Economist Herb Stein’s law that’s as applicable to US healthcare as it is to financial bubbles.

Digital Health

HLTH23 Recap and Major Announcements

Another HLTH is in the rearview mirror, and this week’s exhibit hall chatter was a testament to how much things can change in a single year.

It’s hard to believe that this intro for last November’s show didn’t include a single mention of generative AI. In a few short months, nearly every exhibitor has not only thought about incorporating LLMs, but has implemented new features and shipped entire solutions centered around the technology. 

It was also refreshing to see the amount of good ol’ fashioned innovation happening outside of the AI-focused spotlight. To help keep it all straight, here’s our recap of the major announcements, launches, and partnerships from HLTH23: 

• Artisight announced a virtual nursing and remote patient monitoring pilot with WellSpan Health, leveraging in-room audio / video connections and an in-facility control room to interact with patients and request clinician assistance when needed.

• b.well Connected Health is integrating with Samsung Health to give millions users control of their longitudinal health record plus proactive insights from a growing network of providers, including Walgreens, ThedaCare, Lee Health, and Rise Health.

• CirrusMD showcased its Physician-first Care & Guidance model that streamlines care journeys by building around the physician, allowing them to overcome traditional limitations of one-to-one encounters through collaborative virtual environments. 

• Darena Solutions took the lid off its new MeldRx platform-as-a-service that enables the rapid creation of FHIR-compatible healthcare apps, taking much of the guesswork out of app development while ensuring that new tools integrate seamlessly with EHRs.

• DrFirst unveiled its Fuzion platform that uses “clinical-grade AI” to streamline clinical workflows such as medication reconciliation, eliminating the need for manual data entry while offering analytics on drug fills, patient engagement, and improvement areas. 

• Google Cloud announced healthcare-focused search capabilities that connect clinical data to the Vertex AI algorithm development platform, functionality that can be combined with Med-PaLM 2 to let providers surface answers to specific medical questions.

• HATCo – AKA the Health Assurance Transformation Company – is on the M&A hunt after General Catalyst unveiled the company with the intention of acquiring a health system to serve as a proving ground for tech-enabled care. We’ll unpack this one more on Monday.

• Health Gorilla announced that 17 healthcare organizations have committed to its QHIN once designated (on track to be before the end of the year), a list that included heavy hitters such as Evernorth and Virta Health.

• MDLIVE, the telehealth arm of Cigna’s Evernorth, acquired the technology behind Bright.md to begin offering asynchronous options for virtual care in 2024, with plans to expand to chronic condition management and wellness visits at a later time.

• Nuance shared some impressive results from Atrium Health’s roll out of DAX Copilot, which included 92% of clinicians saying the automatic documentation solution was “easy to use” and 84% reporting an overall improved documentation experience.

• PEP Health put out a stellar report using AI-powered natural language processing on over 25M patient comments across 8.5M unique web pages to create what might be the first national index on experience scores that doesn’t rely on survey data.

• Solera Health launched its HALO unified benefits platform that allows payors and employers to manage all Solera and non-Solera point solutions within a single interface, including a consolidated dashboard to assess program effectiveness side by side.

• SteadyMD is rolling out an all-in-one virtual care solution that combines 98point6’s tech backend with SteadyMD’s 50-state clinician network to help short staffed healthcare organizations lower operational costs while handling additional patient volume.

• Talkiatry debuted its new Mindshare partner program that lets providers easily refer their patients for telepsychiatric care from Talkiatry’s network of 300 psychiatrists across 44 states, with NYU Langone, NOCD, and Transact Campus signed-on at launch.

• Walgreens is throwing its hat into the virtual care ring as it continues its strategic pivot to healthcare services, with virtual consultations for common medical needs and prescriptions slated to begin later this month.

• Withings Health Solutions is partnering with Validic to integrate its suite of cellular devices with the IoT platform, providing seamless access devices such as the Withings Body Pro smart scale and the Withings BPM Connect Pro blood pressure monitor.

Special thanks to everyone at HLTH who caught us up on the latest and greatest, and welcome to all of our new readers we met at the show! Stay tuned for deeper dives into many of these announcements in next week’s Digital Health Wire.

