Nourish CEO Aidan Dewar

Telehealth

Brightside Raises $33M for Medicaid Expansion

Last week’s funding-heavy news cycle was punctuated by Brightside Health’s $33M Series C round, which added more momentum to the telemental healthcare provider’s recent expansion efforts.

Brightside provides full-range care for patients with mood disorders spanning anywhere from mild anxiety to severe depression. The “precision psychiatry” platform is built on a technology backbone that includes:

• ActiveSupervision – a real-time care management solution that tracks patient progress and identifies situations that might require risk escalation.

• PrecisionRx – AI clinical decision support that recommends medication and dose combinations most likely to be effective (resulting in a 70% response rate to the first treatment cycle, twice the industry standard).

• Crisis Care – a national telehealth program for individuals with elevated suicide risk.

In the two years since its last raise, Brightside has scaled those solutions to the point where it can now provide in-network care to over 100 million covered lives, and it’s published close to a dozen peer-reviewed papers supporting its approach. 

• A study from November showed that the Crisis Care program was effective at eliminating suicidal ideation in an average of six sessions.

• Another study in the March 2023 issue of Psychotherapy Research found that supplementing teletherapy with video lessons helps address depression and anxiety.

Put all that together, and Brightside is uniquely positioned to serve not only the highest-acuity patients, but also the populations that often have the hardest time finding effective care.

• The fresh capital will help it do just that, advancing its expansion into Medicare and Medicaid through recent payor partnerships with CareOregon, Blue Shield of California, BCBS of Texas, and Centene.

• The Series C also put Brightside on a “comfortable path to profitability” in the next few quarters, with former Optum Behavioral Health Solutions CEO Trip Hofer joining the board to help oversee the next leg of that journey.

The Takeaway

Few telemental health companies have been brave enough to target the patients with the most severe symptoms, let alone those in the markets with the greatest need. Even fewer have been open to publishing their results. Brightside’s willingness to check all of those boxes makes it a must-watch in this space, especially considering that it’s tackling that checklist with soon-to-be positive margins.

Meet Nabla at Becker’s Annual Meeting

Nabla is heading to Becker’s Annual Meeting on April 8-11 in Chicago! Swing by Booth #515 to meet the team, watch Nabla Copilot in action, and discuss clinical leadership in changing times.

Selecting Your Drug Database and CDS Solution

Do your providers need easy access to real-time drug knowledge and clinical decision support? Explore Synapse Medicine’s complete guide to drug database advantages, use cases, challenges, and factors to consider when selecting the right solution for your organization.

Discover Clear Arch Health’s RPM Platform

With ready-to-use devices, data-driven dashboards, and integrated analytics, Clear Arch Health’s turnkey RPM platform is designed to meet the evolving needs of care delivery. Find out how Clear Arch Health can help keep your providers connected to their patients and equipped with the actionable insights they need to improve outcomes.

The Wire

• Retail Clinic Use Doubles: A FAIR Health report showed that retail health clinic utilization jumped over 200% nationally in 2022. This represented the most growth of any care site – due primarily to cost and convenience factors in the early days of the pandemic – although retail clinics still only represent 0.2% of medical claims (vs. 3.9% for telehealth and 4.2% for EDs). 

• Nourish Lands $35M: Telenutrition startup Nourish grabbed a $35M portion of Series A funding to connect more patients managing chronic conditions with in-network registered dietitians, while also helping those dietitians handle their behind-the-scenes administrative work. Nourish users meet with dietitians through virtual appointments, then receive personalized care plans, meal trackers, educational content, and chat support between visits.

• Nascent Areas for GenAI: A great article in Ambar Bhattacharyya’s aptly named Ambar’s Substack reimagines the care delivery journey with a jobs-to-be-done approach to generative AI, identifying processes with the most nascent potential for improvement across pre-hospital tasks, in-hospital tasks, and post-hospital tasks. This chart summarizes the areas with the most to gain, while providing a useful framework for thinking about genAI use cases in relation to their complexity and ease of adoption.

