Caregility President and COO Mike Brandofino

Digital Health

HLTH 2022 Recap and Major Announcements

HLTH 2022 is officially a wrap, and we’re sending lots of good energy to the vendors currently breaking down their booths after spending a full week in Vegas.

Hats off to HLTH for putting together a stellar 9,000 person event with awesome attendees, a great speaking track, and the best lunch menu in the industry.

If you weren’t able to make it in person, we’ve got you covered with a roundup of some of the biggest announcements that were showcased in the exhibit hall.

• 98point6’s new OEM platform tailored for health systems signed Tacoma-based MultiCare Health System as its first partner, licensing the virtual care solution within its hybrid ambulatory care platform, Indigo Health.

• Awell and Healthie are partnering to enable care organizations to build clinical workflows in Awell’s low-code platform and easily integrate them into Healthie’s API to automate routine clinical tasks and synchronize data between systems.

• Carenostics joined Bayer G4A’s portfolio of Digital Health Partnerships, providing the AI startup with a €200k convertible loan and coaching from industry experts to help enable earlier clinical intervention through machine learning on EHR data.

• Google and Epic are partnering to create a new offering that’ll allow Epic hospitals to run their EHR on Google Cloud, with New Jersey-based Hackensack Meridian Health set to be among the first users.

• General Catalyst tripled its health system partner roster with 10 new logos that it will work with to co-build startups: Banner Health, Cincinnati Children’s, Hackensack Meridian Health, Health First, MetroHealth, OhioHealth, MUSC, UC Davis Health, UC Irvine Health, and Universal Health Services.

• Health Gorilla was selected by MEDITECH as the technology platform for Traverse Exchange Canada, a new interoperability network designed to enable the seamless flow of health information between participating organizations across Canada.

• Hello Heart added Dot-to-Dot capabilities to its digital heart health program, leveraging AI to help people draw connections between their lifestyle choices, such as minutes walked or medication adherence, and their heart health.

• Included Health, the digital health powerhouse formed by the merger of Doctor on Demand and Grand Rounds, launched an All-Included Health hybrid care service to provide primary, specialty, and behavioral care with personalized care teams.

• Maven Clinic entered the unicorn club with a $90M Series E raise that’ll help the virtual maternity and family health clinic expand its parenting, pediatrics, and menopause platform beyond the 175 countries it already serves.

• Nomi Health unveiled its Connect fintech platform to power real-time healthcare payments, enabling health plans and third-party administrators to drastically speed up their processes while cutting down on administrative waste.

• Roche unified its digital health portfolio under the navify brand, providing a range of solutions that help provide evidence about optimizing operational processes and clinical decision making.

• SonderMind acquired neuroscience company Total Brain to enable patients to better understand their mental state outside of therapy while helping therapists implement measurement-based care techniques.

Welcome to all of our new readers that we met at HLTH, and stay tuned for deeper dives into many of these announcements in next week’s Digital Health Wire.

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The Wire

• Amazon Clinic Launch: The biggest non-HLTH news of the week was Amazon’s debut of the Amazon Clinic DTC pharmacy that was leaked a few days ago. Amazon Clinic is effectively a message-based asynschronous care service (AKA patients fill out a symptom questionnaire so that third-party clinicians can prescribe medications for common conditions), and it’s now up and running in 32 states. If Amazon can successfully get consumers to trust them with their health, it has 200M Prime members that should help keep customer acquisition costs down and lifetime customer value up.

• Hospital EDs at “Breaking Point”: Hospital EDs across the US are at a “breaking point” according to the American College of Emergency Physicians, who wrote a letter to President Joe Biden pleading the administration to find a solution to ED overcrowding. The letter urges the administration to convene a summit of stakeholders to identify ways to reduce boarding, where admitted patients are held in the ED due to a lack of inpatient beds, which the authors say has progressed to the point of “becoming its own public health emergency.” 

• Firefly & Sprinter Home Care Alliance: Firefly Health is teaming up with Sprinter Health to provide Firefly patients with at-home services such as lab draws and eye exams through Sprinter’s network of phlebotomists and nurses. The collaboration kicks off in Boston, allowing Firefly providers to order Sprinter visits customized for their patients, and making compliance with recommended chronic condition screenings “as easy as ordering food delivery.”

• Current Health Joins Epic App Market: Current Health’s care-at-home platform is now available in the Epic App Market, simplifying provider workflows for tasks such as patient enrollment and communications. The App Market availability builds on Current’s existing Epic integration (transmits patient vitals between the care-at-home platform and EHR) to let health systems quickly stand up care-at-home programs through turnkey implementation and standardized templates.

• Shared Medical Records: A KeyCare survey found that 79% of patients feel it is “very important” that their telehealth providers and regular physicians both have access to their complete medical records. The respondents heavily favored telehealth providers having access to their medication history and chronic condition data, and viewed telehealth as the preferred option for routine management of chronic conditions (46%), mental health services (43%), and minor but acute issues (41%).

• Caraway Virtual Care: Caraway launched its virtual care services for college-aged women and the LGBTQ+ community starting with campuses in New York, California, Ohio, and North Carolina. The rollout comes four months after Caraway’s emergence from stealth as it sets out to provide team-based mental and reproductive healthcare through its mobile-first platform that makes it easier to see gynecologists, primary care physicians, and psychiatrists.

• Telehealth Framework for Seniors: An editorial in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society highlighted the potential of telehealth to enhance care for seniors, as well as ways to reduce technical challenges with using telemedicine. The authors presented a framework that they believe should be followed to improve access to telehealth for seniors, which placed a huge focus on additional training for both providers and patients.

• Hims & Hers + ChristianaCare: Hims & Hers is bringing in-person specialty and primary care to its patients in Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania through a new partnership with ChristianaCare. Hims & Hers’ provider partnership network now spans across ten states through similar collaborations with Carbon Health, Ochsner Health, Mount Sinai Health System, and Privia.

• Crossover Aetna Plan Benefit: Crossover Health and Aetna are collaborating on a new health benefit for Seattle-area employers, offering a hybrid care plan that gives employees the ability to choose how they receive care (in-person, virtually, or asynchronous messaging). The new plan benefit, Aetna Advanced Primary Health, aims to go beyond traditional “sick care” with the addition of physical therapy, health coaching, and care navigators who can use Crossover’s platform for proactive outreach.

• Remote Cholesterol Program: In a new study of 10k patients with high cholesterol, remote medication management was associated with a mean reduction in LDL-C of 35.4 and 37.5 mg/dL at 6 and 12 months. The authors conclude that standardized remote cholesterol management programs may help optimize guideline-directed therapy at scale and minimize the need for in-person visits among diverse populations.

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