Tag: digital health

Rock Health Q1 2025 Funding Recap, Late-Stage is Back

Posted on by Jason Barry

In a first quarter packed with uncertainty and policy shifts, digital health didn’t skip a beat.

Rock Health’s Q1 Digital Health Market Update counted $3B in venture funding across 122 rounds (up from $2.7B in Q1 2024), and it sounds like there’s finally some optimism in the air again.

Early-stage startups dominated the deal count, with Seed, Series A, and Series B raises comprising 83% of labeled rounds in Q1 (in line with 86% last year).

  • Those included some extra-large investments like Achira’s $33M Seed, Open Evidence’s $75M Series A, and Hippocratic AI’s $141M Series B.

The bigger story was the triumphant return of late-stage mega-rounds, headlined by Innovaccer’s $275M Series F and Abridge’s $250M Series D.

  • While Q1 only clocked five raises that were Series D or later, this cohort lifted the quarter’s median Series D+ round size to $105M – almost double the $55M median Series D+ size seen in 2024.

Success in this climate requires “leapfrogging.” Rock health devoted a large section of the report to its four strategies for leapfrogging over market shifts using their unique circumstances.

  • Tapestry Weaving – using M&A to integrate new features and offerings into your capability mix. Of the 46 M&A deals tracked in Q1, 67% involved digital health startups acquiring other digital health startups, up from 53% across 2024.
  • Modular Tech Stacks – designing flexible infrastructure that reduces dependencies and allows for new integrations. Lumeris’ newly introduced Tom AI platform is a perfect example, leveraging capabilities of 60+ LLMs depending on use case.
  • Platforms and Channel Partners – building platforms that can plug in channel partners and key experiences. Q1 was brimming with good examples, including Eli Lilly bringing GLP-1 partners onto Lilly Direct and Teladoc expanding its Connected Care Program.
  • Engaging Disruptors – embracing solutions that challenge the status quo. Rock Health highlights Labcorp’s participation in Teal Health’s $10M raise, which proactively aligned it with an in-home cervical cancer screening startup that’s disrupting traditional pap tests.

The Takeaway

Following a year of valuation corrections and down-rounds, digital health VCs are showing signs of life, but we’ll have to wait until Rock Health’s next report to see if the momentum can stand up to a trade war.

DispatchHealth Acquires Hospital-at-Home Provider Medically Home

Posted on by Jason Barry

DispatchHealth is acquiring fellow hospital-at-home provider Medically Home to give more patients access to their preferred hospital bed: the one they already have at home.

DispatchHealth delivers full-service high-acuity care to patients across the country by sending clinicians directly to the patient’s own bedside.

  • The company’s tech platform supports diagnostics and treatment, as well as care coordination with health systems and payors.
  • Since being founded in 2013, Dispatch has treated over 1.2M people in 20 states, reportedly resulting in 58% ED avoidance and a 98% patient satisfaction rating.

Medically Home has a similar value proposition, with technology, logistics, and support services that “are unmatched in making hospital-level care possible outside of a hospital’s four walls.”

  • It also boasts an impressive list of health system investors like Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, and Kaiser Permanente.
  • The financial terms of the agreement weren’t disclosed, but Medically Home appears set to be folded into DispatchHealth when the acquisition closes mid-year 2025.

The combined company – AKA DispatchHealth – will provide in-home care across 50 major metropolitan areas through partnerships with nearly 40 health systems.

  • The move brings both companies’ tech and clinical expertise under one roof, which is expected to open up over 62k bed days and reduce total cost of care by up to 30% over a 30-day period (unclear how much of that is offloading work to family members).
  • The merger also reflects a growing trend toward consolidation in this space, where scale is crucial for reaching sustainable growth, even if it means joining forces to get there.

The clock is ticking. The acquisition arrives as the future of the federal hospital-at-home program hangs in limbo. Congress extended the program just a jew weeks ago, but only for another six months.

The Takeaway

The U.S. population isn’t getting any younger, and aging patients have been vocal about preferring care from the comfort of their own homes. In that context, DispatchHealth’s acquisition of Medically Home makes a lot of sense, and a successful merger could support the case for a long-term extension when the current hospital-at-home waiver expires in September.