• Hospital Performance Stable in February: Kaufman Hall’s latest Flash Report showed a continuation of the “strong start” to 2024, with February hospital margins averaging 4%. That said, labor costs and general inflation continue to pile up, and those figures still don’t reflect the impact of recent cybersecurity incidents. While overall revenue growth is getting driven from the outpatient setting, the decline in inpatient revenue is dragging on. Next month’s report should give a much better read on the current state of affairs.

• Pelago Secures $58M: Pelago, the virtual substance use disorder clinic formerly known as Quit Genius, landed $58M in Series C funding to fuel its expansion into new treatment areas beyond tobacco, alcohol, and opioids. Founded in 2015, Pelago provides cognitive behavioral therapy and medication-assisted treatment facilitated via telehealth to help patients who have difficulty attending in-person appointments due to logistical or psychological barriers. It removes further friction from the recovery process by mailing equipment such as remote monitoring devices and breathalyzers when needed.

• Federal Health IT Strategic Plan: HHS released its Federal Health IT Strategic Plan for modernizing the national public health data infrastructure and promoting interoperability between now and 2023. The VA will use the plan’s guidance as it continues its EHR roll out, and specifically mentioned a commitment to preventing cyberattacks and improving resiliency. A blog post from the American Hospital Association applauded HHS’ efforts to include cybersecurity goals, but was noticeably critical of the decision to implement mandatory cybersecurity requirements based exclusively on this concept paper.

• Inexperienced Clinician Safety Concerns: Helping newly trained clinicians transition from education to practice topped the list of healthcare experts’ patient safety concerns for this year, according to ECRI and the Institute for Safe Medication Practices. New clinicians who entered the workforce during the pandemic faced rapidly changing protocols and relatively scarce mentorship, which ECRI expects to “contribute directly to patient harm events” unless sufficient support is created to offset the deficit (e.g. collaborations between academic and provider institutions, transition-to-practice programs, simulation-based education).

• Walgreens Cuts More VillageMD Clinics: Walgreens’ firework show of a Q2 investor call revealed a $5.8 billion write-down on its VillageMD operations, as well as plans to shutter more than twice as many clinics as previously announced. The pharmacy chain has already shut down 140 VillageMD locations (the original plan was to close 60), and expects to close 20 more clinics before the end of this year. To put the cost-cutting in perspective, it’s been three years since Walgreens invested $5.2B for a majority stake in VillageMD, and that announcement included plans to open 1,000 new clinics before spinning out VillageMD through an IPO by 2023.

• A Tale of Two Regulatory Journeys: A TCTMD editorial by Sanjay Kaul, MD put a spotlight on the extremely different regulatory approval pathways for drugs and devices, which could be leading to dubious device approvals while keeping some potentially beneficial drugs off the market. This editorial is worth a read, but the gist is that devices generally don’t require the same level of evidence as drugs to gain FDA approval, and Dr. Kaul’s list of recent device approvals provides plenty of supporting evidence.

• Float Series A: Staffing and pharmacy referral platform Float closed a $10M Series A round to place registered nurses in home care shifts across California and Arizona, with more states coming up on the roadmap. Float works exclusively with RNs and specifically targets those with experience in home-based infusion and oncology. Specialty pharmacies send Float staffing requests so that it can fill them with qualified candidates according to schedule, location, and accreditation requirements.

• Patient Access to Radiology Reports: Patients reading their own radiology reports can be a thorny issue. But Mayo Clinic researchers found that patient access rose when they released data immediately through patient portals rather than holding it so referring physicians could see it first. In a study in AJR, they reported that more patients accessed their data (80% vs. 78%) and got access more quickly (5.5 vs. 45 hours), but also the percentage viewing their reports before referring physicians rose (44% vs. 19%).

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Better Diabetes Management With Glooko

Glooko’s diabetes management platform transforms the way patients connect with their providers, driving better engagement, adherence, and ultimately outcomes. Take a look at Glooko’s latest clinical studies to see how their platform is driving sustained improvements for people with diabetes.

Unlock Revenue Potential in Payor Enrollment

Tune into Medallion’s Webinar on April 4 to delve into the intricacies of managing providers’ CAQH profiles during payor enrollment and learn the best practices to prevent any lapses. They’ll be walking through the end-to-end process, as well as the solutions that can help elevate your credentialing workflow.