Month: October 2021

Best Buy Acquires Remote Care Company Current Health

Posted on by Jason Barry

Best Buy acquired care-at-home company Current Health, supporting the electronics retailer’s ongoing push into the healthcare market.

Although Best Buy is well-established as a consumer electronics store, the company has begun turning to new areas such as home fitness and healthcare to fuel growth beyond its core technology business.

  • Current Health is a care-at-home platform that combines remote patient monitoring (RPM) and patient engagement tools into a single solution aimed at addressing the infrastructure gaps that obstruct providers from delivering care in the home.
  • Best Buy is best known as an electronics retailer with over 1k stores and 100k employees throughout the US and Canada. As televisions grow more affordable and people begin holding onto their smartphones longer, Best Buy is leaning into new services to drive revenue growth. 
  • The acquisition allows Best Buy to leverage its expertise in consumer-friendly technology and supply chain logistics to streamline care delivery, building on past investments in senior care (GreatCall) and RPM (Critical Signal Technologies).

Industry Impact

At-home healthcare has seen a post-pandemic surge in adoption, allowing patients to receive treatment where they’re most comfortable while simultaneously reducing costs. This trend has accelerated the reliance on the technology that Best Buy offers, but also gives the company a new way to take advantage of its large physical reach.

Best Buy’s existing services like Geek Squad and In-Home Advisors send trained employees into customer homes to provide personalized technology solutions while gaining the hard earned trust of consumers. By expanding this trust to Current Health patients, Best Buy can deliver a high-touch customer experience at a scale difficult to achieve for most pure healthcare competitors.

Carbon Health Acquires RPM Company Alertive Healthcare

Posted on by Jason Barry

Carbon Health is extending its home-based care capabilities with the acquisition of remote patient monitoring (RPM) company Alertive Healthcare. 

The move highlights Carbon Health’s focus on having a greater impact outside of its physical clinics at a time when an increasing number of providers are adopting hybrid care models.

  • Alertive Healthcare offers a range of RPM tools and hardware for proactively managing patients across a variety of specialties (primary care, cardiology, neurology, nephrology). Alertive’s platform records patient data and sends alerts to providers to decrease the treatment time for chronic conditions.
  • Carbon Health provides an “omnichannel care” platform designed to meet patients where they are by delivering care through multiple avenues (in-person clinics, home-based care, and virtually with the Carbon Health app).
  • The acquisition allows Carbon Health to integrate Alertive Healthcare’s tools and services into its existing care delivery model. Carbon Health will provide Alertive’s connected devices and monitoring sensors to patients so that they can share vitals with providers. 

Industry Impact

Carbon Health is investing in hardware as a key pillar of its omnichannel care model. The company operates over 90 brick-and-mortar primary care clinics across 14 states, but has been expanding into new channels to meet its goal of becoming “the largest primary care provider in the US” with over 1.5k clinics by 2025. The Alertive Healthcare acquisition arrives shortly after Carbon Health bought remote glucose monitoring company Steady Health in June, which marked its first venture into home-based care.

Teladoc Virtual Primary Care Expands Nationwide

Posted on by Jason Barry

Teladoc Health is using its scale to reach the 80% of adults that “do not have a strong relationship with a primary care physician” by making its Primary360 solution available to US commercial health plans, employers, and other benefits sponsors.

Primary360 is a virtual primary care service that Teladoc has been piloting for the past two years. It is already being used by several large companies and will be available to Aetna members early next year.

  • Primary360 allows members to select a primary care provider and develop longitudinal relationships with physician-led care teams. Members receive personalized health plans through Teladoc’s virtual care offerings, and can get help navigating to in-person providers.
  • Data from the pilot shows that two-thirds of members previously lacked traditional primary care and that Primary360 helped members detect undiagnosed chronic diseases. One in four chronic conditions identified for members of the pilot were new diagnoses of common disorders such as diabetes and hypertension.
  • Half of Primary360 members enrolled in the pilot take advantage of at least one other Teladoc product, while nearly 30% use two additional connected services.