Dr. Oz Sheds Light on Potential Priorities at CMS

Posted on by Jason Barry

Dr. Mehmet Oz appears to have passed his Senate testimony with flying colors, and the surgeon-turned-TV-personality’s confirmation as CMS administrator seems all but locked in.

The nearly three hour testimony wandered through a range of topics with a direct impact on digital health, giving us a first look at what might change – or get axed – in the years ahead.

  • Prior auth topped the hit list. The most concrete policy idea that Oz offered was limiting the number of procedures subject to prior auth in Medicare Advantage to 1,000, a steep reduction from ~15,000 today. Oz said the “pre-approval process is expensive and wastes time,” especially when we have AI that can “pretty quickly adjudicate whether you should have to wait even a day to have the medication that will get you out of pain.”
  • AI was a major theme throughout the testimony. Oz plans to use AI to help doctors “optimize care” and focus on their patients, making several references to its ability to augment treatments and cut down on paperwork. He also said “we should be using AI within the agency to identify [fraud] early enough so that we can prevent it.”
  • Medicare Advantage was another big focal point. Oz cited MedPAC research showing that MA is more expensive than traditional Medicare, but attributed much of the cost to upcoding from payors. He promised to hit the problem head-on with an AI hammer.
  • Medicaid was a mixed bag. While Oz said he fully supports the program, he also agreed that spending has gone off the rails since the ACA, and was in favor of implementing work requirements. Oz sidestepped questions about potential cuts by saying “the way you protect Medicaid is by making sure that it’s viable at every level,” which includes having enough practitioners, compensating them fairly, and improving patient access.

The Takeaway

It’s hard to take the other side when a charismatic doctor vows to fix a broken healthcare system, but it’s also tough to tell the difference between empty promises and real reform until action backs it up. Part of that will have to wait until the actual confirmation, but as Oz put it, “part of this is just recognizing there is a new sheriff in town.”

HIMSS 2025 Recap, Launches, and Major Announcements

Posted on by Jason Barry

It’s the final day of HIMSS 2025 in Las Vegas, and although the exhibitors are still diligently manning their stations, most of the announcement cards have already been dealt and it’s time to round up the biggest stories from the show.

HIMSS centered around the familiar themes of digital transformation, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and workforce development, but the single biggest trend landed at the intersection of all four: agentic AI.

The industry is embracing AI agents everywhere from the bedside to the contact center, and it was amazing to see how quickly last year’s hallucination worries gave way to what feels like a pedal-to-the-metal approach to new AI rollouts. 

You would have been hard pressed to find a dozen booths in the exhibit hall that didn’t mention AI, and the same could be said about the announcements from the show.

HIMSS 2025 major announcements, launches, and partnerships:

