Category: Digital Health

Telehealth Linked to Quality as Extension Deadline Looms

Posted on by Jason Barry

Efforts to extend regulatory flexibilities for virtual care gained some wind in their sails from a new study in Health Affairs that linked telehealth use to significant quality improvements and a relatively modest bump in spending. 

Researchers assigned Medicare patients to health systems according to care patterns in 2019, then segmented the providers based on their telehealth adoption in 2020 (5.5M patients, 576 systems). They then analyzed outcomes for 2021 and 2022.

Patients at health systems in the highest quartile of telehealth use (27% of all visits) had an increase of 0.21 outpatient visits per patient per year, a relative increase of 2.2% compared to systems in the lowest quartile of telehealth use (9.5% of all visits).

  • These patients also had 14.4 fewer non-COVID ED visits per 1,000 patients per year, a 2.7% relative decrease.
  • Further, the patients at high-telehealth systems saw improved adherence to medications like metformin and statins, although there were no clear changes in hospitalizations.

Those improvements came at the cost of an additional $248 per patient per year at high-telehealth systems, a relative increase of 1.6% above the lowest quartile.

  • The authors noted that this increase was largely driven by inpatient admissions and pharmaceuticals, but offset by decreases in outpatient spending.

Where do we go from here? With many virtual care flexibilities set to expire at the end of the year – like allowing Medicare patients to receive telehealth in their homes – regulators are on the clock to create more permanent policies.

  • Policymakers have already proposed a bevy of bills to extend the flexibilities, but the debate carries on as the deadline looms.

The Takeaway

Given the access benefits, quality improvements, and modest increase in spending, this study only makes it harder to justify rolling back telehealth coverage for Medicare patients. The evidence is mounting, and it’s not too hard to picture a world where the arguments against telehealth only grow weaker as technology improves and providers optimize their virtual care services.

Epic vs Particle: The Data Exchange Debate

Posted on by Jason Barry

It probably would have been impossible to wander onto any of your healthcare newsfeeds last week and miss the drama unfolding between Epic and Particle.

If for some reason the solar eclipse blacked out your internet, the basic timeline looks like this:

  • April 8 – Rumors began circulating that Epic cut off data access to patient information platform Particle Health.
  • April 9 – Particle confirmed that Epic ceased responding to medical record requests through the Carequality network (updates ongoing).
  • April 10-11 – All hell broke loose.
  • April 11 – Epic released an Issue Notification detailing the issues and steps toward a resolution.
  • April 12 – Our shepherd through the dark forest of interoperability, Brendan “Health API Guy” Keeler, published a masterful breakdown of the situation and its downstream implications.

Without wading too far into the data exchange weeds, Particle “combines data from 270 million plus patients’ medical records by aggregating and unifying healthcare records from thousands of sources”… sources like Carequality.

  • Carequality is effectively one of the country’s largest health information networks, facilitating data exchange between qualified network members (i.e. Particle) who agree to only query patient data for “Permitted Purposes” such as Treatment, Health Care Operations, or Public Health Activities.
  • The problem at the heart of the Particle controversy arises due to the fact that Treatment is the only purpose that organizations like Epic are actually required to respond to, causing all sorts of companies to warp their true purposes to Treatment-shaped requests.

Epic’s Issue Notification went as far as specifically naming certain Particle customers that it felt violated the Treatment case, including a company named Integritort that was allegedly using the patient data to try and identify potential class action lawsuit participants.

  • Particle maintains that all of its partners directly support Treatment, and that “the ability for one implementor to decide, without evidence or even so much as a warning, to disconnect providers at massive scale, jeopardizes clinical operations for hundreds of thousands of patients as well as the trust that is so critical to a trust-based exchange.”

