hospital administrators as they scramble to adjust their businesses to meet the unprecedented demands of the pandemic.
Besides the obvious concerns related to the direct delivery of care to a surge of very sick patients, hospitals are worried about cash flow, having enough personal protective equipment (PPE) for front-line clinicians, and the challenges of rolling out massive telehealth and remote monitoring programs to care for non-COVID patients at-home.
As the pandemic wears on, and the evolution of hospitals continues, the way these institutions function as part of the U.S. healthcare system will likely be forever changed. We learn what’s important to the AHA — and its 5,000 hospitals and healthcare system members — as they redefine their role in the healthcare system of the future in real-time.
In the early days of the U.S. COVID-19 outbreak, BlueCross BlueShield of North Carolina (Blue Cross NC) stepped up as one of the first health insurance plans to announce reimbursing telehealth visits “at parity” with face-to-face office visits for all providers and specialists. Chief Medical Officer Rahul Rajkumar talks us through the strategy behind that decision to “flip the switch” for telemedicine — which was made in just one meeting (!) – and what metrics and outcomes the Blue plan will be looking at post-pandemic to decide if the switch remains on.
Conversation Highlights:
Changing reimbursement policies to cover ALL COVID-19 testing and treatment
6:45 min: The role of virtual care during COVID-19 and reimbursement at parity
11:11 min: How will telehealth be evaluated post-epidemic?
13:58 min: Telehealth innovation, B2B use, remote monitoring (looking to providers to lead the way)
17:25 min: What’s going to happen with healthcare costs in 2021?
For more on how health tech companies in digital health, telehealth, remote monitoring, health data, and more are responding to the COVID-19 crisis, check out the other interviews in this special series at www.wtf.health/covid19.
In the face of Covid-19, health tech startup Evidation Health is leveraging their relationships with the 4-million people on their Achievement app, the “always on” stream of behavioral data these folks bring to the table via wearables, sensors, and surveys, and everything they’ve learned from years of studying and modeling flu outbreaks to examine the Covid-19 virus in the context of people’s everyday lives.
Evidation’s CEO, Deb Kilpatrick, and Sr. Data Scientist, Ernesto Ramirez, stop by to talk about their company’s efforts for large-scale, frequent symptom surveillance of Covid-19 to add new insights to our understanding of the pandemic and, possibly, even help with making predictions about its spread and severity.
The company is already publishing some of its findings in a weekly report called “Covid-19 Pulse” that is already gleaning insights from a 150,000+ person cohort asked to weigh-in specifically on what they’re doing and how their lives are changing as a result of the pandemic. What’s unique in Evidation’s spin is that they’re adding that critical data from “daily life” that is more or less missed by just looking at the data reported from those who’ve entered the hospital.
“Those folks that are presenting into the medical system — that’s not the full picture of what’s going on,” says Ramirez. “What we need to do is better understand, really, what’s going on at the community level to understand community spread, to understand surveillance efforts, to understand mitigation efforts that may or may not be having impact around the spread of Covid-19.”
“[Employers’] top priority is getting their employees and their family members the appropriate care, but there are a lot of unknowns about how this is going to impact their actual total cost of care…”
As Covid-19 testing and treatment rise in U.S., many people — and their employers — may be starting to wonder: who is going to pay for this? How much is this going to cost?
Castlight Health’s CEO, Maeve O’Meara, talks to us about all-things healthcare cost, coverage and benefits administration, drawing from her position leading a company that focuses on helping people make sense of the health insurance benefits they receive through their employers or directly from health plans.
What has employers and health plans most concerned? Making sure people are aware of changes to their plans so they know what’s covered (and what’s not), and when and where to go for care are the top of the list, according to Maeve.