  • 1upHealth debuted the latest release of its 1up Platform, which introduces a modern lakehouse architecture designed to scale with healthcare’s growing data needs and improve control over real-time management and analytics. Check out our interview with CEO Andrew Boyd for the full overview.
  • Arcadia is bringing its longitudinal patient data to League’s CX platform to let healthcare orgs deliver individualized health recommendations and activate consumer engagement through AI and behavioral science. CEO Michael Meucci shares all the details.
  • eClinicalWorks can now connect and exchange data with PointClickCare applications in long-term and post-acute care settings to support remote and bedside physician encounters.
  • Elsevier expanded its flagship ClinicalKey AI clinical decision support solution through new workflow integrations with Epic and DrFirst’s iPrescribe platform, not to mention the launch of a dedicated mobile app.
  • Google Cloud rolled out new GenAI capabilities in Vertex AI Search for healthcare, including a multimodal search feature called Visual Q&A that ingests tables, charts, and diagrams to build a more comprehensive view of patient health.
  • InterSystems debuted its IntelliCare AI-powered EHR that includes an AI assistant to enable natural language commands, automatic patient history summarization, real-time note generation, and prepopulated billing codes.
  • Kontakt.io bolstered its Responsive Care Operations platform with Kio Agents, which help prioritize day-to-day management of patient flow, assets, and nurse staff while forecasting potential bottlenecks and dynamically redistributing resources in real-time.
  • Medallion enhanced its automated credentialing and compliance capabilities to support Joint Commission standards with electronic privileging workflow management and automated submission of privileging applications to partner hospitals.
  • Microsoft took the lid off Dragon Copilot, an AI assistant that combines the natural language voice dictation of Dragon Medical One with the ambient listening capabilities of DAX Copilot to support everything from documentation and after-visit summaries to referral letters and clinical evidence summarization.
  • Notable released the next generation of its Flow Builder, which rounds out the solution with a new Builder Assistant for AI-powered workflow creation, intuitive visualizations of data flowing through the automations, and granular role-based access controls.
  • Rush University System for Health expanded its partnership with Suki and will be deploying the AI clinical documentation assistant system-wide, allowing clinicians across 28 specialties to generate patient summaries and simplify coding.
  • RevSpring unveiled SeatMate, an AI assistant that guides customer service reps with intelligent scripting, infuses every conversation with patient insights, and enhances self-service through conversational chat capabilities.
  • Salesforce debuted Agentforce for Health, a library of pre-built agent skills to streamline tasks like benefits verification, clinical trial recruitment, provider search & scheduling, care coordination, and customer service.
  • Surescripts released its 2024 Annual Impact Report, highlighting its Touchless Prior Authorization capabilities that helped patients get medications faster by reducing the average time to approve a prior auth from over an hour to just 34 seconds.
  • symplr launched the first of many AI solutions coming to its symplr Operations Platform, a symplrAI Evidence Analysis chatbot designed to accelerate clinical research and streamline the medical device and technology decision-making process for health plans.
  • Talkdesk revealed its AI Agents for Healthcare, which not only automate common patient and member inquiries, but can also schedule appointments, verify benefits or prior auths, and manage prescription refills in any language.
  • TigerConnect announced the general availability of its TigerConnect Pre-Hospital solution that streamlines a wide range of EMS, ED, and transfer workflows to improve patient throughput and outcomes (think better prep for patient arrival and digitized transfer coordination).
  • Withings published an analysis of 3.4M smart scale users, finding that 38% of people classified as “overweight” and 2% classified as “normal” on the BMI scale actually have an unhealthy amount of fat – based on their body composition analysis – and should seek further screenings (6% of those with an “obese” BMI actually had a healthy body composition and should be considered “healthy”).
  • Wolters Kluwer Health is integrating UpToDate with Microsoft Copilot Studio to deliver patient-specific, evidence-based medical content through Microsoft Dragon Copilot ambient listening and other point of care workflows.
  • Zoom announced the public beta of Zoom Workplace for Clinicians, building on its partnership with Suki to automatically generate visit notes for both virtual and in-person appointments by simply clicking on the ‘Clinical Notes’ icon in the Zoom Workplace app.

We hope that everyone had an awesome time if you made it to Vegas, 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.

CB Insights 2024 Digital Health 50

Posted on by Jason Barry

CB Insights unveiled its annual Digital Health 50 rankings of the most promising private digital health startups, and this year’s list certainly included many of the industry’s brightest stars.

Here’s the methodology / our disclaimer: The final cut was selected from a pool of 10k+ applicants based on “proprietary metrics” – Commercial Maturity and Mosaic Scores – along with data on partnerships, growth stats, and market adoption. (CB Insights is of course happy to share this data with its customers, but promises that being one of them doesn’t land you a spot on the list.)

With that out of the way, here’s a look at the Digital Health 50 (high-res version):

CB Digital Health 50

It’s tough to compare this list to last year’s given the ever-evolving categories and methodology, but CB Insights called out four key themes for the latest cohort:

  • AI is becoming foundational infrastructure: 36 of the 50 companies are building AI products, ranging from operational automation high-flyers like Laguna to specialized healthcare LLMs like Hippocratic AI. No surprises here.
  • Workflow efficiency is a key priority: 19 of the companies are streamlining administrative or clinical tasks, spanning document processing startups (Tennr) to ambient AI heavyweights (Abridge). These players seem like an obvious inclusion, but the same could be said last year when ambient AI was nowhere to be found.
  • Diagnostic innovations dominate: 11 companies comprised this year’s largest category, developing next-gen diagnostics across imaging (Airs Medical), pathology (Proscia), and non-invasive diagnostics (Alimetry). Diagnostics was in a three-way tie with Clinical Intelligence and Virtual Care, although the categories have some hazy boundaries. 
  • More specialized platforms: Virtual and hybrid care representation doubled in this year’s cohort, reflecting the shift from general telemedicine toward condition-specific virtual models in areas like mental health (Talkiatry) and cancer care (Resilience).

