We will also had a special guest who is possibly the most successful corporate venture capitalist in health tech–Merck’s Bill Taranto. He had a decent run last decade– you may have heard of Livongo which he was a big investor in! We talked with Bill about the future of investing, what role investing in digital health has for drug business and what he’s expecting in the big health care realignment. Apparently Merck treasury took all the cash he made with Livongo so he couldn’t give it to us, but he has $500m+ top spend and as he said, “you want a Billion Dollar exit? Put me on the board”
You can see the video below live and the audio will be on our podcast channel (Apple/Spotify) from Friday
“Telehealth has a much bigger role to play than just carrying out transactions,” says Amwell’s President & CEO, Roy Schoenberg, who joins Jess DaMassa for a sweeping philosophical discussion about how telehealth’s role will continue to evolve through the covid19 pandemic and the changes its forced on the healthcare market. Conversations about telehealth that were once about the value of improving “access to care” are now about the technology’s potential to drive “quality of care.” And Amwell – which says it is a “technology infrastructure company” focused on helping traditional healthcare players transition into digital distribution – is pushing past the old notion that virtual care is merely a “product to get a Z-pak.”
Roy gives us updates on Amwell’s much-buzzed-about partnerships with United Healthcare and Google, the later being focused on how the telehealth co is looking at integrating some of those famous Google technologies (think natural language processing, translation, and geolocation-ala-Maps) into virtual care delivery in a way that sounds like a lot more than just a “switchboard.”
Two other colorful Roy Schoenberg soundbites to tease you into this conversation about the immediate future of telehealth from the leader of one its biggest players: 1) “the notion that we are no longer looking at the home as an illegitimate place of care is drama in in every sense” and 2) “I think the next war-zone, the next place where there’s going to be a lot of heated confrontations and conversations, is state licensure.”
Not in our lifetimes has humanity experienced such a pervasive, profound, and prolonged retreat from “normal lives.” This. Will. Not. Be. Easy.
While the conversation about the serious negative impact on our behavioral health has started, we also suffer from a scarcity of behavioral health professionals, and equitable access to these essential resources.
More than ever, we all seem to “get it” and are reflexively more forgiving when we hear that some of us are struggling with the behavioral health consequences of Covid -19 — we’ve all been there to some extent over the past year.
As a Veteran, I’m accustomed to reintroduction plans, designed with thoughtful consideration, anticipatory preparation, and behavioral health resources for military members (and their families) returning from deployment. As we approach normalcy, a similar reentry will soon begin, yet we’re not talking about what to expect and how our behavioral health needs will be addressed. Where are the post-pandemic re-entry plans? Yes – we want to get back – but just as the military members need level-setting guidance, support, and understanding as they return “home” so do all of us as we begin our reentry.
Our battlefield has been the isolation, home-schooling, remote working, laid-off, caring-for (and saying goodbye to) loved ones for the last 11 months. It has been the tangled web of emotions: tragic, heartwarming, frustrating, endearing, exhausting and confusing. Emerging from this Nebel des krieges will not be the walk in the park that we hopeful humans imagine it to be. Now is the time to plan for re-entry.
On Episode 186, of Health in 2 Point 00 – I have bad jokes about Olive.ai-related Circulo raising $50m, online/offline clinic Eden Health grabbing $60m, cancer app Carevive getting $18m & provider engagement play Loyal getting $12m. Will Jess DaMassa think the jokes are funny? You’ll have to watch to find out but you can make a pretty good guess!—Matthew Holt
My car takes me where I need to go, but it also gives me pleasure along the way. I have had it for just about ten years now and I have driven it almost 300,000 miles. It feels like an extension of me. Everything about it is just perfect for the way I drive and the things I need to do with it. From the sumptuously cavernous interior to the rugged all wheel drive features and the studded Finnish snow tires, it takes me pretty much anywhere, anytime. Why anyone would want to travel in a car without the sublime pleasure of driving it is beyond my comprehension.
My computers, on the other hand, are things I avoid whenever I can. My work laptop is an awkward Windows machine. Need I say more? Whatever it does happens stiltedly and unintuitively behind layers of barriers and firewalls that make me sign in again and again until I get to a pathetically clumsy EMR.
My MacBook Pro is slimmer and slicker but it gives me no pleasure to use it, I’m sorry to say.
Every word I have written and published – about as many words as I have miles on my car – has been put down on the virtual keyboard of my iPad. It feels more like an extension of my brain. I use it in bed, by the fireplace, in the barn or on the lawn. I can even talk into it without a microphone or any special software. I touch the screen and magic happens: Apps open, fonts and colors change and the world is at my fingertips, wherever I am.
Takeaway:Policy changes have overtaken many health care SPACs but that won’t stop a lot of telegenic advocates; something is sure to go wrong.
Politics. Something is sure to go wrong.
