Category: Digital Health

The 45 Best Digital Health Newsletters, Influencers, and Podcasts for 2023

Posted on by Jason Barry

We’re dedicating today’s top story to the people and publications that we rely on to find the most interesting digital health stories from across the web. Assuming that you already subscribe to Digital Health Wire, these are the 45 other newsletters, websites, and podcasts to follow if you want to keep up with the latest and greatest in healthcare.

Although we stay on top of all the mainstream outlets and digital health journals, some of the best content is usually found just off the beaten path. We’re a newsletter, we love newsletters, so we’re kicking things off with our favorite healthcare newsletters. 

When we’re done rounding up the headlines from the major news sites and back out of our morning newsletter rabbit hole, we can count on finding more fresh perspectives from these specialty publications and blogs.

These days most of our favorite content isn’t published, it’s tweeted. These all-stars are the ones doing the tweeting. (With sample tweets for your viewing pleasure.)

And finally, the podcasts that let our ears take over when our eyes are tired from all the blogs and tweets. We have a soft spot for founder interviews, B2B trends, and long form conversations.

It’s a lot to keep up with, but if you want the best digital health news out there, these sources will do more than get you started. You can also subscribe to Digital Health Wire and we’ll do the heavy lifting for you:)

PS – This list could easily have been a top 100, so if there’s a publication or news source that we’re crazy for not including, hit reply and let us know!

HIMSS23 Recap and Major Announcements

Posted on by Jason Barry

It’s Thursday morning on the final day of HIMSS23, and although most exhibitors are still diligently manning their booths in the Windy City, the announcement fireworks have already gone off and it’s time to round up some of the biggest stories from the trade show.

The exhibit hall chatter had a familiar ring to it, touching on the same themes of healthcare consumerization and workforce burnout that were favorites at ViVE, but with a good amount of HIMSS’ signature interoperability seasoning sprinkled on top.

The list of generative AI launches somehow managed to be longer than the line at a McCormick Place Starbucks, but it seemed like most of the ~35,000 attendees were balancing the initial shock and awe with a realistic understanding of the tech’s current limitations in healthcare.

HIMSS23 major announcements, launches, and partnerships:

  • Amazon rolled out several Alexa Smart Properties features designed to improve the patient and staff user experience at hospitals. The updates look like they make the lives of IT teams easier as they set up and maintain Alexa devices like the newly available Echo Show 15.
  • Caregility announced a new portfolio of hybrid care solutions built on Caregility Cloud that’s designed to reduce tech investment risks for health systems by offering the flexibility to choose apps that are a good fit for their environment without creating more IT silos.
  • eClinicalWorks introduced ChatGPT to its EHR and practice management solutions with the goal of making clinical workflows more efficient as it deepens its collaboration with Microsoft. Azure OpenAI Service will also be enhancing Scribe, eClinicalWorks’ AI dictation service.
  • Epic and Microsoft are bringing generative AI powered by Azure OpenAI Service to the Epic EHR, which might take the cake as the biggest announcement of the show. The partnership delivers a “comprehensive array” of solutions, including SlicerDicer self-service reporting. 
  • Health Gorilla took the lid off its HG Accelerator Program that gives startups access to its solutions, portfolio of healthcare data APIs, and interop mentorship. The inaugural class already includes Oatmeal Health (AI cancer screening) and Long Health (patient onboarding).
  • Innovaccer unveiled six new solutions that together look like the beginning of a new chapter in the company’s growth story. The Sara conversational AI leads the lineup that also includes Health Equity, Readmission Predict, Risk AI, Network Optimizer, and Health 1:1.
  • Memora landed $30M to scale its SMS-based care communication platform that automates clinical responses to frequently asked questions, nudges patients with care prompts, and sends reminders via text, escalating only the most urgent concerns to care teams.
  • Philips released its Future Health Index 2023 global report, which found that healthcare leaders are investing heavily in AI for both critical decision support and operational efficiency, and that these execs are leaning into outside partnerships to help provide the best possible care.
  • RevSpring launched Engage IQ to coordinate patient interactions from pre-service to post-service to payment. The platform handles intake, clinical reminders, and billing to improve clinical and financial outcomes while solidifying patient loyalty.
  • Rimidi’s clinical management platform is now integrated with MEDITECH, allowing clinicians to see remote patient-generated data and PROMs within disease-specific views in the patient chart alongside CDS support to drive next best steps.
  • Salesforce customers can now use Einstein GPT to generate info using natural language prompts directly within their Salesforce CRM, with a new Slack integration also allowing care teams to summarize chat information and complete CRM tasks.
  • symplr debuted four product suites as part of its Connected Enterprise initiative to help health systems address burnout and cost pressures. The new portfolio includes a Workforce Suite, Supply Chain Suite, Quality Suite, and Credentialing Suite.
  • Withings completed its new range of smart scales with the introduction of the Body Smart scale that brings body comp, heart rate, visceral fat, metabolic age, and basal metabolic rate analysis to the entry-level tier of the lineup.