The Takeaway

Lists like these never fail to get pushback because of the methodology or glaring exclusions, but this year’s cohort feels pretty well aligned with the high momentum names that keep popping up in our own coverage. Major congrats to the companies that were included.

PHTI Delivers Mixed Review on Digital Hypertension Tools

Posted on by Jason Barry

Digital hypertension management solutions received a mixed report card from the Peterson Health Technology Institute’s latest evaluation, which found significant differences in performance depending on the treatment approach.

The 71-page report assessed clinical and economic evidence across three solution types:

  • Blood Pressure Monitoring – extend hypertension care beyond in-person visits using home monitoring devices that stream data back to providers. Ex. AMC Health, Health Recovery Solutions, VitalSight (Omron)
  • Medication Management – employ dedicated virtual care teams to coordinate medication adjustments as a supplement to the patients’ main primary care team. Ex. Cadence, Ochsner Digital Medicine, Story Health
  • Behavior Change – deliver educational content, alerts, reminders, and virtual interactions with coaches or care teams to improve hypertension self-management. Ex. Dario, Hello Heart, Lark, Omada, Teladoc (Livongo).

PHTI’s signature chart delivers a great summary of the findings:

The analysis found that all approaches across all payor types increase total healthcare spending over a three-year time horizon, because the cost of the solutions exceeds the savings from improved clinical outcomes.

The good news – at least for Medication Management and Behavior Change solutions – was that improvements in blood pressure over a 10-year window reduced patients’ risk of cardiovascular disease and prevented enough deaths to justify the cost.

  • PHTI found that only Medication Management solutions demonstrated significant blood pressure reductions compared to usual care, and recommended that this is the “most pressing area of integration” for most practice settings.
  • BP Monitoring showed “slightly greater, but not clinically meaningful declines,” but failed to breakeven at current RPM reimbursement levels.
  • Behavior Change approaches produced only “limited incremental declines,” which doesn’t support broad adoption for most patients but could still play a role for underserved populations with difficult access to usual care. 

Those findings naturally led to pushback from some of the companies named in the report. 

  • Omada said that the analysis “inadequately groups companies with very different offerings” and “narrowly focuses on select clinical metrics,” while underweighting user experience and patient-reported outcomes. 
  • PHTI responded to the critics by saying that “patients expect that clinically-focused digital solutions are improving their health. We can talk about competing on user experience… but we need to prove that they work.”

The Takeaway

There’s a high bar for digital solutions that need to justify their cost above standard care, and PHTI just raised that bar even higher for hypertension management. Not all approaches are created equal, and while some companies might not agree with PHTI’s findings, reports like these are a maturity milestone for digital health as a whole.

Huma Acquires eConsult, Launches Huma Workspace for Health Systems

Posted on by Jason Barry

Huma isn’t wasting any time putting its $60M of Series D funding to work, acquiring digital triage and consultation platform eConsult less than a few months after closing the round.

The move aligns with Huma’s vision of becoming the “Shopify for Digital Health” by equipping provider orgs and pharma companies with modular platforms / software development kits for a wide range of use cases.

  • The Huma Cloud Platform is a no-code app builder that enables companies to spin up their own solutions using a combination of GenAI prompts and pre-built templates.
  • The platform includes a library of modules and device connectivity tools for any therapeutic area, APIs and integration capabilities, and a marketplace that creates a flywheel of new features from existing users.

eConsult’s intelligent triage platform adds an entrypoint to Huma’s ecosystem by guiding patients through a series of medical questions before determining an appropriate pathway.

  • From there, eConsult gives physicians a summary of any flags or considerations to review, then connects them to a “comprehensive array of digital health solutions” such as appointment booking, screening tools, or virtual consults.

