Reimagine Care CEO Dan Nardi

Startups

K Health Raises $59M for Chat-First Care

K Health is the latest startup to deploy the “battlefield tactic” of raising an unlabeled funding round to help scale its platform, locking in $59M and a new strategic investment from Cedars-Sinai.

K Health’s been moving quickly since rolling out its AI-enabled symptom checker in 2018, raising $330M, expanding to 48 states, and seeing over 10M patients interact with its chatbot.

• CEO Allon Bloch told Forbes that the K Health platform aims to be the antidote to “Dr. Google” by ingesting user symptoms then stacking them up against its database of millions of patient visits to suggest possible diagnoses.

• The chatbot itself doesn’t give medical advice, but gives patients the option of having a human doctor take over the chat after providing them with potential diagnoses and a summary of the conversation. Over 70% of users reportedly opt for a chat-based visit.

That might sound similar to Babylon and Zipnosis, but K Health licensed its original dataset from HMO Maccabi in its native Israel, where patients tend to stick with the same payor most of their lives and thus provide a rare longitudinal view of clinical and outcomes data.

• K Health reportedly did $52M in revenue last year (margins currently still in the red), around 40% of which was direct-to-consumer and the rest was through enterprise contracts. 

The next chapter of K Health’s journey is to build up its roster of hospital clients to serve as a “digital practice partner,” starting with its new investor Cedars-Sinai.

• Cedars-Sinai will be using K Health for virtual primary care, and by the end of the year expects to have an app co-developed to triage new patients to the system’s physicians.

The Takeaway

One of the more interesting pieces of K Health’s funding announcement was Cedars-Sinai’s input into where K Health fits into its broader digitization strategy. While the health system excels in complex areas such as transplants and neurosurgery, primary care remains difficult to tackle due to physician shortages and burnout. These logistical challenges are the exact problems that K Health looks to address, and they’re also challenges that are far from exclusive to Cedars-Sinai.

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The Wire

• Portal Messages Piling Up: An NPR article gave a good look at how charging for patient portal messages isn’t necessarily opening up much physician bandwidth. UCSF researcher Jay Holmgren shared that some health systems have seen portal messages climb 50% since the pandemic, yet moves by the likes of Cleveland Clinic and Johns Hopkins to stop the influx have fallen short. Holmgren’s research shows that physicians only charge for about 3% of messages, and that’s only led to a decline of roughly 2% in the number of messages they receive.

• Herself Health Lands $26M: Herself Health landed $26M in Series A funding to transform primary care for women over the age of 65. The round arrives just six months after Herself closed a $7M seed round, finding immediate traction with its holistic approach that incorporates mobility, mental health, and quality of life. Herself was founded to serve the unique needs of women that are overlooked by one-size-fits-all primary care, stating that women are 4x more likely than men to be diagnosed with osteoporosis, 3x more likely to have an autoimmune disease, and twice as likely to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

• Phreesia Acquires MediFind: Patient intake company Phreesia acquired MediFind to help patients find best-fit physicians, especially if they’re contending with serious, chronic, and rare diseases. MediFind uses machine learning to identify leading doctors in specific conditions based on factors such as their research output, patient volume, or standing among their peers, and getting folded into Phreesia’s platform just dramatically expanded MediFind’s reach. 

• Hospital M&A Up in Q2: Kaufman Hall’s Q2 Mergers & Acquisitions Report recorded 20 health system M&A moves during the second quarter, the largest total since the start of the pandemic. KH noted that a major driver of recent transactions has been to combine and optimize organizational capabilities, a trend that was evident in two of Q2’s largest transactions: 1) the combination of Froedtert Health and ThedaCare in Wisconsin; 2) Kaiser Hospital Foundation’s creating VBC entity Risant Health through the acquisition of its first member, Geisinger Health. 

• Nurses Sue to Be Called “Doctor”: Three California nurses who have PhDs are suing the State of California for the right to use “doctor” as part of their professional title. An article in Medscape describes how, in a complaint filed in federal court in California, the nurses claim that state regulators fined another nurse $20,000 for violating state rules by using the term “Doctor Sarah” in online advertising and on social media. The lawsuit illustrates the ongoing turf battle over scope of practice by non-physician practitioners. 

• Innovaccer + Post Acute Analytics: Innovaccer is teaming up with Post Acute Analytics (PAA) to help health systems bring value-based care to post-acute patients. The goal is to combine Innovaccer’s data platform with PAA’s Anna AI engine to provide real-time monitoring of patients throughout the post-acute care process, ultimately reducing variability in care quality / cost for risk-bearing providers and minimizing leakage to out-of-network rehab facilities.

• Engagement Drives MSK Outcomes: A study of 55k musculoskeletal patients found that Force Therapeutics’ virtual MSK platform resulted in significant improvements in pain, function, and daily living activities. Among shoulder patients, 84% met minimal clinically important difference thresholds at one year, as well as 82% of hip patients, and 74% of knee patients. Patient engagement was given a lot of credit for the outcomes, with 95% of Force users feeling “very prepared” for surgery and the same share “clearly” understanding their post-discharge pain management plans. 

• UpLift Series A: Virtual-first psychotherapy and psychiatry startup UpLift closed a $10.7M Series A round (total funding now $22M) to fuel its expansion into more states outside of its current footprint of Florida, Maryland, New Jersey, Virginia, and DC. UpLift already holds national contracts with major payors like Aetna and UnitedHealthcare, but is looking to partner with more regional plans as it pushes beyond commercial and Medicare contracts and into Medicaid.

• Reimagine Care Partners With DispatchHealth: Reimagine Care is partnering with DispatchHealth to provide virtual-to-home care for oncology patients. When oncology nurses monitoring patients through Reimagine’s Cancer Care at Home program identify the need for in-person services, DispatchHealth can now be sent to the patient’s home for symptom management and other needs that typically require a hospital visit. The collaboration is designed to give cancer patients a more coordinated experience between their virtual care, in-home treatments, and primary oncology team.

• Racial Inequities in Cancer Survivors: A large study of 905k cancer patients in the International Journal of Epidemiology found that Black survivors are more likely than White survivors to die from cardiovascular disease. That held true for all 18 cancer types studied, with hazard ratios ranging from 1.30 for lung cancer to 4.04 for brain cancer. The study authors linked the higher risk to differences in socioeconomic status and health coverage, factors that “underscore the importance of neighborhood-level interventions and equitable access to care.” 

• Health Issues in 2024 Election: A JAMA editorial from KFF EVP of Health Policy Larry Levitt gave a solid intro to exactly what its title suggested – Health Care Issues in the Early Stages of the Presidential 2024 Election. Whether it’s abortion rights, Medicare and Medicaid coverage, drug costs, or gender-affirming care, there won’t be any shortage of health issues for people to consider in the voting booth next year.

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Patient-Centered Design for Diabetes Care

Glooko’s recently overhauled Mobile App makes it easier than ever for diabetes patients to organize, log, visualize, and share their data. Head over to this conversation with Glooko’s product and design team for a behind-the-scenes look at how patient-centered design is improving diabetes outcomes.