It’s now been three years since the pandemic stopped HIMSS20 in its tracks, but healthcare’s biggest IT conference is very much alive and well with an in-person energy that’s straight out of 2019. We hope that everyone had an awesome time if you made it to Chicago, and welcome all of our new readers that we met at the show. Stay tuned for a deeper dive into some of these announcements next week.

a16z: Healthtech Business Model Magic

Posted on by Jason Barry

The news cycle took a bit of a breather ahead of the upcoming wave of HIMSS announcements, giving us a chance to highlight an excellent thinkpiece from the healthtech team at a16z.

After charting up a beautiful comparison of publicly traded healthcare companies versus other growth companies, a16z found that the healthcare outperformers leverage the same three types of “business model magic” as the world’s largest tech companies:

  • Increasing customer lifetime value (LTV Magic)
  • Expanding operating leverage (Operating Leverage Magic)
  • Declining customer acquisition costs (CAC Magic)

LTV Magic can be boiled down to creating “sticky” products with high retention. Healthtech companies that embed their platform into their customers’ core workflows can then build pricing power and widening revenue streams.

  • Outperformers can add new components to their platforms that increase LTV without a proportionate increase in costs. Ex. Flatiron Health’s provider network enabled it to efficiently build a pharma-facing, real-world evidence generation business on top.

Operating Leverage Magic revolves around reducing the marginal costs to serve customers as the business expands – mainly by leveraging software’s near-zero marginal cost dynamics.

  • Outperformers in a16z’s analysis also maintain modest operating expenditure growth at the central business level as they scale. Ex. Agilon and Oak Street command a valuation premium for impacting the cost of care without having to hire many central clinical staff.

CAC Magic involves finding ways to have declining marginal costs of customer acquisition. One of the most efficient ways to acquire new customers is by accessing groups of patients through partnerships with entities that already maintain those relationships, like MA plans.

  • Outperformers also have network effects that make their service more valuable as more people use it. Ex. Doximity gave more value to its 10,000th user than its 1,000th user, making it easier to acquire new users over time.

The Takeaway

a16z makes one thing very clear with its analysis: investors are ultimately underwriting a business’s ability to generate a lot of revenue over the long term. Every healthcare startup has to find its own way to reach that goal, but the three types of magic highlighted by a16z give a good sense of the ways that current outperformers are earning their premium valuations.

Rock Health Q1 2023 Funding Recap

Posted on by Jason Barry

Rock Health’s Q1 2023 digital health funding report is out and its title couldn’t have put it any better: we’re investing like it’s 2019 again.