Those capabilities strengthen the foundation of Huma Workspace for Health Systems, which was announced alongside the acquisition to provide seamless access to Huma’s library of pre-built modules and solution marketplace. Those support:

  • Check-in and Triage: Captures patient symptoms and clinical history to prioritize patients with immediate needs and optimize intake.
  • Communication Suite: Equips clinicians with tools to manage patients remotely, such as a full messaging suite, video, scheduling, and EHR integration.
  • Remote Patient Monitoring: Allows hospitals to quickly scale applications for diabetes, hypertension, CKD, and other conditions.
  • Proactive Engagement: Automates direct patient communication for screening, education, and engagement campaigns across entire populations.

Put it all together, and Huma is assembling the pieces to an end-to-end platform for delivering virtual care at scale, with over 3,000 hospitals and clinics already using it to power projects for nearly two million active users.

The Takeaway

End-to-end digital health platforms aren’t built in a day, and the acquisition of eConsult confirms that Huma isn’t afraid of using M&A to speed up the process. Huma is full-speed-ahead with adding new capabilities and growing its footprint, so it wouldn’t be surprising if more acquisitions were right around the corner.

2024 Trends Shaping the Health Economy

Posted on by Jason Barry

Trilliant Health just released its 2024 Trends Shaping the Health Economy Report, delivering a unique perspective on the healthcare market through the lens of supply and demand.

The fourth edition of the report builds on the core findings from the previous three:

  • 2021: Healthcare is a negative-sum game.
  • 2022: Every part of the health economy will be impacted by reduced yield.
  • 2023: The victors in healthcare’s negative-sum game will be those who deliver value.

This year’s 164 page analysis is organized into eight sections, each examining a significant macro trend and supported by a wide collection of data-driven stories:

  • 1) The healthcare system is disproportionately expensive. Despite spending nearly 2X more on healthcare than peer countries, utilization has remained largely unchanged, while increasing 7% in peer countries since 2000. U.S. outcomes are also far worse. (Page 11 Chart)
  • 2) Health status continues to decline. We’re seeing higher volumes of early onset cancers in patients under age 45 for breast (+6.6%), colon (+10.0%), and kidney (+2.1%) between 2018 and 2023. (Page 22 Chart)
  • 3) Government regulation is failing to produce value. This one’s a mixed bag. Regulating cigarettes decreased usage by 30%, but mandated reporting of quality measures hasn’t yielded enough improvement to offset the cost of reporting. (Page 46 Chart)
  • 4) The value of tech advancements is uncertain. Since 2018, multiple AI CPT codes have been introduced, but utilization remains infrequent and concentrated among cardiac conditions such as coronary artery disease and ECG cardiac dysfunction. (Page 77 Chart)
  • 5) Supply constraints are correlated with inadequate yield. The decrease in practicing physicians from 2019 to 2023 resulted in a -0.9% workforce reduction. Notably, 31.3% of physicians changed practice location over that time period. (Page 89 Chart)
  • 6) Forced consumerism has fostered fragmentation. Over 14% of patients with commercial coverage go out-of-network for behavioral health services, versus just 2% for physical care. (Page 111 Chart)
  • 7) Lower-cost care settings can offer better value. New treatment paradigms often start in the hospital but shift to new settings over time (due to new tools, reimbursement reform). How long will that continue? (Page 125 Chart)
  • 8) Employers are better equipped to demand value. Employers have historically been relatively passive in managing healthcare costs., but new transparency requirements compel them to change that. (Page 148 Chart)

The Takeaway

Trilliant’s report showcases the fact that the inputs of the U.S. healthcare system, as measured by cost, exceed the outputs, as measured by the actual value received by Americans. As Trilliant’s Head of Research Sanjula Jain puts it, “every stakeholder can – and must – deliver more value to their customers.”

Sync Fast and Solve Things

Posted on by Jason Barry

The “move fast and break things” motto might work wonders with consumer products, but a new editorial in npj Digital Medicine makes a compelling case that healthcare needs to flip that paradigm on its head and co-create with clinicians to “sync fast and solve things.”

