Hint Health CEO Zak Holdsworth

Primary Care

Hint Introduces Hint AI at Annual Summit

Direct primary care seemed more alive than ever at last week’s Hint Summit, which brought together physicians looking to escape the fee-for-service “hamster wheel” and companies building the tools to make that possible.

That of course includes Hint Health, who introduced its new Hint AI solution to help DPC physicians focus on their patients by automatically generating visit notes.

For a quick refresher on direct primary care, it’s a membership model where providers offer a fixed monthly rate for their services, eliminating the need for payor involvement as well as the mountain of administrative work that comes along with it. 

• DPC also allows physicians to work for their patients instead of the system, resulting in shorter waits for appointments and more time for each visit (45min vs. 18min for FFS).

• Despite its advantages, DPC still represents less than 1% of US primary care, in large part due to the hurdles of standing up a practice without the usual foundation of payor revenue. That’s where Hint comes in.

Hint’s All-in-One platform automates membership management and billing, while also serving as an EHR, communications solution, and now an AI assistant. Basically DPC-in-a-box.

• Every feature within the platform is designed to bring DPC physicians closer to their patients, which Hint AI accomplishes by automatically transcribing visit notes and generating summaries that can be directly embedded into the patient record.

• Unlike similar tools used by the wider healthcare system, Hint AI is tailored to the unique complexities of direct care, ensuring that anyone practicing under the DPC umbrella has access to the same technology without having to make compromises for their use case. 

The Takeaway

AI built for traditional healthcare will center around the problems of traditional healthcare, and the clashing aims of payors and providers will undoubtedly create plenty of new tools that reinforce these systems instead of fixing the underlying issues. Direct primary care physicians work outside of this status quo, only adopting tech like Hint AI that makes a tangible impact on patient care, and making DPC a great place to keep an eye out for the innovations actually moving the needle on care delivery.

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The Wire

• Inbound Closes $30M for HaH Enablement: Inbound Health closed a $30M Series B round to help more health systems spin up their own hospital-at-home and SNF-at-home programs. The first half of Inbound’s platform covers all the bases of a robust at-home care program (virtual care teams, in-person nursing, RPM, engagement), which is rounded out with operational oversight, a comprehensive supply chain, and performance-based contracts. A flexible partnership structure also allows providers to leverage their existing capabilities while only relying on Inbound to scale their programs.

• AI Won’t Replace Physicians: Google Health Chief Clinical Officer Dr. Michael Howell gave a great interview to JAMA on the immense potential of AI innovation in healthcare, as well as the drawbacks that come along with the territory. One of the main points that Dr. Howell drove home was that AI isn’t here to replace physicians, but rather to help them deliver their best care by eliminating administrative drudgery and serving as a tireless assistant on the clinical side.

• Health Gorilla Rolls Out Patient Access: Health Gorilla rolled out a new Patient Access solution that enables healthcare organizations to obtain comprehensive data through queries to national health information networks (Health Gorilla, CommonWell, Carequality). Accessing data from national exchanges has traditionally been limited to specific use-cases like treatment, but now non-treatment healthcare organizations and patients can leverage Patient Access to retrieve / share their clinical data with the nationwide network of clinics, hospitals, and EHRs.

• CardioOne’s Big Week: CardioOne made several headlines after announcing $8M in funding, an expansion into three new states (NJ, PA, FL), and an alliance with MedAxiom. CardioOne helps cardiologists remain independent as they transition to VBC through its platform that combines practice management tech, talent, and administrative support to cut down on day-to-day operational burdens. The company emerged from Redesign Health just last year, and is adding to existing partnerships in Texas and Maryland.

• Care Shifting to NPs and PAs: Healthcare is quickly shifting away from doctors, with a Harvard-led study in The BMJ revealing that a quarter of all visits are now delivered by NPs and PAs. After analyzing 276M Medicare visits between 2013 and 2019, researchers found that the share of visits delivered by NPs and PAs climbed from 14% to 25.6%, with wide variation across conditions. Respiratory infections led the way with 41.5% of visits delivered by NPs and PAs, followed by anxiety disorders (36.7%), hypertension (20.4%), and eye conditions (13.2%).

• Arcadia Launches AI Assistant: Arcadia debuted its own generative AI assistant geared toward improving care team efficiency by catching “needle in the haystack” insights such as undocumented medical conditions. The assistant combs through longitudinal patient records curated within Arcadia’s data platform to cut down on the time required for tasks like risk factor documentation or utilization reporting, and the roadmap already includes support for unstructured data types and a “development factory” where users can build their own self-service AI applications.

• Amenities Digital Front Door Series A: Amenities Health hauled in $10M in Series A funding to improve patient loyalty by bringing health systems an “Amazon-like experience where patients can easily register in 30 seconds, find and book their appointments online, and receive same-day services.” The white-labeled Digital Front Door surfaces every appointment across the provider’s network (including virtual options), then organizes the information based on factors such as availability, distance, and the types of coverage accepted.

• CommonSpirit Launches VBC Platform: CommonSpirit is the latest provider positioning itself as an attractive partner for independent physicians looking to make the leap into VBC. A new care management platform, dubbed the Population Health Services Organization, equips providers with a deep toolkit of population-level analytics, network management, care coordination, and reporting dashboards. The PHSO should also be able to serve “a more diverse payor portfolio” than other MSOs, given that CommonSpirit is operational in 24 states and currently manages over 2.6M patients in value-based arrangements.

• 500k Dropped Due to Medicaid Error: Half a million people were mistakenly kicked off of Medicaid due to state errors, according to a CMS release. Apparently 30 states were incorrectly reviewing Medicaid eligibility at the family level instead of on an individual basis, causing 500k members (most of which were children) to be deemed ineligible instead of automatically re-enrolled. That represents a decent percentage of the 7.2M people who have lost Medicaid since April, and CMS is now working to restore coverage for everyone affected.

• Story & WVU’s Home HF Alliance: Story Health and the WVU Heart and Vascular Institute launched a new heart failure partnership, combining WVU’s clinical expertise with Story Health’s virtual care platform and health coaches. That combination would transfer more care to patient homes, while adding personalized support for treatment and care management to reduce WVU’s readmissions and repeat clinic visits. Story Health’s approach seems to be gaining steam, after getting its start with ChristianaCare in 2021 and partnering with Intermountain in early 2023.

• NY Times Probes Prenuvo: The New York Times published a spotlight story on full-body MRI screening company Prenuvo, and while all press is good press, the author definitely kept to a pretty skeptical slant. The article focused on Prenuvo’s marketing tactics, such as its use of celebrities like Kim Kardashian to tout its offerings, but also dove deeper into the question of whether full-body screening is clinically justified (Spoiler: most clinicians don’t think it is).

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