Here are the numbers in a nutshell:

  • US digital health funding totaled $3.4B across 132 rounds ($25.9M average)
  • Trend: $2.2B (Q3 2022) -> $2.7B (Q4 2022) -> $3.4B (Q1 2023)
  • Q1 2023: 28 Series A rounds, 10 Series B, 3 Series C, 7 Series D+
  • 6 mega-rounds over $100M accounted for 40% total funding 

Looking at the past decade (Chart: Funding Trend), it’s clear that the pandemic funding environment was an outlier capped by absolute mania in 2021. The funding uptrend seen in the last few quarters is also a far cry from a true bull run.

  • If funding for the rest of the year matched the average funding of the past three quarters, 2023 would still see the lowest funding total since 2019.
  • Although January and February brought cooling inflation and some real signs of hope, March stepped on any blooming momentum with the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.

Something that Rock Health gave a lot of attention to – and for good reason – is that 40% of last quarter’s funding was from six mega-rounds (Chart: Mega-Round Breakdown) : 

  • Monograph Health – $375M Series C (at-home dialysis)
  • ShiftKey – $300M PE Round (staffing marketplace)
  • Paradigm – $203M Series A (clinical trial platform – largest digital health Series A ever)
  • ShiftMed – $200M Venture Round (staffing and workforce solutions)
  • Gravie – $179M PE Round (insurtech)
  • Vytalize Health – $100M Series C (Medicare ACO)

The other 126 startups split the remaining $2B slice of pie, with an average round size of $16M (vs. $25.9M with the mega-rounds). It makes a big impact, but if you remember back to 2021, we’re currently looking more sane than 88 mega-rounds combining for 56% of total funding.

The Takeaway

Outside of a positive funding trend over the last few quarters, it’s hard to interpret Rock Health’s report as great news for digital health startups. We have a regional banking crisis that might be in its early innings, the IPO market’s been barren since the 2021 SPAC craze, and the end of PHE isn’t exactly a tailwind for many business models. 
That said, it isn’t all doom and gloom. Rock Health is optimistic about the permanent expansion of some telehealth flexibilities and the improving guardrails for data privacy. “Those that make it to daybreak (though we can’t predict exactly when that’ll be) will come out with patched up ships and resilient mindsets.”

ViVE 2023 Recap and Major Announcements

Posted on by Jason Barry

Over 7,500 ViVE Nashville attendees are packing up their cowboy boots and heading home after a beautiful few days in Music City, U.S.A.

The generative AI hype cycle was almost loud enough to drown out the live musicians scattered throughout the venue, but it didn’t stop other stories from breaking through the noise, such as the brightening outlook for digital therapeutics in the wake of AppliedVR’s newly issued reimbursement code.

ViVE stayed true to form and kept the spotlight on the vendors, so we’ll follow their lead and dive right into some of the biggest announcements from the show.

  • Atropos Health unveiled its Atropos Evidence Network that allows physicians to surface answers to their clinical questions from the most appropriate data set across dozens of partner organizations such as ASCO CancerLinQ and Mayo Clinic.
  • AvaSure and Equum Medical showcased their virtual monitoring collaboration that combines AvaSure’s room monitoring hardware / software with Equum’s staff / monitoring services hosted from a new Virtual Care Collaboration Center in Nashville.
  • Amazon Web Services announced the 23 startups participating in its latest healthcare accelerator that provides mentorship to companies tackling problems across three core areas in dire need of new solutions: retention, deployment, and training.
  • Brightside Health detailed the findings of its recent study which found that patients who supplemented psychotherapy with video lessons based on the Unified Protocol saw significantly greater reduction in both depression and anxiety symptoms.
  • DiMe and Moffitt Cancer Center are teaming up to lay the foundation needed to meet the Cancer Moonshot’s ambitious goal of cutting the death rate from cancer by at least 50% over the next 25 years – big news that we’ll circle back on in the coming weeks.
  • Infermedica is expanding its API capabilities to include AI-driven patient intake workflows that initiate medical data collection prior to consultations to improve clinician efficiency and personalize the patient experience.
  • Notable is deploying its intelligent automation platform across Wisconsin-based Marshfield Clinic Health System’s entire organization (1,200 providers, 60 clinics, 11 hospitals) to create a better overall experience for 310k+ patients.
  • Philips debuted its comprehensive Virtual Care Management solution that combines condition-specific protocols with connected devices and engagement tools to deliver data / insights that enable timely interventions and workflow efficiencies.
  • Propeller Health and UC Davis Health announced a collaboration that will offer personalized treatment for high-risk patients with asthma and COPD by leveraging Propeller’s RPM sensors, mobile app, and targeted support. 
  • Transcarent is incorporating Care Journey’s quality and cost insights to equip patients with digestible provider profiles, cost benchmarks, and quality measures across specialties such as orthopedics, cardiology, gynecology, primary care, and pediatrics.
  • Trilliant Health released its health plan price transparency solution that blends its proprietary provider directory and market analytics with data from payor transparency files to reveal the negotiated reimbursements between health plans and providers for any service.
  • Verana Health launched its first Data-as-a-Service product, Qdata Anti-VEGF Market Tracker, which tracks real-world usage of anti-VEGF therapies in de-identified patients with retinal conditions while providing granular market segmentation.

