Mobile Heartbeat CEO Ron Remy

Digital Health

Mindstrong Calls it Quits, Offloads Tech to SonderMind

Mindstrong might have flown a little too close to the sun with its promise of detecting early signs of mental illness through smartphone data, and it’s now shuttering operations after selling off its core technology to former competitor SonderMind.

Once a venture capital darling, Mindstrong wooed investors on the idea of an app that could serve as a “smoke alarm” for mental health issues by scanning smartphones for “digital biomarkers” such as erratic scrolling and typing errors.

That turned out to be a tall order. A recent investigation by STAT revealed that investors were leaning on Mindstrong to commercialize the technology too soon, and that the company lost momentum after the departure of key founders.

• As Mindstrong’s core technology struggled to get up to speed, the company pivoted to providing virtual therapy with a focus on serious mental illness.

• That road was equally rocky, causing Mindstrong to lay off a majority of its employees and stop treating patients earlier this year.

Enter SonderMind, a full-service virtual therapy platform that leverages machine learning to match patients with an ideal therapist for in-person or virtual appointments.

• Mindstrong’s purpose-built EHR and digital biomarker tech will help SonderMind offer more specialized care journeys and improve its ability to treat patients with serious mental illness.

• The move comes just months after SonderMind acquired Total Brain to enhance its user-guided wellness tools, and less than two years after it acquired Qntfy to unlock more value from its patient and provider data.

The Takeaway

Mental health remains one of the hottest corners of the digital health market, but outside of a few notable examples like the Headspace-Ginger merger, we haven’t seen a huge wave of M&A as valuations come back down to Earth. SonderMind now has a chance to be the next success story, assuming it can integrate its acquisitions into a cohesive offering for everything from wellness exercises to psychiatric care.

Clear Arch Health Reduces Readmissions at Altru

When Altru Health System set out to reduce hospital readmissions, it turned to Clear Arch Health to find the solution. Learn how Clear Arch Health’s complete RPM platform and clinical monitoring system helped Altru lower readmissions while improving post-acute care quality.

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.

The Wire

• OakWell Coordinated Primary Care: A joint venture between Oak Street Health and Interwell Health, aptly named OakWell, launched to deliver coordinated primary care directly to end-stage kidney disease patients in the dialysis center. This seems like a great way to take advantage of the 10+ hours that end-stage kidney disease patients spend in a dialysis center each week, enabling PCPs and nephrologists to meet patients where they are instead of requiring additional visits outside of already packed treatment schedules. 

• AI Readiness Lags the Hype: The blazing pace of AI innovation has taken the hype around the tech to an all-time high, but a SoftServe survey of nearly 600 IT leaders found that “AI/ML is deployed as a series of ‘science projects’ to attract talent” and it frequently isn’t aligned with business goals. Although the respondents came from a variety of industries, the takeaways feel more than applicable to healthcare: 98% view AI/ML investment as a priority, but 29% say their organization is extremely unprepared to manage data to train AI/ML platforms. Respondents also felt that pressure to implement AI is coming more from leadership (53%) than customers (41%).

• Bend Health Debut: Continuing the digital mental health theme of the week was Bend Health’s emergence from stealth with $32M in funding to provide online counseling and resources to children struggling with all types of behavioral issues. The startup already has clinicians available in all 50 states to help overlay a family systems approach to telemental health services in an effort to avoid medication as the first option for children. Bend’s website is also cool enough to deserve a special shoutout.

• Physician Salaries Down, Gender Gap Narrows: A Doximity survey (n = 31k docs) showed that average physician salaries declined 2.4% in 2022 after increasing by 3.8% in 2021, while noting that the overall declines were exacerbated by inflation and poor job satisfaction. Although the compensation picture was worse for female physicians, who made 26% less than their male counterparts, the wage gap was slowly trending in the right direction compared to the 28% gap seen in 2021.

• Vital Series B: Vital closed a $24.7M Series B round (total funding now $40M) to fuel the expansion of its AI-enabled platform that keeps patients in-network through personalized content and automated communications. Over the past year, Vital’s added over 40 new hospital clients including Allina Health, CommonSpirit, and Emory Healthcare, while adding new Experience Management and Lab Results solutions. Prior to starting Vital, CEO Aaron Patzer founded personal finance platform Mint and guided it through an acquisition by Intuit in 2009.

• Carium Adds Customizable Care Pathways: Virtual care startup Carium enhanced its Care Pathways platform to support customizable workflow automations. Care Pathways creates an environment for users to build virtual care services tailored to their needs, and the recent upgrades let customers add new devices and external data sources to support more clinical and operational processes. Carium plans to offer additional functionality through the future release of its full developer stack. 

• Patients Worry AI’s Moving Too Fast: Our second AI report of the week comes from Pew Research, who found that 60% of Americans would be uncomfortable with their provider relying on AI in their own care (survey of 11k US adults). The report included a wide range of insights into current patient perceptions of AI, with one of the more interesting gems being the fact that 75% of respondents worry that providers will move too fast with AI and not understand its risk to patients, while only 23% worry providers will move too slowly and miss out on chances to improve outcomes.

• Artera Launches With $90M: Diagnostics startup Artera launched with $90M in funding to kickstart the distribution of its flagship ArteraAI Prostate Test that supports therapy personalization for prostate cancers. The launch arrives on the heels of the ArteraAI Prostate Test’s validation across six phase III randomized trials, results that encouraged Artera to begin expanding its AI-informed approach to other cancers. Artera must have liked WELL Health’s recent rebrand as much as we did considering it opted for the same new company name.

• Desert Oasis + Rimidi: CA-based regional medical group Desert Oasis Healthcare implemented Rimidi’s new Respiratory Module to help guide treatment decisions for patients with respiratory conditions such as COPD and asthma. The implementation is notable because it brings data from Teva Pharmaceutical’s Digihaler smart inhalers directly into clinical workflows via the Rimidi platform, allowing physicians to find previously hard to come by clues as to why a patient might have uncontrolled asthma (e.g. skipping medications or not taking it properly).

• Coffee’s OK: Freshly brewed research published in NEJM brought good news for coffee lovers, finding that drinking caffeinated coffee doesn’t produce significantly more premature atrial contractions. The randomized trial had 100 adults (38yrs avg age) wear a continuous ECG device, a wrist-worn accelerometer, and a continuous glucose monitor while they were instructed daily to drink caffeinated coffee or avoid caffeine via text message. The participants’ caffeine and no-caffeine days had similar daily premature atrial contractions (58 vs. 53) and serum glucose levels (95 vs. 86 mg/dL), but caffeine did produce more premature ventricular contractions (154 vs. 102).

• LeanTaaS Launches Perioperative Solution: LeanTaas is adding Perioperative Transformation as a Service to its portfolio of capacity management, staffing, and patient flow software. The Perioperative TaaS solution helps health systems maximize surgical case volume and high standards of patient care by deploying over “100 clinical perioperative experts” to implement insights from LeanTaaS’ workflow automation tech and provide ongoing support to OR leadership.

Clinical Documentation Integrity For VBC

The growing use of risk-adjusted reimbursement in outpatient settings means clinical documentation needs to keep up, or health systems risk leaving revenue on the table. Check out Nuance’s new blog to learn how shifting reimbursement models make clinical documentation excellence more important than ever, and how AI can help you achieve it.

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.

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.