Redesign Health Venture Chair James Quarles

Digital Health

ViVE 2024 Recap and Major Announcements

ViVE Los Angeles is officially a wrap, and the collaborative event between HLTH and CHIME keeps growing up right before our eyes.

The show’s third year eased up on the flashy displays and DJs that were hard to miss in Miami and Nashville in favor of a more down-to-business approach, not unlike the AI conversations happening in the expo hall.

True to form, the vendors were the stars of the show, so we’ll follow ViVE’s lead and get right into some of the biggest announcements that came out of La La Land:

• Arcadia unveiled its next-generation data platform powered by an open lakehouse architecture. We won’t pretend to know exactly what that means, but it’ll apparently be a nice boost to Arcadia’s population health and value-based care capabilities.

• Artera gave an update on its digital health marketplace, which now includes 50+ vendors after bringing on newcomers like Azara Healthcare, Health iPASS, and Memora Health. Artera’s Message API now receives a whopping 150 million calls each year.

• AvaSure rolled out its Episodic virtual care solution that allows care teams to seamlessly collaborate regardless of location around admissions, discharges, rounds, and specialty consults.

• Biofourmis is partnering with GE HealthCare to enhance continuity of care during transitions from the hospital to the home. Biofourmis’ care-at-home solutions will extend GE HealthCare’s inpatient monitoring portfolio.

• Brightside Health announced a string of new payor partnerships to support Medicaid and Medicare after moving into the space a few months ago. The big name roster includes CareOregon, Blue Shield of California, BCBS of Texas, and Centene.

• CancerX revealed the 16 members of its inaugural Startup Accelerator, which includes a healthy mix of up-and-comers across clinical research, diagnosis, treatment, operations, and care experience. 

• DeepScribe is working with Amazon Web Services to scale purpose-built healthcare LLMs, and is incorporating AWS HealthScribe into its platform while also making its ambient documentation tool available to health systems through AWS Marketplace.

• Elevance is launching a digital weight management program for employer clients of its CarelonRx PBM. Users who are prescribed GLP-1s will have access to medication management support and a digital companion module.

• Gozio released new data showing that 86% of patients who received medical care in the last year used a mobile device when interacting with their provider. Although using a single platform to reach their provider is important to nearly all patients, 46% are still using multiple.

• Highmark is joining forces with Epic and Google to bring more data to the point of care. Epic’s Payer Platform will enable “bidirectional” data sharing between the payor and providers, while Google Cloud will allow the tech to integrate with Highmark’s existing systems.

• Included Health is embedding the CDC’s Healthy Days measure into its navigation service following a successful two year pilot.

• Vale Health made its grand debut as it looks to build an online marketplace of vetted wellness offerings for consumers, and it already has sixteen health systems in its corner.

• Veda Health is teaming up with Humana to improve the accuracy of its provider directories and ensure that seniors have real-time details about in-network providers. Love to see this come full circle after Veda got its start in a Humana hackathon back in 2016.

• Xealth’s Digital Health Review showed how digital tools are reshaping surgery, chronic care, and preventive services. Preventive care programs are seeing the highest levels of patient engagement, while surgery preparation programs see the highest enrollment.

Huge thanks to all of our readers who were in LA and took the time to walk us through the latest and greatest. For everyone holding onto more announcements for HIMSS, we’d love to connect in Orlando. Hit reply and let’s get it on the books!

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The Wire

• Nuvance + Northwell: Connecticut-based Nuvance Health looks set to merge with Northwell Health, New York’s largest provider and private employer. Although we’ll have to wait and see how the regulatory approval goes, the merger would create a network of over 28 hospitals, 1,000+ care sites, and upwards of 14,500 providers. Nuvance’s seven hospitals notched $2.7B in revenue and a $164M operating loss in 2023, while Northwell pulled in over $15B and is currently running at a 1.1% operating margin.

• Senior Healthcare Utilization: New research in Annals of Internal Medicine shows that seniors had an average of 20.7 total healthcare contact days in 2019, meaning three weeks of their year was spent getting care outside the home. Looking at Medicare data for 6,619 patients, most of those days were devoted to ambulatory care, including primary care visits (5 days), specialty care visits (7), treatments (7), imaging (6), and procedures (5). Just over 11% of those seniors racked up over 50 total contact days.

• b.well Series C: Health data unification platform b.well Connected Health closed a $40M Series C round, bringing its total raised to $88M since launching in 2015. b.well helps payors, providers, retail pharmacies, and employers equip their populations with tools that allow them to take a proactive approach to their health. Users can use b.well to see a unified view of their health data, as well as personalized insights into potential care needs. Stay tuned for a deeper dive on Monday.

• Veradigm Acquires ScienceIO: Veradigm scooped up healthcare AI developer ScienceIO for a cool $140M, gaining access to a range of models to bolster use cases such as patient anonymization, record linkage, information extraction, summarization, and predictive analytics. Coincidentally announced on the same day, Veradigm is also getting delisted from the Nasdaq after failing to comply with reporting requirements. Turns out the SEC is serious about having public companies file a quarterly report every once in a while.

• The Ups and Downs of AI: CirrusMD put out a great white paper exploring AI’s most promising prospects in the realm of care delivery, as well as the areas where it’s bumping into some early setbacks. The paper takes a bright outlook on use cases such as patient navigation, clinical decision support, and coding, while also citing several studies highlighting why a cautious approach is critical in areas like behavioral health and medication support.

• Reveleer Secures $65M: Data and analytics startup Reveleer secured $65M in unlabeled financing to scale its payor-focused platform supporting areas such as risk adjustment, quality improvement, and member management. The financing follows Reveleer’s acquisition of risk adjustment platform MDPortals in May of last year, which helped with aggregating patient data from across the continuum of care into a longitudinal health record.

• Voters Split on Best ACA Candidate: Unexpected medical bills and healthcare costs top the list of expenses that US adults are worried about, with 3 in 4 adults saying they are “very” or “somewhat worried,” according to the latest KFF Health Tracking Poll. Over half (55%) are worried about prescription drug costs, while a similar share (48%) is concerned about their health plan’s monthly premium. When asked which candidate has a better approach to the future of the Affordable Care Act, 90% of Democrats went with Biden and 91% of Republicans went with Trump. That said, only 30% of Republicans believe Trump has a better health plan to replace it.

• Signify Adds In-Home AFib Testing: Signify Health announced the addition of arrhythmia testing to its in-home Diagnostic and Preventive Services offering. Signify will screen patients to identify those with greater arrhythmia risks, then offer ECG patches to all at-risk patients without contraindications. After 14 days of continuous wear, ECG data will be shared with a cardiologist for AFib diagnosis, and those findings will then be shared with members and their PCPs. Signify’s AFib testing service arrives just a few months after it added home kidney health evaluations.

• Redi Lands $14M: Redi Health landed $14M in Series B funding to expand its health management platform that includes a patient-facing mobile app and web platform for things like medication and symptom tracking. The platform is tuned for patients taking specialty drugs, with features such as medication reminders and advice for managing symptoms or diet. Redi’s navigation tool also facilitates connections between life sciences orgs, care providers, and other stakeholders (specialty pharmacies, data aggregators, payors).

• Physician Sentiment Survey: Athenahealth’s 2024 Physician Sentiment Survey found that nearly all of the 1,000+ respondents feel burned out on a regular basis (93%), with an average of 15 hours of “pajama time” work per week. As a result, 56% said they’ve considered leaving the field or no longer seeing patients. Many of them are sticking around to see whether AI can help ease the burden, and 83% are hopeful that AI could eventually reduce “many of the problems facing healthcare.”

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