Special thanks to all of our readers who were at the show and caught us up on the latest and greatest. For those of you holding onto more announcements for HIMSS, we’d love to connect in Chicago. Hit reply and let’s set something up!

Mindstrong Calls it Quits, Offloads Tech to SonderMind

Posted on by Jason Barry

Mindstrong might have flown a little too close to the sun with its promise of detecting early signs of mental illness through smartphone data, and it’s now shuttering operations after selling off its core technology to former competitor SonderMind.

Once a venture capital darling, Mindstrong wooed investors on the idea of an app that could serve as a “smoke alarm” for mental health issues by scanning smartphones for “digital biomarkers” such as erratic scrolling and typing errors.

That turned out to be a tall order. A recent investigation by STAT revealed that investors were leaning on Mindstrong to commercialize the technology too soon, and that the company lost momentum after the departure of key founders.

  • As Mindstrong’s core technology struggled to get up to speed, the company pivoted to providing virtual therapy with a focus on serious mental illness.
  • That road was equally rocky, causing Mindstrong to lay off a majority of its employees and stop treating patients earlier this year.

Enter SonderMind, a full-service virtual therapy platform that leverages machine learning to match patients with an ideal therapist for in-person or virtual appointments.

  • Mindstrong’s purpose-built EHR and digital biomarker tech will help SonderMind offer more specialized care journeys and improve its ability to treat patients with serious mental illness.
  • The move comes just months after SonderMind acquired Total Brain to enhance its user-guided wellness tools, and less than two years after it acquired Qntfy to unlock more value from its patient and provider data.

The Takeaway

Mental health remains one of the hottest corners of the digital health market, but outside of a few notable examples like the Headspace-Ginger merger, we haven’t seen a huge wave of M&A as valuations come back down to Earth. SonderMind now has a chance to be the next success story, assuming it can integrate its acquisitions into a cohesive offering for everything from wellness exercises to psychiatric care.

Nuance Unveils GPT-4 Enabled DAX Express

Posted on by Jason Barry

Generative AI is making its biggest healthcare splash yet after Microsoft-owned Nuance Communications unveiled DAX Express with GPT-4 integration.

Dragon Ambient eXperience (DAX) Express creates clinical note drafts from patient-provider conversations in a matter of seconds by eliminating the need for a human quality checker before clinicians can review and upload the notes to the EHR.

DAX Express is the first clinical documentation application to combine conversational and ambient AI with OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, but its main goal remains the same as its predecessor: reduce administrative burden so providers have more time to focus on patients.