Over 400 SPACs have formed and about 100 business combinations announced. At least as far as health care goes, excluding biotech and pharma, the quality of the business combinations has thus far been uninspiring.
Deerfield’s CareMax/IMC Medical, Jaws’ Cano Health are focused on the very crowded Medicare Advantage market just as demographic realities require attention to shift toward younger people. Falcon’s ShareCare, GigCapital2’s Uphealth/Cloudbreak, Hudson’s Talkspace are yet more digital platforms to manage care. VG’s 23andMe wants to monetize all the genetic data it has collected through drug development.
Absent durable business models that address the core challenges of health care such as price, efficiency and quality, SPACs seem to be relying on charismatic personalities to win over investors, great and small, regardless of their experience or credibility. So much so, Twitter entreaties from Chamath Palihapitiya’s fan-base have taken on the tone of religious followers. “@chamath give @Clover_Health some love on Valentine’s Day what’s your position are you optimistic, excited, hopeful of its future? We would love to hear from you…”
Mr. Smith’s pneumonia was clinically shy. He didn’t have a fever. His white blood cells hadn’t increased. The only sign of an infection, other than his cough, was that his lung wasn’t as dark as it should be on the radiograph. The radiologist, taught to see, noticed that the normally crisp border between the heart and the lung was blurred like ink smudged on blotting paper. Something that had colonized the lungs was stopping the x-rays.
Hundred and twenty-five years ago, Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, a German physicist and the Rector at the University of Wurzburg, made an accidental discovery by seeing something he wasn’t watching. Roentgen was studying cathode rays – invisible forces created by electricity. Using a Crookes tube, a pear-shaped vacuum glass tube with a pair of electrodes, Roentgen would fire the cathode rays from one end by an electric jolt. At the other end, the rays would leave the tube through a small hole, and generate colorful light on striking fluorescent material placed near the tube.
By then photography and fluorescence had captured literary and scientific imagination. In Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles, the fire-breathing dog’s jaw had been drenched in phosphorus by its owner. Electricity and magnetism were the new forces. Physicists were experimenting in the backwaters of the electromagnetic spectrum without knowing where they were.
On November 8th, 1895, when after supper Roentgen went to his laboratory for routine experiments, something else caught Roentgen’s eyes. Roentgen closed the curtains. He wanted his pupils maximally dilated to spot tiny flickers of light. When he turned the voltage on the Crookes tube, he noticed that a paper soaked in barium platinocyanide on a bench nine feet away flickered. Cathode rays traveled only a few centimeters. Also, he had covered the tube with heavy cardboard to stop light. Why then did the paper glow?
On Episode 185, Jess has beat us to an interview on WTF Health before we cover it here on Health in 2 Point 00 – Modern Health raised $74 million in a Series D, so how does this compare to other mental health and wellness companies? Owlet is going public via a SPAC for their infant monitoring tech, and Mymee raises $8.7 million for patient self-tracking on the autoimmune disease front. —Matthew Holt
We touched on the impact of the extremes of global warming on health! And in a pandemic nonetheless!. Plus the wild world of SPACs, more funding for mental health, and the sausage making of health care’s place in the upcoming stimulus bill. But I’m not sure the group is ready for the big policy move that the pandemic may give us the opportunity to pursue! A great conversation nonetheless.
The video is below but if you’d rather listen to the episode, the audio is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels.
Chronic disease prevention is often lumped into chronic disease management – but should it be? Aren’t there different nuances to preventing diseases than to treat them? Making the case that healthcare’s “primary prevention” businesses deserve their own category is the CEO of Newtopia, Jeff Ruby. Newtopia’s just announced the creation of a new category of healthcare provider, the Habit Change Provider, in effort to more accurately describe the role of companies working to change the way people behave in their everyday lives. What they eat, whether or not they exercise, how they deal with stress and anxiety – in short, this is the business of influencing the many micro-decisions that, cumulatively, add up to our overall health and whether or not we’ll be impacted by “lifestyle diseases” like diabetes, obesity, heart disease, mental health issues, and more.
Newtopia’s been in this business for over a decade, starting its path to commercialization with Aetna and a three-year randomized control trial of more than 2,800 Aetna employees that proved the power of prevention: physical risk reduction, clinical cost savings, and the “holy grail” of any population health model, in-year ROI. So confident is Newtopia in their approach that the company goes at-risk on outcomes, a compelling enough value proposition to attract clients like Accenture, JP Morgan Chase (and it’s now defunct joint-venture with Amazon and Berkshire Hathaway, Haven) and the whole of CVS Health (which acquired Aetna.)
Is this starting to sound different than those chronic condition management companies yet? Listen in to hear more about the details behind Newtopia’s approach, which even leverages genetic testing to “remove blocks for habit change” by helping people identify what they’ve inherited from their parents (slow metabolism, difficulty processing fats, body’s ability to handle stress signals) so they can get past blaming themselves and start developing healthy lifestyle improvements.
