Oxeon CEO Sonia Millsom

Digital Health

NeuroFlow Picks Up Steam With New Growth Funding

When looking at the movers and shakers in the behavioral health arena, it’s hard not to include NeuroFlow in that conversation – especially after last week’s funding boost courtesy of Concord Health Partners.

The press release definitely leaned into the “unlabeled round” theme, offering neither a Series title nor a dollar value, although it did tag the funding for growing NeuroFlow “to match the increase in demand for its solutions” among health systems, payors, and government agencies.

NeuroFlow had previously raised a total of $57.8M, capital that was used to build out an AI-driven analytics platform that helps providers consistently screen for behavioral health issues, triage patients to appropriate care, and engage them between visits.

• That platform enables NeuroFlow’s partners to overcome the usual hurdles to adopting an integrated behavioral health model, reducing the risks associated with undiagnosed conditions and helping them get out in front of potential issues before they escalate. 

• The data collected through that process is then served to providers within their established workflows in the form of decision support, creating a nice feedback loop with the platform’s engagement component while helping create high-touch care journeys.

NeuroFlow’s story over the past year has been about partnership momentum, with a string of new names on the roster like Novant Health, Atlantic Health System, and Emory Healthcare.

• Growth acquisitions also found a place in NeuroFlow’s playbook, and it recently picked up Capital Solution Design (Behavioral Health Lab) to expand its reach within the VA while gaining some valuable VA-specific EHR integration expertise.

• The mission behind NeuroFlow is to make mental health a bigger part of physical health, and the latest investment will push that pursuit forward by funding new platform capabilities and quite possibly more strategic M&A.

The Takeaway

The behavioral health segment continues to remind us that it’s one of the most resilient corners of the digital health market, and NeuroFlow’s raise is the latest proof point that these startups can keep securing capital in an otherwise gloomy funding environment. NeuroFlow isn’t offering teletherapy and it’s not delivering care, but it seems to be carving out a nice niche with its “picks and shovels” approach to bridging gaps in the treatment journey for those that are.

Upgrade Your Prescribing Workflows

Whether you’re a care delivery organization or building products that have prescribers, there’s no need to build your prescribing workflow from scratch. Find out how connecting your prescribers to clinical decision support powered by real-time drug data can help provide the patient-centered insights needed for medication success.

Glooko Outcomes Using Real-World Data

Modern diabetes management requires personalized, always-on, and connected care. Explore Glooko’s latest clinical studies to see how remote patient monitoring is making real-word improvements across multiple glycemic outcomes.

Creating an Exceptional Engagement Experience

With a surge in experience‑oriented disruptors entering the healthcare industry, patient engagement is becoming a crucial competitive differentiator. Get your copy of Nuance’s guide to  delivering intelligent interactions and a better experience at every touchpoint.

The Wire

• Intermountain, UPMC Jump to Epic: Oracle Cerner just had a nightmare week. Intermountain and UPMC both announced that they’re jumping from Oracle Cerner to Epic for their enterprise-wide EHR systems. They’re both in for a hefty tear-down and reimplementation cycle, with Intermountain’s footprint spanning 33 hospitals and 385 clinics, while UPMC is looking at 40 hospitals and 800 outpatient sites. The news predictably had social channels pretty stirred up. “Epic is God’s way of telling your hospital that it’s making too much money.”

• Click & Indivior DTx Partnership: Click Therapeutics is going after the Pear-shaped hole in the DTx market by inking a new partnership with Indivior, the maker of opioid addiction treatment Suboxone, to develop prescription mobile apps targeting substance use disorders. The partnership will initially focus on a CT-102 app for opioid use disorder, with Click handling the technical and regulatory tasks while Indivior tackles the global commercialization duties. Drug developer partnerships seem to be emerging as the path of choice for DTx startups looking to avoid some of the category’s potholes.

• High Tech or High Touch? An interesting new paper provided a balanced exploration of digital health’s potential benefits and risks to the healthcare system, exploring how innovations in areas such as digital biomarkers can advance early disease detection while also scrutinizing the blazing pace toward deploying AI for medical diagnoses. The author reaches the conclusion that digital strategy needs to be guided by a steady hand to ensure that technology complements the human touch in healthcare, rather than replacing it.