The Takeaway

Although Teladoc is positioning Primary360 mainly as a way to make primary care more accessible, it also serves as a way to bring in new business following slowing membership growth as the pandemic wanes. Teladoc is establishing Primary360 as a hub for its full suite of virtual solutions, giving more patients the ability to receive primary care while widening the patient funnel for its other offerings.

Graphite Health Announces Open Marketplace

Posted on by Jason Barry

Piloting new digital health tools will soon be as easy as downloading a smartphone app, at least if Graphite Health has anything to say about it.

Intermountain Healthcare, Presbyterian Healthcare Services, and SSM Health recently announced the launch of Graphite Health, a member-led nonprofit aiming to create an interoperable data platform that will allow health systems to adopt new technologies “as easily as anyone can download an app from an app store to a smartphone.” 

Graphite Health is modeled on another Intermountain-owned venture called CivicaRx, which works to make generic medications broadly accessible, and is seeking to build an open marketplace for digital health tools.

  • Graphite Health Platform – To support the development of plug-and-play applications, Graphite Health is creating a common data language (built on the FHIR framework) that will allow providers to implement tools without unique customizations.
  • Graphite Health Marketplace – The marketplace will serve as a single location for innovators to distribute their solutions at scale, while giving providers a way to save months (if not years) of security and integration reviews when piloting a new tool.

In addition to the founding health systems, Graphite Health is planning on bringing additional organizations into the coalition over the coming months, with a target of reaching over 40m lives covered.

Industry Impact

Unlike current health marketplaces such as Epic’s App Orchard, Graphite Health’s nonprofit structure allows its marketplace to function as a “health utility,” serving members without the additional provisions of alternatives. If the company succeeds in its vision of streamlining interoperability, an elusive goal for many that have attempted, it will help facilitate the adoption of new tools while bringing operational efficiency to health systems.

Digital Health Funding Tops $21B in 2021

Posted on by Jason Barry

With three months left in 2021, digital health funding has reached a staggering total of $21.3b across 541 deals.

To put that number into perspective, last year was the first year that total digital health funding surpassed $10b, and 2019’s total was a small-by-comparison $7.9b.

These figures are from Rock Health’s Q3 2021 Digital Health Funding Report, which analyzed how 2021’s financing boom is shifting market expectations and creating a landscape that’s ripe for consolidation.

Funding themes remained similar to prior years, with investors focusing on value propositions such as R&D software and clinical indications like mental health. R&D funding was lifted by mega rounds from XtalPi ($400m) and Reify Health ($220m), while mental health services saw an influx of capital at Spring Health ($190m) and SonderMind ($150m).

Most funded value propositions:

  1. R&D catalysts ($4.7b)
  2. On-demand healthcare ($3.4b)
  3. Treatment of disease ($3.1b)
  4. Fitness & wellness ($2.9b)
  5. Non-clinical workflow ($2.1b)
  6. Consumer health information ($2.0b)

Most funded clinical indications:

  1. Mental health ($3.1b)
  2. Cardiovascular disease ($1.4b)
  3. Diabetes ($1.4b)
  4. Primary care ($1.4b)
  5. Oncology ($1.2b)
  6. Substance use disorder ($793m)

Industry Impact

This year’s unprecedented funding signals that investors are betting on a continued surge in healthcare innovation, but the wave of new entrants is creating a clutter of digital health options for patients and providers. As the market begins to call for more unified offerings, companies are turning to M&A for the answer.

The 216 digital health M&A deals through the first three quarters of the year have already eclipsed the 146 deals in 2020. Companies like Headspace and Ginger have combined to vertically integrate their solutions to provide their user base with a deeper well of resources. Other deals, like K Health’s recent Trusst acquisition, are focusing on horizontal integration to serve multiple channels with a single tech interface.

Regardless of the strategy, the rate of the dealmaking is causing many to wonder if company valuations can continue rising at the same pace for much longer, but for now it seems like we could be in the early innings of another record breaking Q4.

