Amwell President and co-CEO Roy Schoenberg, MD

ICYMI: Our third newsletter – Cardiac Wire – launched last week. If you’re interested in cardiology and want the most important news curated and written with the typical “Wire” style, subscribe to get Cardiac Wire today.

Digital Health

CVS Health 2022 Health Care Insights Study

CVS Health’s 2022 Health Care Insights Study revealed that people are eager for the next chapter in their health journeys after multiple years of delayed care and lifestyle disruptions. CVS surveyed 1,000 US consumers and 400 providers about their ideal care delivery experience, finding that the pandemic unsurprisingly caused many people to redefine what healthcare should look like.

The full study has 14 slides of insights to catch you up on the latest sentiment towards everything from patient engagement to primary care (the 1-pager can get you pretty close), but the biggest highlights fell into two main buckets.

Patients are embracing a more holistic view of their health, with 54% saying that it’s important for care plans to involve diet, exercise, and counseling. The pandemic proved to be a catalyst for positive change, with 22% of consumers reporting that they care more about their health than ever before.

• As a result, patients are taking a more active role in managing their own healthcare, with 17% saying they’re now more likely to book their annual wellness checks.

• 83% of consumers said good patient-provider communication and continuous care coordination is important to their health, yet 88% of providers reported that they don’t have enough time for strong patient engagement.

Virtual care is helping providers keep pace with rising consumer expectations. Nearly all consumers (92%) value convenience above all other factors when selecting a primary care physician, while 59% said it’s important to their health to have access to telehealth services.

• 62% of consumers are likely to consider virtual visits if a physical exam isn’t needed, primarily due to convenience-related reasons such as not having to leave home (41%) or saving time (37%).

• 53% of providers said that adding telehealth resulted in more patient visits, and a majority also believe it made patients more likely to make appointments (93%) and keep them (88%).

The Takeaway

If the CVS Health report made one thing clear, it’s that patients are engaging in their care with a renewed sense of urgency towards holistic wellness and convenience. All signs are pointing towards “coordination” and “communication” being two of the biggest watchwords for post-pandemic healthcare, and that’s a strong demand signal for solutions that make them possible.

Empower Your Staff With connectRN

Learn how connectRN’s nurse-scheduling app can empower your shift managers and community leadership with a more predictable and sustainable approach to staffing, so they can focus on providing exceptional care.

Creating an Exceptional Engagement Experience

With a surge in experience‑oriented disruptors entering the healthcare industry, patient engagement is becoming a crucial competitive differentiator. Get your copy of Nuance’s guide to  delivering intelligent interactions and a better experience at every touchpoint.

The Wire

• Northwell Selects Google Cloud: New York’s largest health system Northwell Health has selected Google as its preferred cloud provider to make better use of AI for clinical decision support and predicting future capacity. Although AWS holds a leading 40% of the healthcare cloud market and just announced several high-profile agreements with Tufts Medicine and Geisinger, the Northwell partnership adds to Google’s recent momentum with provider-facing initiatives stemming from improvements to Care Studio and the launch of a Conditions feature geared towards giving physicians a unified view of patient data.

• SAFER and SMARTER: A recent viewpoint from health informatics leaders Dr. Kevin Johnson and Dr. William Stead calls for expanding use of the SAFER guides to support health systems and EHR vendors in enhancing safety and usability, while also pushing for the development of new SMARTER guides to protect the cognitive attention of physicians. The SMARTER Guidelines include 7 dimensions for advancing and measuring EHR cognitive support, including better synthesis of information to improve goal-oriented search and the translation of important user actions into documentation.

• Wysa Series B: Wysa closed a $20M Series B round (total funding now $29.4M) to expand its mental health chatbot into new clinical areas after receiving FDA Breakthrough Device Designation to use its technology with adults who have chronic musculoskeletal pain and related depression. Wysa’s chatbot guides users through CBT for mood-related issues while triaging patients towards higher levels of care or human coaching if more support is needed.

• Turquoise + Komodo: Turquoise Health is partnering with Komodo Health to help patients, providers, and payors better understand the full constellation of costs associated with healthcare encounters. Leveraging Komodo’s Healthcare Map of real-world data for 330M patients, Turquoise will expand its price transparency platform with new features that help identify patterns consistent with specific conditions and establish cost benchmarks associated with the complete patient journey.

• RPM Market Set to Double: Signify Research’s Global Remote Patient Monitoring Report indicates that RPM market revenues are set to double to $3B by 2026 as providers seek to offer more support to patients outside of the hospital and new reimbursement frameworks are implemented. Signify predicts that the shift to value-based-care and population health management models will be the market’s primary long-term drivers, and includes a useful breakdown of the fragmented RPM vendor ecosystem.

• Cuffless BP Monitoring: LiveMetric received FDA 510(k) clearance for its LiveOne cuffless blood pressure monitor that uses a sensor array over the radial artery to produce a waveform that can be used to determine systolic and diastolic blood pressure. Although LiveOne is currently intended for clinical settings, sensor-based blood pressure monitors are a holy grail for consumer-grade smartwatch manufacturers, and the LiveMetric’s new clearance makes it seem like the technology could be getting closer to a mass market debut.

• Adverse Event Improvement: A JAMA study of 244k adult patients hospitalized in 3k US facilities between 2010 to 2019 found significant decreases in annual adverse events for acute myocardial infarction (annual adjusted relative risk, 0.94), heart failure (0.95), pneumonia (0.94), and major surgical procedures (0.93). Although the study showed improving trends for harmful drug reactions and hospital-acquired infections, researchers noted that it also serves as an “unfortunate reminder that adverse events remain unacceptably frequent.”

• No Surprise Act: One in five Americans are still receiving surprise medical bills despite the federal ban that went into effect at the beginning of the year. That’s according to a Morning Consult survey of 2,210 US adults that found 21% have received a surprise bill from an out-of-network provider at an in-network facility (a third of which originated from lab work), and that 22% have had over $1,000 in unexpected medical costs so far this year.

• Canvas Funding: Canvas Medical raised $24M in Series B funding as it looks to build-out its full-stack ambulatory EHR and digital health developer platform that enables providers to launch new patient experiences and business models faster. In addition to the funding, Canvas announced that it received ONC certification to make its customers eligible for value-based reimbursement models in Medicare and Medicaid programs.

• HF Care Costs Billions: The US healthcare system spends $22B on heart failure-related medical services every year, driving the total annual expenditure for adults with heart failure to nearly $180B. UCLA researchers pooled patient data from 2009-2018 (n=250,820) and discovered that the US spends about 5-times more on individuals with heart failure than those without it ($28,950 vs. $5,727 annually). HF-related expenditure increased by 23% over the ten-year period, outpacing expenditure growth associated with other conditions like diabetes and cancer.

Streamlining Care With BrainInsight AI

Discover how Hyperfine’s BrainInsight AI tools are streamlining patient care by giving clinicians the quantitative biomarker information needed to reduce the burden of manual brain MRI measurements and decrease the time to diagnose and treat.