It’s Telehealth Awareness Week! Today on Health in 2 Point 00, we cover Pager raising $70 million, bringing their total to $132.6 million. German-based company Ovivia gets $80 million, bringing their total to $127 million. Meru Health raises $38 million, and NOCD raises $33 million. —Matthew Holt
Above the Fold
#Healthin2Point00, Episode 230 | Commure, Spring Health, UniteUs, Nomad & Xealth
It’s been quite a while since Jess & I did a Health in 2 Point 00 and that one was buried in our Policies|Techies|VCs conference in the first week of September. But, as John Malkovich says, We’re back…
Commure gets $500m and maybe one day we’ll know what it does, Spring Health adds to the mental health funding party, UniteUs buys competitor NowPow; Nomad banks $63m for its nurse hiring service, and Xealth adds $24m, even though I’m not sure it’s more than a feature! – Matthew Holt
Matthew Holt
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.
Not Your Father’s Job Market
By KIM BELLARD
If you, like me, continue to think that TikTok is mostly about dumb stunts (case in point: vandalizing school property in the devious licks challenge; case in point: risking lives and limbs in the milk crate challenge), or, more charitably, as an unexpected platform for social activism (case in point: spamming the Texas abortion reporting site), you probably also missed that TikTok thinks it could take on LinkedIn.
Welcome to #TikTokresumes. Welcome to the Gen Z workplace. If healthcare is having a hard time adapting to Gen Z patients – and it is — then dealing with Gen Z workers is even harder.
TikTok actually announced the program in early July, but, as a baby boomer, I did not get the memo. It was a pilot program, only active from July 7 to July 31, and only for a select number of employers, which included Chipotle and Target. The announcement stated:
TikTok believes there’s an opportunity to bring more value to people’s experience with TikTok by enhancing the utility of the platform as a channel for recruitment. Short, creative videos, combined with TikTok’s easy-to-use, built-in creation tools have organically created new ways to discover talented candidates and career opportunities.
Interested job-seekers were “encouraged to creatively and authentically showcase their skillsets and experiences.” Nick Tran, TikTok’s Global Head of Marketing, noted: “#CareerTok is already a thriving subculture on the platform and we can’t wait to see how the community embraces TikTok Resumes and helps to reimagine recruiting and job discovery.”
Marissa Andrada, chief diversity, inclusion and people officer at Chipotle, told SHRM: “Given the current hiring climate and our strong growth trajectory, it’s essential to find new platforms to directly engage in meaningful career conversations with Gen Z. TikTok has been ingrained into Chipotle’s DNA for some time, and now we’re evolving our presence to help bring in top talent to our restaurants.”
Continue reading…I Am a Decision Maker, Not a Bookkeeper
By HANS DUVEFELT
Perhaps it is because I love doctoring so much that I find some of the tools and tasks of my trade so tediously frustrating. I keep wishing the technology I work with wasn’t so painfully inept.
On my 2016 iPhone SE I can authorize a purchase, a download or a money transfer by placing my thumb on the home button.
In my EMR, when I get a message (also called “TASK” – ugh) from the surgical department that reads “patient is due for 5-year repeat colonoscopy and needs [insurance] referral”, things are a lot more complicated, WHICH THEY SHOULDN’T HAVE TO BE! For this routine task, I can’t just click a “yes” or “authorize” button (which I am absolutely sure is a trackable event in the innards of “logs” all EMRs have).
Instead, (as I often lament), I have to go through a slow and cumbersome process of creating a non-billable encounter, finding the diagnostic code for colon cancer screening, clicking on REFERRAL, then SURGEON – COLONOSCOPY, then freetexting “5 year colonoscopy recall”, then choosing where to send this “TASK”, namely the referral coordinator and , finally, getting back to the original request in order to respond “DONE”.
Continue reading…Recommendations From the Coalition for Physician Accountability’s UME-to-GME Review Committee: Winners & Losers Edition
By BRYAN CARMODY
If you’re involved in medical education or residency selection, you know we’ve got problems.
And starting a couple of years ago, the corporations that govern much of those processes decided to start having meetings to consider solutions to those problems. One meeting begat another, bigger meeting, until last year, in the wake of the decision to report USMLE Step 1 scores as pass/fail, the Coalition for Physician Accountability convened a special committee to take on the undergraduate-to-graduate medical education transition. That committee – called the UME-to-GME Review Committee or UGRC – completed their work and released their final recommendations yesterday.
