Digital health veteran Sean Elwell on the one-cure-fits-all approach of some startups.

Digital Health

Headspace Launches Unified Mental Health Platform

Headspace Health just took a massive step forward in delivering on the promise of last year’s $3B merger with Ginger, rolling out a new unified product experience that combines the services of both companies into a comprehensive mental health platform.

The integrated experience brings together Headspace’s meditation and mindfulness offerings with Ginger’s on-demand coaching, therapy, and psychiatry solutions – all within the Headspace app.

The Headspace Health overhaul is set to debut in January 2023, which should be welcome news to the employers and employees that have been calling for more mental health support as the pandemic drags on.

For employees, the new experience provides seamless navigation between Headpace’s wellness content and Ginger’s clinical services.

• An onboarding survey helps Headspace get to know its members and create personalized care plans, then ongoing check-ins help scale the level of support to individual needs.

• A sample program might include meditation, a mindfulness walk, and a Sleepcast, with easy escalation to text-based behavioral health coaching or therapy if warranted.

For employers, the single platform approach is designed to eliminate administrative burden, while providing high-level insights for understanding their employees’ mental health needs.

• Employers can access joint enrollment and engagement trends, such as the percent of members using both Headspace and Ginger simultaneously, as well as aggregate outcomes data for each product.

• An included Employee Assistance Program bolts on work-life services, critical incident support, workplace training, and manager consultations.

The Takeaway
As we enter the fourth year of the pandemic, most employers are making mental healthcare a top strategic priority, but they’re also trying to avoid cobbling together point solutions to make it happen. The new Headspace Health experience sets out to be the end-to-end solution employers are calling for, although their biggest competitor seems to have gotten the same memo. Headspace will be up against Calm’s new clinical mental health product that was announced last month.

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The Wire

• Privia + Novant: Privia’s health system momentum is picking up steam following a new strategic partnership with Novant Health Enterprises to launch a clinically integrated network called Privia Medical Group – North Carolina. Providers joining the network will be given access to the Privia Platform, which includes a suite of tools for improving their practices as they make the leap to value-based care. The news marks Privia’s third health system partnership and ninth state with operations.

• Healthcare Cost Transparency: An AKASA survey found that patients are deterred from seeking healthcare for themselves if they don’t have information about the cost, but they’re less likely to forgo care for their dependents. Among 2k respondents, 35% said they’d be deterred from seeking care for themselves without cost information, but only 18% would be deterred from seeking care for a dependent.

• Navina Series B: Navina doubled its total funding with a $22M Series B raise as it looks to help primary care physicians make sense of the rapidly increasing amounts of data they deal with on a daily basis. Navina transforms EHR data into Patient Portraits designed to give clinicians immediate comprehension of a patient’s health record while informing them of potentially missed diagnoses.

• One Medical Filing: One Medical just released its latest financials as it awaits the approval of Amazon’s $3.9B acquisition, and one of the metrics shared in the filing raised a lot of eyebrows: the 5% of its members who are under capitated contracts accounted for 51% of its total revenue. One Medical’s entrance into risk-based contracting came roughly a year ago after its acquisition of Iora Health, with the outsized revenue contribution showing how lucrative capitated Medicare programs can be for managed care organizations.

• Who Uses Wearables: The patients who need wearables the most appear to use them the least, according to a recent analysis from the Cardiovascular Data Science Lab at Yale. Researchers found that people with cardiovascular disease were far less likely to use wearables than the general population (18% vs. 29%), while more education, higher income, and younger age were all linked to greater use.

• Midi Health Seed Funding: Virtual menopause clinic Midi Health announced $14M in seed funding to expand its services beyond California, hire more team members, and enter new partnerships. Midi works with major payors to bring midlife care to women over the age of 40, ranging from lifestyle coaching to medications for patients who are impacted by hormonal changes.

• Virtual Primary Care Satisfaction: Elevance published a new survey revealing that 94% of US adults who have used virtual primary care were satisfied with their experience, while 79% reported that it helped them take charge of their health. Of the 5k respondents, 68% had never used virtual primary care services, but of those who had, 84% found it “very useful during the pandemic,” citing convenience and accessibility as the top reasons.

• Valera Raises $44.5M: Valera Health scored $44.5M in growth funding to develop its platform that connects virtual care teams to high-acuity patients with serious mental illness. Valera’s team-based model includes licensed therapists, nurse practitioners, case managers, and psychiatrists who partner closely with health systems and health plans to deliver comprehensive clinical care to their patients and members.

• EHR Clinical Decision Support: A JAMA study found that EHR-based clinical decision support improves the “contextualization of care,” increasing the likelihood that physicians address relevant patient life challenges in their care plan. The study included 452 patient encounters, revealing that the use of EHR CDS tools significantly increased the contextualization of the care plan (OR: 2.67), although they didn’t improve patient outcomes compared to standard care.

• Carta Closes $20M: Clinical data solutions startup Carta Healthcare closed a $20M Series B round (total funding now $37.3M) to scale its operations beyond the 20 health systems it currently works with. Carta’s AI-driven solutions help organizations collect and analyze their clinical data to reduce the cost of labor associated with manual data abstraction processes.

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