The Takeaway

Since we know a perfect takeaway when we see one, we’ll leave it to the Health API Guy to wrap up the story:

“The tactical actions and who’s right or wrong really isn’t that important. Instead, they can serve as a catalyst and accelerant for the change needed. These events occurred because fraud and abuse are happening because the status quo of the networks only working for Treatment leads to the worst possible incentives. Health data is needed by a broader set of stakeholders in order to serve the patient.”

In other words, now’s the time to make viable paths for other Permitted Purposes a reality.

Rock Health Q1 2024 Funding Recap

Posted on by Jason Barry

If Rock Health’s Q1 2024 Digital Health Funding Report makes one thing clear, it’s that the times of transition are behind us, and we’re now fully entrenched in a new digital health funding cycle.

The first quarter saw $2.7B in digital health venture funding across 133 rounds, marking the lowest quarterly total seen since 2019. It’s not as bad as it sounds.

  • Although total funding wasn’t trending in the right direction, the pace of the funding was actually healthy, and the 133 rounds was the highest in the last six quarters.

The average transaction size of $20.3M mostly tells the tale of growth-stage companies having to justify their valuations based on clinical outcomes rather than fancy storytelling.

  • Crowded markets are pushing enterprise customers to seek out outcomes data as a way to differentiate players and evaluate value-for-investment.
  • As outcomes data becomes a moat and a customer draw-in, investors are seeking out companies that can demonstrate efficacy early – making outcomes data more central to fundraising conversations… and at earlier stages.

AI drove a record share of funding. While not exactly too surprising, AI-enabled companies captured 40% of Q1’s funding total ($1.1B across 45 deals), compared to 33% of 2023’s funding pot and 29% of 2022’s.

  • As AI energizes the sector, it isn’t too hard to follow the funding to the areas with the most perceived promise: scribing, precision medicine, and care enablement.
  • Abridge raised a colossal $150M Series C, AI precision health company Zephyr AI landed a $111M Series A, and a suite of high flying startups landed huge rounds, including Ambience Healthcare ($70M), Fabric ($60M), and Codametrix ($40M).

The last theme is familiar: creative fundraising continues to be a crowd favorite, especially as public market delistings cause investors to rethink their exit potential.

  • Nearly half (48%) of Q1’s funding rounds were unlabeled, compared to 44% of all transactions in 2023.
  • Founders are going above and beyond to entice investors with more upside in the event of an exit, as seen with Transcarent structuring its $125M Series D to offer funders 2.5x their investment should the company M&A or IPO. 

The Takeaway

Expectations have been reset for digital health startups, causing them to evolve their strategies and reorient around different metrics of success (strong outcomes / margins vs. high projected growth). These expectations are undoubtedly higher than they were during the pandemic era of loose capital, but that’s probably not a bad thing for a sector that’s still striving for maturity.

The Cost of Manual Workflows, and Where Automation Can Help

Posted on by Jason Barry

We cover new solutions promising to swap manual workflows for automated operations on a weekly basis, but it’s rare that we get a chance to devote a full deep dive to the motivations driving the innovation:

  • What workflows would see the biggest benefit from automation?
  • What areas are healthcare orgs hoping to evolve in their operations?
  • What teams stand to gain the most from automation? 

Medallion’s 2024 State of Payer Enrollment and Credentialing Report gave us that chance, shedding light on those answers through a survey of nearly 350 healthcare executives.

Among the key findings from the report was the fact that 45% of respondents say their staffing levels are “inappropriately low,” yet 34% also feel the need to further cut headcount expenses.

  • Those numbers are a recipe for burnout. 57% of enrollment and credentialing teams have experienced turnover in the past year, along with 36% of CNAs, 15% of NPs, and 11% of PAs.

One of the main reasons why enrollment and credentialing teams are feeling the pressure so acutely is because of the manual nature of their workflows.

  • The payor enrollment process involves wrangling information from providers to fill out applications, staying on top of the evolving requirements of various health plans, communicating the enrollment status of every provider, and constantly following up with payors by email or fax. 
  • Those slow turnaround times directly impact the bottom line, with 46% of respondents reporting that unoptimized enrollment workflows cause them to miss out on revenue.