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• CVS Super App: Although not quite yet at the press release stage, CVS Health Chief Medical Officer Sree Chaguturu told HLTH attendees that the company is looking to create a healthcare “super app” connecting multiple omnichannel experiences. The app ideas shared at the show certainly weren’t lacking in ambition, with CVS apparently aiming to integrate recently acquired services such as Oak Street and Signify, as well as benefits and retail, all under a unified umbrella.

• The Ripple Effect of GLP1s: Ro CEO Zach Reitano shared his thoughts on the potential impact of GLP1s as they relate to pretty much everything, from healthcare and consumerism to lifestyle and intimacy. It’s hard to overestimate the influence that these drugs are poised to wield over the entire economy, which Reitano compares to “millions of butterflies flapping their wings – small changes resulting in massive, impossible to predict, far reaching ramifications.”

• Pediatric Telemental Health Surge: Perhaps no area of healthcare saw a greater utilization increase since the start of the pandemic than pediatric telemental health, which soared 2,300% between January 2019 to August 2022. That’s from a new JAMA study of 1.9M mental health visits from <19-year patients with commercial coverage, which coincided with a 25% decline in in-person pediatric behavioral services over the same time period. All together, total pediatric mental health utilization was up 21.7%.

• Commons Clinic Lands $19.5M: Musculoskeletal care provider Commons Clinic landed $19.5M in Series A funding to disrupt the “stagnant hospital-centric model” through a combination of conservative treatment, digital-first services, and the use of surgery centers for procedures. Commons Clinic partners with brick-and-mortar facilities to guide patients through treatment while supporting them with virtual physical therapy, a hybrid strategy that it’s hoping will position it as the One Medical of value-based specialty care.

• Cardiovascular-Kidney-Metabolic Syndrome: The connection between obesity, type 2 diabetes, chronic kidney disease, and cardiovascular disease has become abundantly clear, leading the American Heart Association to officially define this clinical overlap as cardiovascular-kidney-metabolic syndrome (CKM syndrome). In its official statements, the AHA defined CKM syndrome’s severity stages (0-4), detailed how different healthcare specialties should collaborate for shared CKM patients, and encouraged adding CKM factors to risk calculators.

• Modifiable CVD Risk Factors’ Major Toll: In somewhat related news, a large pooled NEJM analysis of 112 studies in 34 countries charted the effects of five modifiable cardiovascular risk factors: BMI, systolic BP, LDL-C, smoking, and diabetes. Data from over 1.5M people show that these five factors may be at the root of over half of CVD cases in both women and men (57.2% & 52.6%) and roughly one fifth of all-cause deaths (22.2% & 19.1%).

• Optimize Series B: Remote patient monitoring startup Optimize Health closed $18M in Series B financing (total raised now $37.1M) to expand the reach of its customizable RPM platform that sits on top of providers’ existing tech stacks. The Optimize platform provides “a single pane of glass” for providers to enroll and treat patients across remote patient monitoring, chronic care management, and principal care management through a joint solution.

• NuraLogix’s Video AI Launch: NuraLogix announced the availability of its unique Anura telehealth platform, allowing physicians to monitor a wide range of patient vitals during video calls using analysis of patients’ faces. The platform analyzes facial blood flow data and then applies AI to estimate over 100 health parameters (e.g. pulse, respiration, blood pressure, cardiac workload) and make risk assessments (e.g. T2D, CVD, heart attack, stroke, hypertension).

• Nursing Home Turnover: A recent JAMA Internal Medicine study highlighted the association between nursing home staff turnover and care quality using data from 13,826 facilities. The study found that an additional 10 percentage points in nursing staff turnover within two weeks of a health inspection was associated with 0.241 more citations (avg 5.98 citations). Considering that during an average week 15% of nursing staff and 11.6% of administrators were new hires brought on after recent turnover, that can really add up.

• FDA Sets Up Digital Health Group: The FDA established a new Digital Health Advisory Committee to help guide the agency’s policies on technologies like AI and machine learning, augmented and virtual reality, and wearable devices. The move illustrates digital health’s growing importance in the eyes of the FDA, and the agency is now accepting nominations of experts to serve in the nine-member committee.

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