I was at the AHIP conference in Vegas late last month and caught up with a number of CEOs & execs for some quick bite interviews — around 5 mins getting (I hope) to the gist of what they & their companies are up to. I am dribbling them out–Matthew Holt
Next up is Kristin Herrera, EVP, Accolade.
By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH
Mental health digital therapeutics startup Happify Health has spent the past 5 years quietly ‘self-actualizing’ into a brand-new, tech platform company that just launched this week: Twill. This is a big pivot – not just a brand change – and we’ve got co-founder & President Ofer Leidner and newly-hired Chief Operating Officer Megan Callahan (who formerly ran Lyft Health) here to tell us how it all went down AND what will happen to the old Happify app.
Wellness-app-no-more, Twill has emerged as a health tech infrastructure company. Its core product (called Sequences) is the open architecture, digital back-end that ties together a health plan, employer, or pharma co’s various digital point solutions – wellness apps, digital therapeutics, virtual coaching, peer support groups, telehealth platforms, etc. etc. – to create one neat-and-tidy, hyper-personalized, automagically-navigated patient care journey based on condition or patient population.
Big brands like Elevance Health (Anthem), Biogen, and Almirall have already bought-in, with products already in market for conditions as diverse as maternal health, multiple scleroses, and psoriasis. Not forgetting its mental health roots, Twill is bringing in its own vast resources from the ole Happify days to run digital mental health support under each of these disease-specific point solutions. Ofer and Megan say that Sequences can be developed for ANY condition or to target specific populations of patients and they plan to launch 2-3 new Sequences each year.
What else is ahead for Twill now that it’s revealed from its stealthy start? Happify Health had raised $73 million in March 2021 in a big round lead by Deerfield Management Company – what should we expect next? Tune in for all the details on the transformation, the new products, and how other digital health companies can expect to work with Twill in the future.
BY MIKE MAGEE
“There’s common ground there—not the warm belonging of full creedal agreement, perhaps, but a place, even a welcoming place, where we can stand together.” Ian Marcus Corbin, Research Fellow, Harvard Medical School
Most Americans would love to believe this statement. But political reality intervenes. A March, 2022 Pew Research Center analysis found our two major parties to be “farther apart ideologically today than at any time in the past 50 years.”
Take, for example, Presidential hopefuls, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). They see political pay dirt on the jagged peaks of America’s culture wars with the governor taking on Disney for defending LGBTQ employees by introducing the his “Stop W.O.K.E. Act“, while Rubio goes one step further with his “No Tax Breaks for Radical Corporate Activism Act”.
In academic circles, you increasingly find references to “what’s the matter with…debates.” The phrase derives from a 2004 book “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” written by historian Thomas Frank, which spent 18 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List.
Continue reading…I was at the AHIP conference in Vegas late last month and caught up with a number of CEOs & execs for some quick bite interviews — around 5 mins getting (I hope) to the gist of what they & their companies are up to. I am dribbling them out–Matthew Holt
Next is Julia Kastner, CPO & Chris Molaro, CEO, Neuroflow, and it includes a great brief product demo from Julia
By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH
In the ‘point solution versus platform’ debate, mark another score for integration as Vida Health jumps into the musculoskeletal (MSK) care space. This is a move we’ve seen before among the digital health chronic condition management set (remember when Omada acquired Physera, Dario Health acquired Upright, and everyone was waiting to see if Livongo would make a play for Sword or Hinge?) so why is Vida just jumping in now?
Dr. Patrick Carroll, Vida Health’s Chief Medical Officer, lets us in on the strategy behind the startup’s move into the MSK space and what it signals about how employers (and their employees) are starting to view digital health and virtual care within the larger scope of available care options out there.
As for Vida’s MSK program, it’s different than what you might expect. According to Pat, the program is strictly focused on lower back pain and helping members quickly find the physical therapy and, if needed, mental health care that can make a real difference to their overall health in a manner of weeks. If something more complex is discovered, Pat says Vida is working with partners – including those digital-first MSK clinics – to refer out. Is this the long-term play or will Vida eventually build out or buy its way further into MSK? We find out what’s ahead for the cardiometabolic care company as it launches yet another new offering to improve access to care.
BY KIM BELLARD
I saw a great quote by Alfred North Whitehead the other day: “It is the business of the future to be dangerous.”
Now, I was a math major many years ago, so I know who Alfred North Whitehead was: the coauthor (with Bertrand Russell) of the Principia Mathematica, a landmark, three-volume treatise that proved – in excruciating detail — that all of mathematics (and thus, arguably, all of science) can be reduced to mathematical logic. I always thought Lord Russell was the eloquent one, but it turns out that Professor Whitehead had a way with words too.