That isn’t even half the battle, with the credentialing process taking just as long to gather provider data, check qualifications, and complete primary source verifications.

  • 84% of credentialing teams experience turnaround times of 15 days or more, which unfortunately isn’t too surprising considering that 30% manually verify credentials by visiting individual sites.
  • Every day wasted waiting on credentialing is a day the provider isn’t seeing patients, and that missed reimbursement turns out to cost an average of $10k each day.

If those problems hit a little too close to home, automation is more than likely going to play a major role in the solution. An end-to-end platform like Medallion might be the right way to make that happen, and you can check out our coverage of the platform for a complete overview of how it can help fully automate payor contracting and enrollment, credentialing, and licensing.

The Takeaway

It’s no easy task to balance operational costs with a mission to provide high-quality care, but with the US healthcare industry spending over $800B every year on administrative tasks, it’s time to find a way to thread that needle. For a closer look at these issues and how Medallion might be able to help, make sure to head over to the full report.

Digital Diabetes Management in the Hot Seat

Posted on by Jason Barry

Digital diabetes management tools found themselves in the hot seat after a blistering study from the Peterson Health Technology Institute suggested that several leading solutions don’t provide significant clinical benefit, especially relative to their cost.

That conclusion naturally had many digital health advocates sharpening their pitchforks, but first let’s start by unpacking PHTI’s research and findings.

The analysis had two main endpoints: clinical effectiveness and economic impact. PHTI reviewed 1,100+ articles, including 120 submitted by the companies being evaluated, then offered ratings across three categories – remote patient monitoring, behavior / lifestyle modification, and nutritional ketosis. This chart summarizes the results beautifully.

  • On the clinical side, PHTI found that these tools deliver small reductions in HbA1c (0.23 to 0.60 percentage points) compared to usual care, as well as limited long term durability of the improvements.
  • On the economic side, PHTI concluded that each of the three product categories led to a net increase in spending, with total reimbursement and program investment exceeding any cost reduction from avoided care (the ketosis category carried an asterisk for its potential to cut costs over the long term).

Those findings led to plenty of blowback, including an excellent rebuttal from the Digital Therapeutics Alliance and a flurry of press releases from the companies in the report.

The DTx Alliance’s rebuttal centered around three primary issues:

  • The limited selection of solutions overlooks a large portion of the diabetes tools on the market, and that it’s misleading to give generalized conclusions based on a small sample when many products can demonstrably improve clinical and economic outcomes.
  • The report’s reliance on predictive models rather than actual cost studies overlooks real-world evidence, particularly concerning products like Dario, which has independent studies demonstrating reductions in both costs and hospitalizations.
  • It might have made sense for PHTI to list any of the nation’s 9,000 endocrinologists (diabetes experts) as authors or advisors. It’s tough to beat their pointed suggestion: “Had there been expertise in this evaluation, they may have considered the broader scope of diabetes management like reductions in hypo- and hyperglycemic events, in addition to the reduction of A1C levels.”

The Takeaway

Embracing debate is essential if the industry wants to improve, and even if there was room for improvement in PHTI’s methodology, it definitely succeeded in its goal of refocusing attention on the clinical and economic impact of digital innovations.

HIMSS 2024 Recap and Major Announcements

Posted on by Jason Barry

It’s the final day of HIMSS 2024, and although most exhibitors are still either valiantly stationed at their booths or playing hooky at Disney World, the giant wave of announcements has already crashed and it’s time to round up some of the biggest stories from the show.

The topics du jour among the ~35,000 attendees weren’t entirely unexpected. Generative AI was definitely the main course, but with an especially heavy portion of HIMSS’ signature interoperability sauce poured over it following the TEFCA go-live. Cybersecurity was also an even more popular side dish than usual (anyone’s guess as to why).

