Quite A Few Claims Author Benjamin Lee

Patient Engagement

Memora Lands $30M for Care Automation

Among last week’s wave of HIMSS announcements was Memora Health landing $30M in fresh funding from General Catalyst and a group of strategic health system partners.

The investors included big names like Northwell and NorthShore/Edward-Elmhurst, which makes sense given the two major goals of Memora’s care automation platform:

• Unburden care teams to allow them to practice at the top of their license
• Proactively guide and engage patients throughout their care journeys 

The themes are familiar, but Memora’s platform tackles them in some unique ways.

• An SMS-based asynchronous communication platform (vs. app based)
• Tight integration with human providers for triage and navigation
• Automation to push data to patients + pull new data via questionnaires and devices
• AI-enabled care journeys that evolve with the behavior of patients

Memora works with its partners to understand how they manage their most complex patients, then takes their existing workflows and automates as much as possible into a text messaging protocol with reminders, check-ins, and scheduling.

• Although companies like Conversa and Twistle also play in the automated engagement sandbox, Memora points to its enterprise scalability as a differentiator.

• The platform includes a wide breadth of programs for areas like surgical care, chronic condition management, and maternal care, and Memora’s investor roster speaks to the fact that systems are actively looking for ways to consolidate solutions.

It was interesting to see Memora CEO Manav Sevak note that the round was “not something we intended to raise,” but as a way to “work more collaboratively with these sites.”

• Sevak also mentioned that Memora is “exploring opportunities” to market its solution to more payors and digital health companies.

• Memora already works with a few digital health startups like Luma Health and Reimagine Care, but its bread and butter still looks like the care delivery orgs after adding Virtua Health and Moffitt Cancer Center earlier this year.

The Takeaway

Memora’s value proposition reads like a Mad Lib of ways to address today’s biggest provider pain points, and $30M of strategic funding should definitely help it deliver. That said, it sounds like Memora is widening its focus to new customers, making execution even more important as the strategy shifts gears.

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The Wire

• Teladoc Moves Into Weight Mgmt: Teladoc is the latest virtual care provider to throw its hat into the obesity ring after expanding its Provider-Based Care to weight management and prediabetes. The new programs build on this year’s launch of hypertension and diabetes services, offering a similar mix of physician-led treatment, day-to-day coaching, and of course, GLP-1s. 

• Outcomes-Based Pharmaceutical Contracts: About 58% of payors had at least one outcomes-based contract with a PBM for prescription drugs in 2022, according to an Avalere Health survey of 46 health plans. Of the payors with an outcomes-based contract, over 35% had over 10, and their preference for using these contracts with “mostly new products” suggests that there’s a growing interest in aligning reimbursement with clinical benefit, particularly for new drugs with limited real-world evidence.

• AI Has Entered the Chat: The triumphant trio of Ben Lee, Paulius Mui, MD, and Blake Madden shared a great overview of generative AI’s foray into healthcare. They cover a lot of ground, including the current segmentation of the landscape, the competition dynamics between players, and a financial analysis of ambient documentation models, then they top it off with a clinician’s perspective on all the action.

• athenahealth Patient Digital Engagement Index: athenahealth unveiled its Patient Digital Engagement Index to help medical practices understand how their patients use digital tools while receiving care. The Index offers a unified view of patient usage across areas like health information updates and scheduling, then lets users analyze the data within the athenaOne Insights Dashboard to leverage best practices and see how their performance stacks up against similar orgs.

• RPM Socioeconomics: A cross-sectional study of 4,206 hospitals revealed that socioeconomic status (SES) impacts the adoption of remote patient monitoring (RPM) for chronic care management. Rural hospitals near lower-middle quartile SES households were 33.5% less likely to adopt RPM compared to those near the highest quartile, while urban hospitals near the lowest quartile were 41.9% less likely to adopt RPM.

• 1upHealth Series C: 1upHealth completed its $40M Series C round to accelerate the development of its FHIR-native Data Cloud that’s used by 75+ organizations to acquire, store, and analyze their data. The funding will also go toward addressing forthcoming CMS regulations and building serverless scalability, which 1upHealth expects to bridge the final steps on its path toward profitability.

• Ada + Jefferson: Philadelphia-based Jefferson Health is deploying Ada Health’s symptom assessment and care navigation stack across its 18 hospitals and 50+ outpatient facilities. Ada’s digital front door aims to open up bandwidth for Jefferson physicians by giving patients the ability to self-triage and schedule the appropriate level of care, cutting down on unnecessary consultations and the number of patients using the ED as their entryway to the health system. 

• Overworked Residents Affect Patient Safety: A study in BMJ Medicine links longer resident work hours to adverse safety events. The study of 4,826 senior residents found that those who worked over 48 hours a week had higher rates of medical errors and adverse events. For those working 60-70 hours a week, the risk was double for medical errors (OR=2.36) and triple for preventable adverse events (OR=2.93).

• Scene Health Closes $17M: Scene Health closed a $17.7M Series B round to bring its video-based medication management platform to more health plans, pharma companies, and clinical research organizations. Scene’s mobile app drives medication adherence by letting patients connect to a care team of pharmacists, nurses, and health coaches through daily video check-ins, a service that’s impacted over 200k lives since the startup launched in 2014.

• Retail Pharmacy Primary Care: Surescripts put out new research noting that nearly half of US counties face a shortage of PCPs, and 61% of those counties have a high enough volume of retail pharmacy locations to fill that primary care gap. Surescripts also announced that it intends to apply to be a QHIN as it joins the push for secure data sharing among healthcare orgs. 

• KeyCare Adds Allina: KeyCare added Minnesota-based Allina Health Partners to its health system roster, giving patients the ability to access care by scheduling a virtual visit directly through their MyChart portal. The fully Epic-integrated pitch is clearly resonating for KeyCare, with both Memorial and WellSpan also signing on in the last few months.

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