  • Following a nearly $20B acquisition in 2022, Nuance’s latest solution is also fully backed by Microsoft’s enterprise resources and the scale of the Azure cloud.
  • That’s not to mention Microsoft’s recent $10B investment in OpenAI, which it’s clearly trying to monetize sooner rather than later. Starting this summer, DAX Express will be open for early access to all providers using DAX or Dragon Medical One.

When we spoke to Nuance Chief Strategy Officer Peter Durlach a few weeks ago about an older AI model that some readers might still remember – ChatGPT – he raised some good questions about AI’s future in healthcare.

  • How do these models fit into regulatory guidelines?
  • What’s the indication for use?
  • Can you explain the black box?
  • How will the FDA operate in the middle of this?

With how fast AI is moving, these questions are going to be front and center in discussions with everyone from patients to regulators. In the last month alone, we’ve seen Doximity leverage similar tech in its DocsGPT tool that lets providers quickly fax prior authorizations, and Google announced that its Med-PaLM 2 model is consistently passing medical exams at an expert level.

The Takeaway

It’s hard to believe that Nuance DAX Express is considered the “early stages” of generative AI given how transformative these models are right out of the gates. There’s already a tsunami of startups working on new AI-enabled healthcare products, but the fact that Nuance’s 550k physician user base is about to have access to DAX Express highlights how powerful platform and distribution advantages are going to be on a level playing field where everyone has access to similar magic on the backend.

Zus Health Lands $40M, Elation Partnership

Posted on by Jason Barry

Zus Health is the latest company to set off on a quest for the Holy Grail of healthcare – a universal patient record – and it just landed a $40M venture round to help it in its pursuit.

Founded in 2021 by healthcare veteran Jonathan Bush, Zus originally planned on creating a “Build-a-Bear for EMR, patient relationship management, and CRM” by offering a shared data record and software development kit that other companies could use to build their own tools.

That mission appears to be alive and well, but Zus is also looking to grow into a new role as “the common information ground” that brings comprehensive patient information to the point of care.

The Zus platform centers around the Zus Aggregated Profile (ZAP), a unified view of a patient’s healthcare info aggregated from EHRs, labs, claims networks, and other sources.

  • This network provides access to data across 70K+ provider sites and 270M+ patients, which Zus then distills into a user-friendly patient profile through FHIR-normalization, deduplication, and summarization.
  • The first time a provider uses Zus to “get up to speed” on a patient, Zus charges $4 to pull the data and plug it into the EHR. Zus then charges a monthly fee for providers to continue receiving updates on that patient.

Zus works with EHR companies that offer the ZAP as an upgrade to their provider customers in exchange for a share in the resulting revenue.

  • Alongside the funding news, Zus announced a partnership with Elation Health to bring the ZAP to its EHR that currently supports over 12M patients.
  • The Elation announcement follows similar partnerships with Healthie and Canvas, which both saw 95%+ of their providers included in the first rollout upgrade to Zus after a preview of the service.

The Takeaway
More than a few companies have been tempted by the prospect of bringing comprehensive patient information to the point of care, and it hasn’t exactly worked out optimally for any of them. That said, with the 21st Century Cures Act facilitating more health data sharing and a pandemic that’s pulled digital health innovation forward in a drastic way, there’s a case to be made that the timing’s never been better. It’s a long road to get from Build-a-Bear for Healthcare to Universal Patient Record, but the upside is massive if Zus can pull it off.

Medicare Advantage Plans Using AI to Deny Care

Posted on by Jason Barry

It’s a tough week to be working PR at Medicare Advantage plans after STAT put out an in-depth investigation revealing that payors are using  “unregulated predictive algorithms under the guise of scientific rigor” to cut off care for seniors.

Hit piece might be too aggressive of a label, but let’s just say it’s a strongly worded report that makes some MA players look very, very bad.

The booming popularity of Medicare Advantage has turned it into a cornerstone of many payor strategies. According to the report, these payors are now using AI to pinpoint when they can plausibly begin cutting off payments for treatment.