HIMSS24 major announcements, launches, and partnerships:

  • Abridge added UCI Health to its quickly growing roster of health system deployments, and the system-wide ambient AI roll out sounds like it’s already helping out significantlywith “pajama time.” The expansion hits less than a month after Abridge closed its $150M Series C.
  • Altera Digital Health showcased Paragon Denali, its cloud-native EHR built on Microsoft Azure that’s designed for rural, critical access, and community hospitals. Paragon Denali’s SaaS model gives smaller hospitals a single platform for managing clinical and financial data without having to do the heavy lifting of on-premises implementations and upgrades.
  • Ambience Healthcare is now fully integrated with Oracle’s Cerner Millennium EHR, enabling clinicians to seamlessly interface with Ambience’s medical scribe, coding assistant, and full suite of generative AI products within their standard workflows.
  • Caregility presented its new class of adaptive telehealth edge devices that support multiple audio and video streams at the bedside, enabling providers to deploy advanced hybrid care delivery models at scale.
  • emtelligent unveiled the next generation of its medical AI platform dubbed emtelliPro+, which uses a custom medical LLM to produce hallucination-resilient outputs that can be used to make safe determinations in even the most complex use cases.
  • Google Cloud launched Vertex AI Search for Healthcare, a genAI tool that allows providers, payors, and life science orgs to make better use of their clinical data. Users can search for information across clinical notes, scanned documents, and other data sources to find natural language answers to their questions (e.g. patient medical history).
  • Hyro announced a long-term strategic partnership with healthtech consulting firm Disruptive Innovations that’ll see Hyro’s Responsible AI platform and voice assistants help DI’s clients address key challenges such as agent burnout, patient access, and operational efficiency.
  • Innovaccer previewed its upcoming provider AI copilot, a portable tablet designed to deliver multi-solution clinical support at the point-of-care. Not to outshine its foray into the hardware game, Innovaccer also announced its acquisition of Pharmacy Quality Solutions to accelerate VBC in pharmacy settings. Stay tuned for a deeper dive on this next week.
  • Intermountain Health became the first organization in the world to attain Stage 7 validation of the HIMSS Infrastructure Adoption Model (INFRAM), which basically means it’s the bee’s knees across all corners of care delivery, including clinical outcomes, adoption, sustainability, performance, and cybersecurity. We’ll unpack the newly modernized INFRAM framework in an upcoming issue, and want to give a major congratulations to Dr. Farukh Usmani and team.
  • Juno Health demonstrated a range of new features within its modular EHR that enhance its user experience through personalization, including a Clinical Content Builder, Care Planning tool, and Treatment Plan solution.
  • Linus Health introduced two huge upgrades to its cognitive impairment detection platform, including Hearing Screener tests to identify signs of MCI and a new Digital Trail Making Test Part B (an FDA Class II medical device designed to capture more data than traditional paper-based exams). The cherry on top? Linus also acquired speech analytics vendor Aural Analytics.
  • Microsoft is spearheading the Trustworthy & Responsible AI Network (TRAIN), a consortium of top tier organizations aimed at operationalizing responsible AI principles in healthcare. The packed announcement also casually included three major deployments for Nuance’s DAX Copilot at Stanford Medicine, WellSpan Health, and Providence.
  • Nabla announced that Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (the largest pediatric multi-specialty medical group in the US) has selected Nabla Copilot to streamline clinical documentation after collaborating closely throughout the pilot to tailor specific capabilities for the unique requirements of pediatrics in a hospital setting.
  • Philips expanded its partnership with AWS to combine its expertise in digitization and pathology with AWS’ scalable cloud solutions to help pathology labs store, manage, and analyze growing volumes of digital pathology data.
  • Salesforce debuted Einstein Copilot: Health Actions, a new solution geared toward letting healthcare workers submit natural language prompts to summarize information, update patient and member data, and automate manual outreach.
  • Surescripts put out a gem of a report on health intelligence sharing in the US, highlighting the fact that its network saw a mindblowing 24 billion exchanges of clinical and benefit information in 2023. The report is filled with insights that make it a must-read, including the fact that last year saw 10% growth in e-prescribing among non-PCPs (29% among pharmacists), and a 49% increase in electronic processing of prior auths.
  • symplr took the lid off symplrAI, the culmination of its enterprise-level approach to AI/ML integration for accelerating productivity gains in healthcare. symplrAI will leverage genAI services from AWS, including Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Q, to bolster both established and new AI capabilities within symplr’s SaaS portfolio.
  • Talkdesk introduced Talkdesk Autopilot for Healthcare, a generative AI solution built to deliver EHR-integrated self-service experiences to resolve complex needs without burdening human contact center agents.
  • Wolters Kluwer Health unveiled its newly unified UpToDate portfolio of Clinical Decision, Drug Referential, and Patient Engagement solutions to improve interoperability and care coordination. On top of that, WK announced that its AI Labs solution now has access to the complete set of UpToDate’s evidence-based clinical content and graded recommendations across over 25 specialties. 

