I was at the VIVE conference in Miami last week and caught up with a number of CEOs & execs for some quickbite 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.
Up here are are Joe Gagnon, CEO, 1upHealth, a data integrator that works primarily with health plans, and Mark Clermont, CEO, Cecelia Health, a chronic care management company that also runs pharma patient adherence programs. — Matthew Holt
By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH
Turns out, the Clarify Health Solutions story is about a lot more than data and analytics these days. Value-based payments? Acquisition of provider-focused, behavioral science startup Embedded Healthcare? Opportunities in real-world evidence??
Good thing founder & CEO Jean Drouin and I caught up at ViVE 2022. Not only do we get into the backstory of the business, which has built a self-service analytics platform for payers, providers, and life science co’s on top of “one of the largest-ever patient datasets” in the industry, but we also talk about the strategy that’s driving Clarify into the world of value-based contracting and how Embedded Healthcare’s tech will be used to augment and refine that new offering.
Jean talks in detail about his client mix, business model, and the two “healthcare golden rules” Clarify lives by as it scales up its business: 1) figure out how the payment method is going to work and 2) don’t mess with the work-flow.
By BRIAN KLEPPER
It seems inevitable that, in the near future, an innovative health care organization – Let’s call it The Platform – is going to seize the market opportunity of broader value. It will cobble together the pieces, and demonstrate to organizational purchasers that it consistently delivers better health outcomes at significantly lower cost than previously has been available.
To manage risk and drive performance, The Platform will embrace the best healthcare management lessons of the past decades: risk identification through data monitoring and analytics, driving the right care, quality management, care navigation and coordination, patient engagement, shared decision-making, and other mission-critical health care management approaches. It will practice care that is grounded in data and science, and is outcomes-accountable.
But The Platform will also appreciate that a few specialty vendors have developed deep expertise in dealing with clinical or financial risk in high value niches – where health care’s money is – like management of musculoskeletal care, chronic disease, maternity, surgeries, high performing providers, or specialty drugs. It will understand that it often makes sense to partner with experts who can prove and guarantee high performance rather than trying to learn to achieve high performance within each niche. The Platform also will realize that simplicity is a virtue, and that bundling specialized services under one organizational umbrella is easier for health plan sponsors to manage and for patients to negotiate than an array of individual arrangements.
Continue reading…By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH
Turns out, that if you’re lucky enough to catch Glen Tullman in an impromptu chat just off the main stage at ViVE 2022, he’s warmed up enough (we could maybe even call it ‘fired up’ enough) to kick it into overdrive, roar past the usual talking points, and tell us what he REALLY thinks about what’s happening in the healthcare market today.
Things are changing. And, if you listen to this chat from start-to-finish, one of the key, overarching themes is payment model reform. From the news about Civica RX’s commitment to $30-dollars-or-less insulin (an initiative Glen helped lead and fund via his family foundation) to the 10X growth of virtual care coming out of the pandemic and the rise of “Big Customer” (aka Walmart and Amazon) in healthcare, the bottom line is that we’re no longer talking about fixing the way care is paid for – it’s actually starting to happen.
What is Transcarent’s role in all this? For those who might still be confused, tune in. This IS confusing, but I think the candor of our situation here may have given rise to one of the best descriptions of the business yet. Glen goes point-by-point on the way Transcarent is attempting to shift the paradigm for cost-and-quality across five (5!!!) different aspects of care at one time, using different strategies, novel technologies, cross-industry partnerships, and never-before-seen relationships with health systems to deliver what “20 years working with payers and 5 years working navigators didn’t deliver” for self-insured employers and their employees.
We made it back from ViVE in one piece! Will Jess DaMassa stab me in the back Brutus-Style? Tune in to find out as we discuss deals: Clarify buys Embedded Healthcare; Wildflower raises $26 million; Vivante Health raises $16 million; Gravie raises $75 million; and Nice Healthcare raises $30 million.
–Matthew Holt
Transcript
Jess DaMassa:
Well, we made it back from Vive all in one piece and we landed squarely in the Ides of March. Will I stab Matthew Holt in the back Brutus-style? Tune to the March 15th episode of Health Tech DEALS. Oh Matthew Holt, those ruthless Romans, never trust an Italian. That’s the lesson here.
Matthew Holt:
Well, sad enough, I trusted you and you told me to buy some stocks. And now, have you seen digital digital health talks yesterday?
Matthew Holt:
Everybody off another 10%?
Jess DaMassa:
Okay, but how does that compare with the reality of everything else right now?
Matthew Holt:
I don’t know. Somehow, Teladoc was about 300 a year ago
Jess DaMassa:
Don’t even talk to me about Teladoc.
Matthew Holt:
Now it’s around 50.