The editorial argues that healthcare practitioners (HCPs) should play an active role in driving digital health innovation, as opposed to being passively “consulted” so that developers can tout the fact that their product is backed by clinicians.

  • The breakneck pace of digital innovation in the wake of the pandemic has outpaced the inclusion of HCPs in the co-creation of new solutions, leading to a fight-or-flight response where clinicians are reluctant to adopt said solutions to defend their traditional responsibilities. Separate research seems to back that up.
  • If new tools lack product insight and buy-in from HCPs, they’re significantly more likely to be doomed to clinical irrelevance, as showcased by a recent analysis that found 44% of digital health companies have a clinical robustness score of 0 out of 10.

Although it isn’t an earth-shattering revelation that HCPs have a solid grasp on the exact workflows needed to inform clinically relevant solutions, the authors offer three considerations for shifting from “passive” to “active” co-creation.

  • First, financial incentives alone aren’t enough to ensure busy clinicians can engage in meaningful co-creation. The most important incentive that companies can offer clinicians is time, particularly by delivering a product that can optimize workflow efficiency or help deliver quicker treatments.
  • Second, the article stresses a need to embed digital health technologies in clinical curricula so that HCPs can learn about not just using these new tools, but also translating their experience into better-informed products.
  • Lastly, the authors lay out why there’s a role for regulators to mandate that HCPs participate in digital health innovation, and suggest that payors and legislators consider augmenting their approval processes by requiring HCPs be involved in the development of new solutions to serve as a proxy for their clinical safety and efficacy.

The Takeaway

Healthcare clearly isn’t the best sandbox to “move fast and break things,” but this article is an important reminder that “sync fast and solve things” shouldn’t mean trading clinician input for speed. While passive co-creation might help with the marketing materials, giving clinicians an active role in product development is the only way to ensure their experience is reflected in digital innovation.

The Dynamics Steering Healthcare in Q3 2024

Posted on by Jason Barry

It’s rare that a mid-year trend roundup qualifies as the biggest story of the week, but it’s also rare that they’re as stellar as the one that former HHS policy leader Paul Mango just released.

Mr. Mango served juicy takes on three of the biggest trends shaking up the industry:

Trend #1) Payor transformation has been full-speed-ahead as payors seek success in managing beneficiaries with chronic conditions by developing their own disease management platforms (not to mention new arcs of growth help justify their climbing P/E ratios).

  • Evernorth is now 80% of Cigna’s total revenue and a whopping 68% of its profit – mostly as the result of its Express Scripts acquisition in 2018. In the first half of the year, Evernorth grew 29% while Cigna as a whole grew 4%.
  • United was obviously an early mover into non-health plan assets, but Optum is now the key growth driver for the entire enterprise. United Healthcare remains Optum’s largest client (accounting for two-thirds of its revenue), but Optum now represents 25% of UNH’s total revenue and 49% of its profit (thanks in large part to OptumRx).

Trend #2) Provider tailwinds are adding up as several key performance measures improve simultaneously, including higher volume, increased acuity for inpatients, and lower labor costs. 

  • HCA just posted same store revenue up 10% due to a combination of the aforementioned tailwinds. ACA exchange volume was up 46% (total commercial volume rose 12.5%), and contract labor costs were down 25%.
  • Even Community Health Systems, whose performance has lagged other national hospital chain operators, saw a 3.2% increase in admissions and a 4.7% bump to same store revenue. CHS axed contract labor costs by 39% year over year.

Trend #3) Medicare Part D upheaval has been emanating from the Inflation Reduction Act, which will take full effect on the 1st of next year.

  • Mango boils down the IRA’s impact on Part D as such: it shifted the economic burden from beneficiaries who are heavy consumers of prescription drugs to the payors issuing the plans. 
  • Medicare Part D has been around for twenty years and during that time the combination of the beneficiary’s premium and government’s subsidy only rose to $64.28. “The impact of the IRA in one year’s time will cause that to rise to $179.45.

The Takeaway

Where is all this payor transformation heading, especially as providers increasingly view them as competitors? Will health systems sustain their momentum, or is recent performance a reflection of pent-up pandemic demand? All eyes will be on next quarter’s numbers to find out, and you’ll be the first to know when we see them.

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