So, of course, I want to apply a few of his particularly pithy quotes to healthcare.
Continue reading…I was at the AHIP conference in Vegas late last month and caught up with a number of CEOs & execs for some quick bite interviews — around 5 mins getting (I hope) to the gist of what they & their companies are up to. I am going to dribble them out this week–Matthew Holt
First up is Pouria Sanae, CEO of IXLayer.
BY JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH
Butterfly Network (NYSE: $BFLY) is working to make its pocket-sized, smartphone-directed ultrasound as “ubiquitous as the stethoscope” – hoping to give docs and nurses at the point-of-care the ability to easily perform any type of scan and instantly see the results. Dr. John Martin, Butterfly’s Chief Medical Officer, talks us through the technology behind the $2,400 hand-held device and how the company is working with healthcare orgs to integrate ultrasound into their workflows — completely shifting the paradigm for where-and-when scans are performed and able to be utilized.
What does this paradigm shift toward on-demand, point-of-care ultrasound really mean for the practice of medicine? Is this over-medicalization and unnecessary, or the key to higher-quality care? And, what about the risk involved in taking ultrasound out of the specialized-and-certified arena of the radiology department and democratizing it for front-line practitioners?
John lets us ask all the tough questions, talks through what’s being learned as Butterfly scales-up and builds its body of use cases, and gives us some insight on how the business itself is doing after going public via SPAC last year. Fun fact on the diversity of those use cases: Beyond human healthcare and the very important work of helping improve maternal and fetal health in Africa via a $5 million dollar grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Butterfly is also being rolled-out across 200 Petco care centers to help veterinarians use point-of-care scans to treat our pets.
BY KIM BELLARD
It’s July 4th – Independence Day for those of you who remember your U.S. history. There’s already too much talk about loss of rights, political tyranny, militias, even succession, and I don’t want to wade any further into those troubled waters. But I thought I could at least try to reimagine what a Declaration of Independence might look like if it was aimed at the American healthcare system.
I’m no Thomas Jefferson, or even a Roger Sherman, but here goes:
Continue reading…Each week I’ve been adding a brief tidbits section to the THCB Reader, our weekly newsletter that summarizes the best of THCB that week (Sign up here!). Then I had the brainwave to add them to the blog. They’re short and usually not too sweet! –Matthew Holt
In this edition’s tidbits, I have to return to the stunning impact of the Dobbs ruling. We know will happen because it is already happening in Texas where the 6 week law was already being enforced in contravention of Roe v Wade.
Taxpayer money is going to “pregnancy crisis centers” that flat out lie to vulnerable patients about the impact of abortions on their health. Doctors are questioning women who have miscarried–at a moment that is already terrible for them, and women who have miscarried are being denied basic D&Cs–which can kill them.
Don’t get me started on the absolute nonsense being talked–and passed into law –about ectopic pregnancies, of which there are over 130,000 each year in the US, being carried to term. How unlikely is it that an ectopic pregnancy makes it to term with no ill effects? Let me tell you a story. My dad was an OBGYN. He and his anesthetist saved the life of a woman and her baby who somehow had made it to term while being ectopic. During the surgery she needed 12 pints of blood (a normal woman has 7-8 pints in her body) and he considered it the greatest piece of surgery he did in his entire career. He thought that he and the patients were very lucky. So I demand that crazy legislation saying ectopic pregnancies have to be carried to term also mandates that my dad is around to do every single C-Section. Unlikely, as he’s dead, but no crazier than the legislation in Indiana.
Then there’s the impact on telehealth. Most abortions are done using drugs but more and more of the pandemic-era exemptions to prescribing drugs and seeing patients over telehealth across state lines are being withdrawn. Clearly the state-based licensing of doctors is itself ridiculous in an age of online commerce, but despite the DOJ statements the legality of prescribing abortifacients across state lines is very unclear and, as Deven McGraw explained in this harrowing piece on THCB Gang, HIPAA doesn’t protect patient privacy from local law enforcement. So what happens to someone in a state where abortion is banned if they have to go to hospital because of a complication from taking an abortifacient? Trump thinks they should go to jail.
What is clear is that bans on abortion don’t stop abortions. But they do endanger women. And if the pregnancy crisis center stops a woman from getting an abortion, do they help afterwards? Why yes, if you mean by “helping”, they have a celebratory dinner and light a fricking candle.
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