• Digital Health IPO Watch: healthcare.digital published a good overview of the factors that might be pushing us toward an end to the IPO glut by the time next summer rolls around, namely the critical mass that’s being achieved by some high flyers in the VBC and digital MSK spheres. It’s worth a skim if you don’t mind a little interesting font selection. Five potential HealthTech IPOs to look out for in 2024: Omada Health, Hinge Health, Sword Health, Doctolib, and Aledade.

• Semaglutide’s T1D Impact: We might be able to add type 1 diabetes to semaglutide’s list of treated diseases, in addition to T2D, obesity, and CVD. In a small 10-patient study with potentially life-altering implications, all patients who began taking low-dose semaglutide shortly after their diagnosis were able to discontinue post-meal insulin within three months, while seven of the patients were able to stop taking daily insulin. The group’s HbA1C also dropped from 11.7% to 5.9%. This small study earned a big reaction from the medical community, and should pave the way for larger trials.

• Telehealth Use Flat in June: Telehealth visits comprised 5.4% of claim lines in June, dead even with the previous month, according to FAIR Health’s latest report. The most notable metric from the update was that the percentage of asynchronous telehealth visits for mental health conditions more than doubled in the Midwest, although FAIR stops short of venturing a guess as to why. In that region, mental health conditions rose from 15.9% of asynchronous visits in May to 36% in June, replacing hypertension as the number one diagnosis.

• AvaSure + Ouva: AvaSure is bolstering its TeleSitter solution with an AI-driven alert system through a new collaboration with patient observation startup Ouva. The new alerts are delivered directly within the AvaSure platform, guiding observer attention to where it’s most needed and providing real-time insights without requiring additional hardware installations at the bedside. 

• HF Hospital at Home: Home-based care might be better for many patients with worsening heart failure, but the approach still faces significant hurdles. That’s from a Circulation: Heart Failure paper that detailed hospital at home (HaH) care’s HF advantages (similar care at lower-costs, no isolation from family). However, HaH for worsening HF largely remains limited because it’s currently appropriate for a small portion of patients, and would require new and more-permanent reimbursements, better research evidence, improved patient selection models, and greater patient/family readiness.

• CHS Taps Mindoula For Behavioral Care: Community Health Systems is tapping population health management company Mindoula Health to bring virtual behavioral health services to its 700+ affiliated primary care providers. The “collaborative care management” approach will see Mindoula provide services ranging from initial assessments to virtual follow-ups for any patients referred by their PCP for mental health concerns such as anxiety or depression.

• Healthcare CPI Methodology Update: The Bureau of Labor Statistics is updating its methodology for calculating health insurance’s impact on CPI next month, and the early verdict is that medical services are about to put some serious upward pressure on inflation. Without going into too much detail, the changes are designed to reduce volatility and lag in the payor cost numbers, and Goldman Sachs expects the change to accelerate core CPI from a three-month average of 0.14% to a 0.46% average over the next six months.

• Teen ECG Screening: Axios explored the trend towards testing teen athletes for heart conditions via ECG screening, driven by recent high-profile cardiac arrest cases and an alarming estimate that up to 80k teen athletes suffer fatal cardiac arrests annually. Although experts warn against the inefficiencies and risks that would come with screening all teen athletes, the article noted that “sudden cardiac death is still the top medical cause of death in athletes,” and cited a recent study showing that 3% of 11,500 student athletes in central Florida had abnormal ECG results.

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.

Save Time & Minimize Risk with connectRN

connectRN takes the work out of hiring at scale. connectRN’s W2 staffing solution protects you and your business from liability. Plus, their credentialing team handles everything from state licensure to background checks, and you’ll have access to it all via their user-friendly platform. Learn more.

Medallion Elevate is Where Innovation Meets Healthcare

As the leader in all-in-one provider network management, Medallion kicks off a premier one-day virtual conference on September 20th. Hear from industry leaders like Hims & Hers, Equip Health, and Optum, spotlighting groundbreaking healthcare operations strategies and tactics. With over 1,000 professionals attending last year, this year promises to be even more transformative. Secure your spot today.