Continue reading…I was at the VIVE conference in Miami last week and caught up with a number of CEOs & execs for some quickbite 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.
First two up are Julia Hu, CEO of Lark, a conversational AI program for chronic & behavioral health that works primarily with health plans, and Adnan Iqbal, CEO of Luma Health, a patient messaging system mostly used by providers. — Matthew Holt
In this episode of Health Tech Deals, Jess and I say hello to you from Miami! Together at ViVE 2022, we weigh in on some big funding deals! We also have a short cameo along the way (watch to see who it is)! Elemy raises $215 million; Health Gorilla raises $50 million; M_disrupt raises $6 million; Flume raises $30 million; and Homeward Health raises $20 million.
TRANSCRIPT
Jessica DaMassa:
Hello from Miami. I am at ViVE and look, the exhibit hall coming down around me. Here’s what the reg area looked like. People are leaving, everybody’s got their bags and ah, look who I’ve got. Weighing in with the big funding deals from ViVE, Matthew Holt. It is the March 10th episode of Health Tech Deals. Well, we’re selfie-style here, because we are on the move.
Matthew Holt:
Yeah. You had a fantastic professional cameraman and we decided not to use him
Jessica DaMassa:
No. Instead we’re using this, but I’ve interviews for you guys coming out of this.
Matthew Holt:
Even I did some, actually a lot of stuff going on in the show, pretty interesting. And there were a few deals announced.
Continue reading…By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH
Sprinter Health bills itself as “the “DoorDash for lab draws” – sending nurses and phlebotomists out to patients’ homes to collect blood samples and urine samples, check vitals, and even perform Covid tests. Their model has been received with some skepticism (most notably by my Health Tech Deals co-host and legendary health care curmudgeon Matthew Holt) so we get down to the bottom of what’s REALLY going on with CEO Max Cohen.
The long-term play is NOT to just rove the streets like some nomadic Quest Diagnostics; it’s to support the emerging market of virtual care and telehealth-based next-gen healthcare companies that will, ultimately, be limited in their abilities to diagnose-and-treat unless they can easily – and inexpensively – get patients lab tests.
Sprinter hopes to be that logistics company, extending the ‘value of virtual’ so it can live up to its promise of providing less expensive, more convenient care to patients. Max says only 15-20% of their business is made up of consumer-directed concierge calls; instead, the focus is on having a provider – think home health providers, specialty labs, virtual-first primary care clinics – dispatch Sprinter instead. Their pricing is built to attract these kinds of providers, giving Sprinter an advantage over, say the kind of medical transport services that are typically engaged to bring home health patients to the lab instead of the other way around.
Less than one-year old, Sprinter has already raised more than $37 million and counts health-tech-famous funds like Andreesen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Accel, Google Ventures – and even the real DoorDash’s co-founder and CEO Tony Xu – as investors. So, what’s ahead in the short-term to expand services out of LA, San Francisco, and Sacramento? We talk geographic expansion (hello, Texas and Georgia) and how Max is planning to continue to expand the utility and value of virtual care without increasing cost.
By KIM BELLARD
The conflict between Ukraine and Russia has been called many things. To most of the world, of course, it’s considered an invasion, a war between the two countries. To Russia, it’s a “peacekeeping” mission. The description that I can’t get out of my head, though, is one that I believe The Washington Post first used: it’s the world’s first crypto war.
“There is something about the war in Ukraine that feels different,” a former U.S. intelligence official told Nick Bilton. “We’ve seen wars documented on Twitter and images shared on the internet before, but this time it isn’t just bombs and bullets; this war is digital from the top to the bottom.” And, Mr. Bilton says: “At the center are cryptocurrencies.”
If crypto has come to war, can healthcare be far behind?
Continue reading…By JESS DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH
Two experts in mental health care for the Medicaid market stop by to help us get smart on the challenges facing patients and providers alike in this critical area of care. It’s not just the payment model that is different; stigma is different, patients are more racially and culturally diverse than those in commercial plans, support systems vary, and even the normalization of seeking mental health care manifests itself differently when it’s individually-driven as opposed to part of an “employer group.”
Anna Lindow, CEO of digital-first mental health startup Brave Health, and Vik Bakhru, Chief Health Officer of new managed Medicaid plan Circulo (the one built on Olive’s health tech platform) share what they know about this patient population, including what they are learning via the partnership they share to provide Brave Health’s services to Circulo’s members in Columbus, Ohio and Albany, New York.
The top of this conversation starts with the trend-talk and identification of the key issues facing Medicaid mental health care, then we get into some updates from Brave and Circulo, including how Circulo is examining “what it means to be a payer of care” and looking to innovate just one-year after launch.
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