TailorMed COO Vince King

Digital Health

Digital Health Trends to Watch in 2023

Happy holidays, and welcome to the last Digital Health Wire of 2022! For our final issue of the year, we’re polishing off our crystal ball (crowdsourcing predictions from digital health leaders) to bring you some of the top trends likely to make a big impact in 2023.

Without further ado…

• Show, Don’t Tell – DiMe CEO Jennifer Goldsack – Digital health innovators with practical solutions for real problems have enormous potential to thrive in the coming year, but only if they have clinical evidence to demonstrate their value. Even better, full-stack digital solution providers will identify pathways to reimbursement that don’t involve throwing themselves at the feet of healthcare systems and carving away at their margins.

• Deeper Patient Segmentation – SCAN Health Plan CEO Sachin Jain – The idea that all patients should receive the same clinical model is being fundamentally questioned, and more companies will look at further segmenting their offerings to differentially serve diverse populations. See: Clever Care (MA startup with Asian-focused benefit offerings), Included Health (Affirm product focused on LGBTQ+ population), and Zocalo Health (clinical care “by Latinos for Latinos”).

• More Consolidation – Centura Health CEO Peter Banko – Traditional health care competition will intensify as consolidation continues and new entrants bring disruptive value propositions. Private equity firms’ $700B+ in dry powder is set to surge even higher in 2022, and national health plans are deploying their pandemic-driven financial gains to fuel consolidation and diversification.

• Quality Funding Rounds – 7wireVentures Partner Alyssa Jaffee – With fewer IPOs for exits, many high quality startups will return to the private markets for another funding round. Fewer investors are running around with loose capital, making it likely that investment decision cycles will take longer but have more discipline. For context, there were 23 public digital health market exits in 2021, vs. 7 in 2022.

• D2C Pivot to B2B – Alyssa Jaffee again since her Twitter thread was best-in-class – As inflation continues pressuring the global economy, half of consumers can’t cover a $1K medical expense within 30 days. As consumer purse strings tighten, we could see an increasing number of D2C companies pivot to B2B models to survive.

• AI-Driven Engagement – MD Anderson Cancer Center CIO Rebecca Kaul – AI will start to enable omni-modal communications that are personalized, predictive, and empathetic to the patient. Communications platforms will need to be able to seamlessly connect patients to integrated end-to-end solutions, and more sentiment analysis is needed to build emotional intelligence into digital tools.

• Mission Critical Tech – OMERS Ventures Principal Christina Farr – Hospitals are bleeding revenue, so 2023 will be about “must have” vs.“nice to have.” What’ll do well is anything mission critical (addressing labor shortages, burnout, revenue cycle). Companies that can be wiped out by Epic’s next feature update will be in a tough spot.

The Takeaway

It’s tough to predict which of these trends will become the top story of 2023, but it’s pretty safe to say that we’re in for another action-packed year for digital health. While the record shattering funding days of 2021 are behind us, we still have overworked providers, rising healthcare costs, and patients in need of innovative solutions. Cheers to making those solutions a reality in the new year.

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The Wire

• SaVia Lands $8.5M: SaVia Health secured $8.5M in seed funding to expand its SaaS clinical support platform by adding 15-20 care pathways to its existing library of applications. SaVia’s platform allows clinicians to either use off-the-shelf clinical care pathways or customize their own, transforming decision support for certain conditions into digital workflows that can be integrated directly into EMRs.

• Citron Takes Aim at agilon: Infamous short-seller Citron Research published a brutal hit piece on value-based care enabler agilon health, claiming that the company’s business model “unknowingly got torpedoed by the Supreme Court of the United States without Wall Street noticing.” Citron’s report argues that the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear UnitedHealthcare v. Secretary of Health and Human Services was bad (horrible) news for agilon because the market for Medicare overpayments will be diminished. To be clear: Citron definitely has a stake in agilon’s stock declining as a result of the report, but it also gives a digestible overview of the situation if you can look past the bias.

• Memora + PeriGen: Virtual care company Memora Health is partnering with PeriGen to remotely monitor and engage obstetrics patients from labor through the postpartum period. The coordinated service will be made available to health systems nationally, combining both a labor and delivery inpatient solution with post-discharge monitoring tools, which have traditionally been separate offerings. 

• Premature Death Spike: The United Health Foundation released its America’s Health Rankings 2022 Annual Report, revealing that the premature death rate increased by a whopping 18% from 2019 to 2020 (7.3k to 8.6k) – the largest single year increase in the history of the report. While the pandemic definitely played a role in the increase, 92k people in the US died due to drug overdoses in 2020 alone (up from 73k in 2019), and ~75% of those involved opioids.

• Ubie Secures $19M: Japan-based Ubie scored $19M in a Series C extension to grow its US presence after entering the market in April. Ubie’s AI symptom checker presents users with possible causes of their symptoms after a 3-minute questionnaire, taking into account local disease trends and other regional characteristics. 

• Health Benefit Survey: A Mercer poll revealed that employers expect health benefit costs to rise by 5.4% in 2023 following this year’s 3.2% increase to $15k per employee. Most of the 2k employers surveyed also predict that rising benefit costs are only going to increase faster beyond next year, which is reflected in their current top priorities of addressing affordability (68%), improving access to behavioral health care (73%), and enhancing benefits to improve hiring and retention (84%).

• IncludeHealth MSK Partnership: IncludeHealth is collaborating with Yale New Haven Health to provide hybrid musculoskeletal care combining YNHH’s in-person orthopedic services with IncludeHealth’s Musculoskeletal Operating System for in-home physical therapy. The partnership allows YNHH clinicians to create interactive virtual exercise plans and monitor patient progress in real-time using IncludeHealth’s body tracking technology.

• Ardent and Signify ACO: Tennessee-based Ardent Health Services signed an agreement to join a 2023 Accountable Care Organization enabled by Signify to manage risk and provide coordinated care for its Medicare patients. Signify will provide Ardent’s Medicare patients with access to its preventative in-home health evaluations (checking vitals, going over medications, reviewing medical history, answering questions) that help identify care gaps and connect members with necessary support.

• ED Physicians vs. NPs: A working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research raised a lot of debate last week after concluding that nurse practitioners are driving up costs and decreasing quality in EDs compared to physicians. The paper concluded that physicians should see higher compensation for their labor after finding that care by NPs was associated with increased preventable hospitalizations (20%), lengths of stay (11%), and ED costs of care (7%).

• Cardiosense Scores $15M: Cardiosense scored $15M in Series A funding to support a nationwide clinical study to validate its CardioTag multi-sensor wearable that enables early detection of heart disease. Cardiosense plans to use the study to pursue the FDA approval of its CardioTag device, while also developing new digital biomarkers to identify at-risk patients and support personalized therapies.

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