This isn’t the first time I’ve covered the UGRC’s work: back in April, I tallied up the winners and losers from their preliminary recommendations.
And if you haven’t read that post, you should. Many of my original criticisms still stand (e.g, on the lack of medical student representation, or the structural configuration that effectively gave corporate members veto power), but here I’m gonna try to turn over new ground as we break down the final recommendations, Winners & Losers style.
Continue reading…A Man With Sudden Onset of Gastroparesis
By HANS DUVEFELT
Leo Dufour is not a diabetic. He is in his mid 50s, a light smoker with hypertension and a known hiatal hernia. He has had occasional heartburn and has taken famotidine for a few years along with his blood pressure and cholesterol pills.
Over the past few months, he started to experience a lot more heartburn, belching and bloating. Adding pantoprazole did nothing for him. I referred him to a local surgeon who did an upper endoscopy. This did not reveal much, except some retained food in his stomach. A gastric emptying study showed severe gastroparesis.
The surgeon offered him a trial of metoclopramide. At his followup, he complained of cough, mild chest pain and shortness of breath. His oxygen saturation was only 89%.
An urgent chest CT angiogram showed bilateral pulmonary emboli and generalized hilar adenopathy, a small probable infiltrate, a small pulmonary nodule and enlargement of both adrenal glands, suspicious for metastases.
He is now on apixiban for his PE, two antibiotics for his probable pneumonia and some lorazepam for the sudden shock his diagnoses have brought him.
Continue reading…More Laughing, More Thinking
By KIM BELLARD
There was a lot going on this week, as there always is, including the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and the beginning of the NFL season, so you may have missed a big event: the announcement of the 31st First Annual Ig Nobel Awards (no, those are not typos).
What’s that you say — you don’t know the Ig Nobel Awards? These annual awards, organized by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research, seek to:
…honor achievements that make people LAUGH, then THINK. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology.
Some scientists seek the glory of the actual Nobel prizes, some want to change the world by coming up with an XPRIZE winning idea, but I’m pretty sure that if I was a scientist I’d be shooting to win an Ig Nobel Prize. I mean, the point of the awards is “to help people discover things that are surprising— so surprising that those things make people LAUGH, then THINK.” What’s better than that?
Healthcare could use more Ig.
Continue reading…Policies, Techies, VCS: Musings From a Futurist
By IAN MORRISON
I should’ve been in Paris last week on vacation with my wife, instead I listened in to the Policies Techies VCS: What’s Next For Healthcare conference (I’ll explain why later). Matthew Holt and Jessica DaMassa did a magnificent job of assembling the Who’s Who of digital health tech to wax lyrical about what the new kids on the block were up to, where it is all headed, and what it will mean for the system. (Full disclosure Matthew and Jess are friends of mine, I hired Matthew from Stanford almost 30 years ago to join the Institute For The Future (IFTF) and have watched proudly as he has become a Health 2.0 impresario. Jess simply deserves a gold medal for wrangling Holt and all the other tech Bros with wit, charm and intelligence).
This is a tumultuous time for digital health technology because of the pandemic and the related rise of digital solutions not to mention the very frothy investment market and massive deal flow over the last 24 months. There are a lot of exciting new faces. But, many of the companies on display have been at this for some. And for many of the old guard, like Livongo and now Transcarent Founder Glen Tullman, Athena Health and now Zus Founder Jonathan Bush, and Amwell CEO Roy Schoenberg and others this has been a much longer journey.
(Parenthetically, as a young management engineer in Canada, a position, I was not qualified for, I wrote the justification for an all-computerized hospital at the University of British Columbia in 1979! I still find it just incredibly pathetic that it has taken us 40 years to suddenly “discover” digital health. I wrote The Second Curve which forecast (among other things) the rise of digitally enabled health transformation 25 years ago! So it is hard for me to get really excited that this is either “new” or “next”.)
So, while a lot of us have been in this movie for a long time, there is something very different about the current crop of offerings. In particular, technology has advanced considerably and there are clearly new cloud and SaaS tech enabled care solutions. There is a new cadre of talented and committed investors and entrepreneurs who believe they have the capability and capital to scale meaningful enterprises that will disrupt incumbent healthcare players and better serve consumers and providers. And the timing seems right as the pandemic forced consumers and the health care system to confront new ways of doing business.
Continue reading…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…
