Dr. Jay Parkinson’s (mostly) tongue-in-cheek tweet on the state of medtech startups.

Primary Care

TimeDoc Health Raises $48.5M for Virtual Care

Virtual care enablement company TimeDoc Health recently clocked in $48.5M in Series B funding to help physicians establish new remote care capabilities for a post-pandemic environment.

The latest financing pushes TimeDoc’s total raise to $58.2M, with recent demand for hybrid care and staff support creating a need to quickly expand the company’s growing roster of over 150 care coordinators.

• TimeDoc’s virtual care platform aims to lighten the burden of overworked physicians through three major service lines: chronic condition management, remote patient monitoring, and behavioral health integration for primary care.

• The company positions itself as a way to increase the bandwidth of primary care teams by allowing them to leverage additional personnel alongside its services as standalone solutions, or as supplements to existing approaches.

• Unlike other care coordinators that often go D2C, TimeDoc works directly with PCPs so that they can better manage their patients in between appointments, while also driving reimbursements for remote patient monitoring and chronic care management.

• The new funding will be put towards doubling the size of TimeDoc’s care coordination team and expanding its customer base beyond primary care practices towards more traditional health systems and accountable care organizations.

The Takeaway

TimeDoc is no stranger to the fact that the benefits of virtual care programs are best realized through long term engagement. By recognizing that care coordinators are instrumental in making this happen, then offering flexible services that tailor staff support to the needs of individual organizations, TimeDoc could gain an edge by truly meeting providers where they are instead of taking a one-size-fits-all approach.

Nuance’s Patient Engagement Must-Haves

Consumer demands are shifting, and they’re looking to get more out of their digital health technology. Nuance outlines the 5 must-haves for your patient engagement strategy here.

The Wire

• Fight CRC: Komodo Health and Fight Colorectal Cancer are expanding their partnership with the launch of the Fight CRC Provider Finder, a digital tool that leverages Komodo’s Heathcare Map of real-world medical encounters to allow patients to easily find nearby CRC specialists. The Provider Finder is a prime example of how de-identified clinical data can be turned into actionable next steps, allowing users to evaluate specialists based on factors such as patient volume, clinical trial experience, and whether they have a strong referral network to support interdisciplinary care pathways.

• Telehealth Frustrations: A new survey of 240 healthcare providers found that while the majority find telehealth convenient (69%), a large portion of them are facing telehealth-related frustrations with poor quality of care (58%), managing patient expectations (55%), and technical difficulties (50%). When asked what was needed to overcome these obstacles, respondents’ top answer was “more training for both patients and clinicians,” a phrase that finds itself in so many of these telehealth studies that it suggests there’s still a lot of work to be done even as in-person care returns to more normalized levels.

• Virtual Care Framework: Teladoc recently unveiled a Virtual Care Transformation Model (VCTM) to serve as a roadmap to help health plans and employers enhance their benefits by incorporating proactive virtual care. The framework can be applied to organizations of any size and industry to guide their strategies related to five core dimensions: plan design, program offerings, member experience, performance measurement and governance. The VCTM was reviewed by an “objective panel of experts” to be solution agnostic, although Teladoc’s solution suite is coincidentally well positioned to help implement recommendations from the report.

• Canopy Debut: Digital oncology company Canopy recently emerged from stealth with $13M in funding to help make its Intelligent Care Platform generally available to cancer treatment centers across the US. Canopy’s platform includes EHR-integrated tools to help cancer centers continuously engage their patients and streamline clinical workflows, allowing care teams to focus more resources on supporting patients as opposed to administrative tasks.

• Edison Digital Health: GE Healthcare announced the upcoming launch of its Edison Digital Health Platform, which will enable healthcare systems to have a vendor-agnostic platform to integrate apps into clinical workflows. The platform will aggregate data from multiple sources (e.g. EMRs, labs, imaging, genomics) so that providers can easily access relevant patient information in a unified view, allowing them to break out different patient cohorts for analytics.

• Rural Hospital Closures: New research from UNC found that rural hospital closures often negatively impact the local economy. Of the 1,759 nonmetro counties observed in the study, 109 experienced a hospital closure from 2001 to 2018, which decreased each county’s labor force by an average of 1.4%. The effects were strongest following a Medicare Prospective Payment System hospital closure, which decreased a county’s overall population size by an average of 1.1%.

• Provider Mental Health: President Joe Biden signed into law the Dr. Lorna Breen Health Care Provider Protection Act, which allocates over $140M in funding to programs for mental health treatment and suicide prevention for providers. Clinicians often forgo mental health treatment due to stigma in the medical community or fear of professional repercussions, and the new legislation establishes a national education initiative to encourage proper treatment for these concerns as well as a comprehensive study of frontline worker burnout during the pandemic.

• Embold Series B: Healthcare analytics company Embold Health recently raised a $23M Series B round (total $47.9M) to fund the national expansion of its platform that scores doctors on their performance while making the insights searchable for employers and consumers. Embold’s platform is designed to align cost and quality data across a range of specialties (cardiology, endocrinology, and primary care among others) to unlock new views of physician-level performance while making it easier to enable value-based care.

• Missed Appointments: A new study of pediatric patients at the Yale Pediatric Winchester Chest Tuberculosis Clinic found that telehealth use significantly reduced missed follow-up appointments. Between 2016 and 2019 when all follow-up visits were in-person, 16.9% of patients missed the appointments. This figure dropped to 5.8% in 2021 after optional telehealth was implemented for follow-ups (54.2% of patients took advantage). Surprisingly, patients living within 5 miles of the clinic accounted for the greatest share of missed appointments in 2021, which the researchers tie to the fact that telehealth was more favored by patients further from the clinic.

• Adobe Healthcare: Adobe recently launched its Experience Cloud for Healthcare, expanding its Experience Platform for personalized customer interactions with HIPAA-compliant features for providers, payors, and pharmacies. The Experience Cloud for Healthcare gives Adobe’s new health system customers such as CommonSpirit and Mercy Health the ability to leverage unified patient data from Adobe applications (e.g. Marketo Engage, Adobe Sign, Adobe Workfront) to provide contextually relevant experiences across multiple channels.