Kate Kline, President of Trusted Health

Digital Health

a16z: Consumer Health Forecasts

VC powerhouse Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) is quickly building out its library of health tech thought leadership, and its latest opus focused on the areas of consumer health where it sees the most opportunity.

Here’s a high-level summary for the three major categories, but the full report has plenty of insights to go around if you want to take a deeper look at any of the topics.

Area 1: Improving Access to Care

• Marketplaces: To say that a16z is bullish on marketplaces would be a huge understatement. One of the biggest challenges for marketplaces is that consumer usage must be frequent and durable enough to justify the customer acquisition cost (one reason why apps that focus on infrequent forms of care struggle), but a16z believes we’ll start to see these metrics improve by letting users compare drugs, health plans, and non-traditional services (wellness, family, caregiving) within a single platform. 

Area 2: Changing How Consumers Receive Care

• Payor Focus Categories: a16z goes with a safe pick for its first subcategory: the specialties that payors spend the most on. These include cardiometabolic/diabetes (Omada, Marley Medical), MSK (Sword, Vori), and oncology (Thyme, Jasper) – all areas where payors need better care at a lower cost. While this market is relatively mature, a16z predicts that there’s more success to come for startups who can leverage their ability to engage consumers, manage medications, and inspire behavior change into broad consumer engagement platforms across multiple patient journeys.

• Consumer Focus Categories: Several VC success stories come from spaces where people don’t expect payor coverage, and therefore handle the costs themselves (Hims, Ro). a16z is forecasting a lot of upside for services that have had slower adoption in traditional healthcare, but are quickly gaining traction in DTC, such as medication-assisted weight loss, psychedelics, and biohacking/longevity.

• Gaming: a16z is also excited about the intersection of healthcare and gaming, but it’s still wondering whether the successes in this category will “gamify healthcare or healthify games.” In other words, will they look more like Epic Systems (EHR) or Epic Games (Fortnite)? Gamified health is more likely to be designed for efficacy and health outcomes, but healthified games are more likely to have better retention (which is one of healthcare’s biggest challenges).

Area 3: Helping Consumers Afford Care

• The last section was such a minefield of spam words that any summary side-stepping all of them wouldn’t do it much justice. That said, “less crappy” health plans, patient-friendly BNPL, and new card products all made an appearance. With total American healthcare debt already sitting at over $1 trillion, it’s a big enough problem that a16z sees enough space for several massive companies to emerge while solving it.

The New Standard for Prescription Safety

Synapse Medicine’s quick-deploy Prescription Assistance API and components can be up and running in less than a day and instantly connect your HCPs to real-time drug data and prescribing support. Find out how easy it can be to equip your providers with the tools they need to ensure prescription safety and precision for their patients.

What is Patient Engagement for a CMIO?

In its patient engagement guide for hospital execs, Nuance examines the goals and challenges of Chief Medical Information Officers, highlighting the ways that AI-powered patient engagement solutions can help CMIOs reduce physician burnout and improve care delivery.

The Wire

• Health Gorilla State of Interoperability: “Is interoperability a buzz word? Yes. Is it overused to the point of being nearly meaningless? Also yes. Despite those facts, does the State of Interoperability Report somehow manage to break through that wall of vendor marketing and provide data-driven analysis and insights that simply haven’t been put out before? Resoundingly yes. If you’re curious about what’s actually happening in the industry in regards to clinical data exchange and perception by various stakeholders, it’s not only one of the best resources out there; it’s arguably the only impartial, data-driven resource out there today.” – Brendan Keeler, Head of Product at Flexpa. Couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

• Oula Series A: Maternity health clinic Oula raised a $19.1M Series A round (total funding now $22.3M) to expand beyond its two clinics in New York City and add more services including in-home sonography. Oula works with Medicaid and commercial health plans to provide full-service pregnancy care with a blend of traditional offerings (prenatal care, birth education, delivery) and holistic treatments (group support, mental healthcare, postpartum care).