GoodRx Launches Online Health Resource

Posted on by Jason Barry

Digital pharmacy tool GoodRx recently launched an expansive online resource called GoodRx Health to provide research-based answers to popular health questions.

GoodRx Health takes a different approach than other consumer health destinations, offering actionable insights through GoodRx Answers and a Health Wizard for navigating difficult decisions.

  • GoodRx’s current services include app-based prescription tracking and a telehealth platform called GoodRx Care, which provides virtual primary care services.
  • GoodRx Help adds new ways for users to explore the company’s library of Video Explainers and editorial content, a large strategy shift that pushes the company beyond its current role as a comparison tool.
  • GoodRx’s new strategy targets every stage of a consumer’s healthcare journey, uniting the company’s platforms by directing diagnosis-seeking consumers from GoodRx Health to its GoodRx Care telehealth service for treatment.

The Takeaway

GoodRx Health is far from a small content play to drive more traffic to a website. GoodRx is doing everything in its power to leverage the 20m monthly users already visiting its site, from hiring a 50 person editorial team helmed by the former executive editor of WIRED, Thomas Goetz, to acquiring health video company HealthiNation for $75m in April.

WebMD and symplr announced a similar partnership in August, which allows WebMD users to go from a health information search to scheduling a telehealth appointment in three clicks. GoodRx’s vertical integration of these services could position it as a leader among companies operating in the overlap between health information and treatment.

Amazon Announces Healthcare Accelerator Finalists

Posted on by Jason Barry

Amazon Announces Healthcare Accelerator Finalists

Digital health startups were in the spotlight this week as Amazon announced the ten finalists for its first ever AWS Healthcare Accelerator.

The companies were selected from 427 applications and 31 countries around the world, although each finalist is US-based. The finalists were chosen by a panel from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and KidsX, an accelerator for companies focusing on pediatric care. Each startup has a validated solution along with existing revenue and customers.

The AWS Healthcare Accelerator is a four week program that pairs finalists with technical and business mentorship from experts from AWS and KidsX, then offers collaboration opportunities with members of the AWS Partner Network looking for healthcare solutions.

AWS Healthcare Accelerator finalists include:

  1. AIVA is a voice-powered care assistant for hospital patient rooms and senior living communities with a mission to be the voice operating system for better care. 
  1. b.well offers an integrated solution for consumer engagement, holistic health management, and cost containment. They use longitudinal aggregated data to paint a picture of health for each consumer and aggregate data to show population health.
  1. Ejenta automates remote monitoring and remote care delivery using AI exclusively licensed from NASA. Their “intelligent agents” learn from connected devices and EHR data to monitor patients, predict health, and connect care teams.
  1. Giblib creates an educational content streaming experience for healthcare providers. It allows for on demand streaming of surgical videos and medical lectures from subject matter experts along with the ability to receive continuing education credits.
  1. Gyant is a virtual assistant and digital front door solution designed to optimize patient journeys. It navigates patients to the right care setting and resources while providing simple appointment scheduling.
  1. Kaizen Health is a healthcare logistics platform that connects healthcare and transportation to reduce access barriers.
  1. Medical Informatics Corp offers an FDA-cleared Sickbay virtual care platform that helps hospitals improve operational efficiencies by enabling the rapid scaling of remote patient monitoring across any inpatient setting.
  1. Neuro Rehab VR is reinventing training exercises for physical and cognitive therapy by leveraging VR and neuroplasticity for recovery. It allows providers to track their patients in real time and has shown increased patient engagement.
  1. OneRecord provides an app that helps patients build a consolidated health record of their entire medical history in a single place.
  1. Pieces uses AI to connect patients and health systems with solutions that address social determinants of health. They connect care providers to actionable data, people to services, and caseworkers to information.

Industry Impact

Amazon’s multi-pronged strategy for entering the healthcare market goes beyond its hands-on approach with Amazon Care. By providing companies such as these finalists with AWS solutions, Amazon is establishing itself as the cloud-based foundation for a new cohort of healthcare disruptors.

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