For the first HIMSS meeting since the conference changed hands to Informa ownership, the upbeat show floor still seemed right at home in the Florida sunshine. We hope that everyone had an awesome time if you made it out in-person, and welcome all of our new readers that we met at the show!

Think Twice Before Targeting Employers?

Posted on by Jason Barry

Second Opinion published an absolute opus on why digital health startups starting out today should think twice before targeting employers, with a few notable exceptions included for the brave founders among us.

Self-funded employers have long been a fan-favorite of digital health startups. They’re often faster moving than payors, with not only their own large populations and healthcare budgets, but also an added incentive to pick up exciting new benefits to attract the best talent.

Why wouldn’t you target them? OMERS Ventures Principal Christina Farr and Big Health Co-Founder Peter Hames make the case that the tried-and-true playbook of signing a critical mass of employers before leveraging it to get into health plans doesn’t work like it used to.

  • The competition is intense. A decade ago, you could count the number of solutions in any given space on your fingers, and benefits leaders had the bandwidth to interface with startups directly. Over $100B has since poured into digital health startups, and middlemen groups like EHIR have popped up to filter vendors before they reach employers. It’s hard to break out from all that noise (but not impossible).
  • Vendors are now expected to share risk. The days of fixed “per employee, per month” contracts are behind us, and most vendors are now expected to bring some form of performance guarantee. Although this trend is great for vendors that can deliver, it isn’t ideal for new entrants that now need more overhead to track outcomes and have less visibility into forward business.
  • Point solution fatigue. An abundance of point solutions has caused employers to narrow their focus toward platforms with broad offerings that focus on high cost, high prevalence problem areas. Again, not great for companies getting their start with a specialized offering. Potential exceptions include startups focusing on areas that receive a sudden boost in public attention, such as weight loss or menopause.
  • The market now has mature incumbents. Even if you’re addressing a real need, the likelihood that an employer already has an established solution is far higher. That doesn’t mean you can’t compete, but the bar is definitely higher.

When should you target them? There’s a whole section dedicated to this question that’s worth checking out if you’re playing in this sandbox, but the overarching message is clear: “the solution itself – and the impact it delivers – need to be articulated as powerfully and simply as possible.”

The Takeaway

Employers have kickstarted plenty of success stories over the years, including names that are easy to look up to like Omada, Hinge Health, and Maven Clinic. Just because top tier articles are now getting published on why you shouldn’t target employers, doesn’t mean it isn’t still a good strategy. It’s just more important than ever to make sure you’re asking yourself the right questions before going down that path.

ViVE 2024 Recap and Major Announcements

Posted on by Jason Barry

ViVE Los Angeles is officially a wrap, and the collaborative event between HLTH and CHIME keeps growing up right before our eyes.