• Ransomware Attack Trends: Ransomware attacks on US healthcare delivery organizations more than doubled from 2016 to 2021, climbing from 43 to 91 breaches per year. A University of Minnesota-led study identified 374 attacks in total, exposing the personal health information of 42M patients – over 10% of the US population. Although the research showed that only 15.8% of breaches resulted in health information making its way to the dark web, the authors “strongly suspect underreporting for basically everything.”

• National Health Spending Growth: A CMS report outlined how national health spending grew to $4.3T in 2021, up by nearly 3% year-over-year. That represented a major slowdown from the 10% growth seen in 2020, due primarily to a large increase in healthcare utilization being offset by less government spending on COVID. Federal health expenditures vaulted up 37% in 2020 as the pandemic swept across the nation, then fell by 3.5% in 2021.

• Gympass Adds Headspace: Employee wellbeing unicorn Gympass is bringing Headspace mindfulness programs to its suite of services. Gympass originally focused on giving its members access to multiple gyms and classes through a single membership, but has since expanded into “Mind” partner apps, which are reportedly being utilized by over 10k companies. Employees at these companies now have access to Headspace’s complete library of mindfulness content, ranging from guided meditations, to sleep, focus, and movement exercises.

• October Telehealth Use: Fair Health’s Monthly Telehealth Regional Tracker showed that telehealth use fell by 3.7% in October, accounting for 5.2% of total visits (down from 5.4% in September). The list of top five diagnoses remained stable with mental health conditions at the top (65.2%) and COVID-19 in fifth spot (1.4%). The decline in telehealth utilization was largest in the South (6.8%), Midwest (4.9%), and West (4.1%), while the Northeast posted a 1.7% increase in utilization.

• Trusted Names New President: Healthcare labor marketplace Trusted Health named former ZocDoc exec Kate Kline as its new President to lead enterprise go-to-market strategy for its Trusted Works platform. Works is designed to allow hospitals to predict and react to fluctuations in demand, and has reportedly helped Missouri-based Mercy reach its target fill rate of 86% and reduce agency spend by 50% since its system-wide implementation across 45 hospitals.

• Scrub Color Trust Levels: Researchers investigated whether scrub color impacted the perception of physicians by presenting 113 adult patients at UNC Medical Center with eight images: four male and four female clinicians each wearing different color scrubs. Those in blue scrubs were perceived to be the most caring for both male and female clinicians, while black scrubs ranked the worst because they were “deathlike” or “resembled a mortician.” 

• Avanlee & Walmart Team Up: Avanlee Care launched a new digital tool in collaboration with Walmart to help caregivers remotely monitor the vitals of aging loved ones and create shopping lists personalized for health conditions (low-sodium, diabetic-friendly, post-surgery support). The Avanlee app allows up to two family members to access HIPAA-compliant messaging, vitals tracking, and two Walmart lists, while a $10/mo version allows up to 10 caregivers to manage unlimited lists.

• Hospital Outlook “Deteriorating”: Fitch Ratings gave the not-for-profit hospital sector a “deteriorating” outlook due to its diminishing financial reserves relative to its business risk. The sector was originally downgraded from “neutral” last August as inflationary pressures compounded climbing labor and supply costs. While Fitch warned that these factors are raising questions about the liquidity of many health systems, it also noted some signs that “we are beginning to come out of the worst of it.”

Bedside MRI’s Patient Acuity Impact

With rising patient acuity rates creating “unsustainable financial challenges,” health systems are looking for innovative ways to increase critical care throughput. A growing number of health systems are achieving this goal with the Hyperfine Swoop point-of-care MRI, which can eliminate risks associated with intrahospital transport and keeps more critical care team members in the ICU.

unResign From Nursing with connectRN

connectRN’s new campaign unResignation Notice is helping nurses recommit to the profession they love by highlighting both the challenges they face and the reasons why they want to return. “It’s not in a nurse’s nature to quit. Something needs to change, and it’s not the nurses.” Learn more and sign your own unResignation Letter here.

Effortlessly Manage Your Provider Credentialing

Medallion’s all-in-one platform streamlines the management of your provider network – from licensing to credentialing to monitoring. Find out how Medallion can help you expand into new markets faster, automate administration, and effortlessly manage your provider data.