  • These algorithms have begun driving denials to new heights, delaying treatment of seriously ill seniors and setting off heated disputes between doctors and payors.
  • If patients or their physicians disagree with a denial, they’re funneled into an endurance race with payors through a lengthy appeal process.
  • As Calvary Hospital COO Chris Comfort described it, “We take patients who are going to die of their diseases within a 3 month period of time, and we force them into a denial and appeals process that lasts up to 2.5 years. So what happens is the appeal outlasts the beneficiary.”

An entirely new industry has sprung up to help payors predict everything from the providers patients might see to the minimum number of hours they’ll have to stay in a nursing home.

  • These AI-generated predictions have become so ingrained in MA that most payors have started bringing these capabilities in-house. Elevance, Cigna, and CVS Health have all made acquisitions in the space.
  • David Lipschutz at The Center for Medicare Advocacy told STAT that “while the firms say [the algorithm] is suggestive, it ends up being a hard-and-fast rule. There’s no deviation from it… no accounting for situations in which a person could use more care.”

One of the largest and most controversial companies supplying these predictions is NaviHealth, now owned by UnitedHealth Group, and STAT spent the second half of the report basically using them as a punching bag.

  • NaviHealth was founded by Tom Scully, the former head of CMS who played a pivotal role in creating the Medicare Advantage program under the Bush administration.
  • You’ll have to head over to the full report for the tear-jerking patient stories, but long story short Scully sold NaviHealth to Cardinal Health for $410M in 2015, then ownership bounced between different PE firms until it landed at United. Denials went up every step of the way, and now we have a STAT investigation.

The Takeaway

“The black box of the AI has become a blanket excuse for denials,” and nobody wants a canned response about a proprietary algorithm when they ask why they’re being kicked out of a nursing home. Federal officials have already proposed new rules that say MA payors can’t deny coverage “based on internal, proprietary, or external clinical criteria not found in traditional Medicare coverage policies,” and STAT just added more fuel to the industry’s push for change.

Transcarent Acquires 98point6 Care Delivery Assets

Posted on by Jason Barry

Employer-focused care platform Transcarent is acquiring 98point6’s entire care delivery division in a transaction that’s reportedly valued at the 2023 Digital Health Number of the Year: $100M.

If you’re unfamiliar with Transcarent, the company is helmed by Glen Tullman, a CEO who knows how to get a deal done. Tullman is the former founder of Livongo and guided it through Teladoc’s $18.5B acquisition in 2020.

Transcarent’s virtual platform lets patients book virtual visits, schedule in-home care, meet with therapists, and manage their prescriptions all within the same solution.

  • 98point6 technology will now power the front-end chat that Transcarent’s been using third-parties to handle. 98point6 also doubles Transcarent’s customer base to over 200 employers with a combined 4M employees. That’s a big jump from the 1M employees Transcarent currently supports.
  • Although Transcarent has historically depended on contracted clinicians, it will now gain 98point6’s ~150 physicians, as well as aforementioned employer clients such as Boeing, Costco, and Chipotle.

At its core, the acquisition is about obtaining 98point6’s head start on AI, and bringing Transcarent’s digital front door in-house. Tullman told MedCityNews he was looking for “full control of the front-end process, because how you start determines where you end up… You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression.”

  • What’s next for 98point6? First, a rebranding to 98point6 Technologies. Second, it will stop providing patient care and focus exclusively on licensing its software to health systems, and Washington-based MultiCare has already signed on as its first customer.
  • The pivot allows 98point6 to push toward pure play SaaS margins by licensing its chatbot and engagement suite while it lets hospitals use their own doctors and nurses to take over the actual appointments.

The Takeaway
Transcarent is aiming to simplify the process of finding and receiving care, and 98point6’s front-end chat and affiliated provider group will help it do just that. Simplicity is the value proposition, and it seems like a good one to bring to an employer healthcare market where complexity is the enemy.

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