The show’s third year eased up on the flashy displays and DJs that were hard to miss in Miami and Nashville in favor of a more down-to-business approach, not unlike the AI conversations happening in the expo hall.

True to form, the vendors were the stars of the show, so we’ll follow ViVE’s lead and get right into some of the biggest announcements that came out of La La Land:

  • Arcadia unveiled its next-generation data platform powered by an open lakehouse architecture. We won’t pretend to know exactly what that means, but it’ll apparently be a nice boost to Arcadia’s population health and value-based care capabilities.
  • Artera gave an update on its digital health marketplace, which now includes 50+ vendors after bringing on newcomers like Azara Healthcare, Health iPASS, and Memora Health. Artera’s Message API now receives a whopping 150 million calls each year.
  • AvaSure rolled out its Episodic virtual care solution that allows care teams to seamlessly collaborate regardless of location around admissions, discharges, rounds, and specialty consults.
  • Biofourmis is partnering with GE HealthCare to enhance continuity of care during transitions from the hospital to the home. Biofourmis’ care-at-home solutions will extend GE HealthCare’s inpatient monitoring portfolio.
  • Brightside Health announced a string of new payor partnerships to support Medicaid and Medicare after moving into the space a few months ago. The big name roster includes CareOregon, Blue Shield of California, BCBS of Texas, and Centene.
  • CancerX revealed the 16 members of its inaugural Startup Accelerator, which includes a healthy mix of up-and-comers across clinical research, diagnosis, treatment, operations, and care experience. 
  • DeepScribe is working with Amazon Web Services to scale purpose-built healthcare LLMs, and is incorporating AWS HealthScribe into its platform while also making its ambient documentation tool available to health systems through AWS Marketplace.
  • Elevance is launching a digital weight management program for employer clients of its CarelonRx PBM. Users who are prescribed GLP-1s will have access to medication management support and a digital companion module.
  • Gozio released new data showing that 86% of patients who received medical care in the last year used a mobile device when interacting with their provider. Although using a single platform to reach their provider is important to nearly all patients, 46% are still using multiple.
  • Highmark is joining forces with Epic and Google to bring more data to the point of care. Epic’s Payer Platform will enable “bidirectional” data sharing between the payor and providers, while Google Cloud will allow the tech to integrate with Highmark’s existing systems.
  • Included Health is embedding the CDC’s Healthy Days measure into its navigation service following a successful two year pilot.
  • Vale Health made its grand debut as it looks to build an online marketplace of vetted wellness offerings for consumers, and it already has sixteen health systems in its corner.
  • Veda Health is teaming up with Humana to improve the accuracy of its provider directories and ensure that seniors have real-time details about in-network providers. Love to see this come full circle after Veda got its start in a Humana hackathon back in 2016.
  • Xealth’s Digital Health Review showed how digital tools are reshaping surgery, chronic care, and preventive services. Preventive care programs are seeing the highest levels of patient engagement, while surgery preparation programs see the highest enrollment.

Huge thanks to all of our readers who were in LA and took the time to walk us through the latest and greatest. For everyone holding onto more announcements for HIMSS, we’d love to connect in Orlando. Hit reply and let’s get it on the books!

The Case For More Retailers and Health Systems to Partner

Posted on by Jason Barry

A new viewpoint in the Harvard Business Review made the case that health systems and retailers are only scratching the surface of their partnership potential.

The authors – a trio of professors out of Harvard and UNC – outline four actions they believe health systems and retailers should take to better coordinate their complementary services.

Move Beyond Convenience. Retailers like CVS and Walmart are beginning to add services such as primary care, mental health counseling, and home care, yet even more robust solutions like Amazon Clinic still fall short of integrated care. 

  • Things like cancer treatments and surgeries remain well outside the realm of retail health, yet a close partnership between a retailer and a health system could help integrate the many elements involved in treating more-serious conditions.

Move Care Into the Home. Although retail clinics are more convenient and accessible than hospitals, patient homes have them beat on both metrics. Hospitals have begun offering more care in the home, but often lack the logistical prowess to supply patients with the monitoring tech needed for larger programs.

  • Efficiently equipping patients’ homes with RPM devices is right in the retailer wheelhouse, and a partnership could fill the gap. Look no further than Best Buy and Geisinger for proof.

Leverage Data to Improve Care. The data held by retailers and health systems largely remains in separate databases, with some notable exceptions like Target-Kaiser Permanente.

  • The authors point out that better integration could help with everything from flu outbreak prediction (grocery carts filled with tissues = sick people) to food-as-medicine programs (well-timed nudges and incentives).

Change Who Delivers Care. Labor shortages are one of healthcare’s biggest immediate obstacles, and few employers have a larger workforce than retailers. The article gives the example of Walmart, which subsidizes education for its employees to train for roles like pharmacy technician and medical assistant.

  • Health systems could ensure these training programs meet quality standards and help graduates find jobs, creating a model where retailers attract more ambitious candidates and providers have a new talent pool to tap into.

The Takeaway

One way or the other, retailers are moving past the Retail Care 1.0 era, and it’s hard to argue against the case for tighter retailer-provider partnerships. Even if consumers might not jump at the idea of sharing their grocery list with their physician, the ideas outlined in this article are good food-for-thought for combining the complementary strengths of retailers and providers to improve the system as a whole.

Rock Health 2023 Full-Year Funding Recap

Posted on by Jason Barry

Rock Health’s 2023 digital health funding numbers are in, and although they’re every bit as bleak as expected, there were some silver linings that could bode well for the year ahead.

Here’s 2023 by the numbers:

  • US digital health funding totaled  $10.7B across 492 rounds ($21M average)
  • Q4 funding totaled $1.9B across 122 rounds (lowest quarterly total since Q3 2019)
  • Unlabeled rounds accounted for a record 44% of annual total
  • Surprisingly no pronounced spike in startup shutdowns

Last year’s $10.7B funding total was the lowest seen since 2019, but Rock Health points out that the real story often gets missed by the headline number. (Chart: Funding Trend)

  • Most startups tend to raise every 12-18 months, however Rock Health’s database shows that 81% of US digital health startups that raised in 2021 or earlier haven’t closed a subsequent labeled round.
  • Silent rounds (quiet raises from existing investors), Series extensions, and unlabeled rounds appear to have been the tools of choice to stay afloat.

Rock Health’s predictions for 2024 

  • Labeled raises will return – The startups that extended their runway with creative financing will need to produce proven outcomes data or showcase new products to keep investors interested. This year will separate the best from the rest, and the latter group will be looking at adjusted valuations (down rounds) or restructured cap tables.
  • M&A pace will accelerate – 2023 failed to produce the uptick in M&A that was expected to be brought on by attractive valuations, due in part to “higher for longer” interest rates and market volatility. In 2024, getting acquired will start to look like the best path for startups struggling on the fundraising front. (Chart: M&A Trend)
  • The public market cohort will recalibrate – After a year without a single digital health public exit, we should see a few of the late-stage players that delayed their listing to wait out market choppiness finally take the plunge, especially those with strong financials. (Chart: Digital Health Exits)

The Takeaway

While last year definitely delivered on “financial creativity” from nimble founders, the transition period can’t last forever, and Rock Health expects some startups will have to face the music in 2024 (i.e. raise at a reduced valuation, seek an acquisition, call it quits). Those are tough decisions to make, but the silver lining is that they’re also the decisions that will strengthen the sector in the long run (i.e. smaller cohort of stronger companies, platform synergies unlocked through M&A, and a more successful IPO class).

Get the top digital health stories right in your inbox

You might also like..

Select All

You're signed up!

It's great to have you as a reader. Check your inbox for a welcome email.

-- The Digital Health Wire team

You're all set!