Awell Head of Engineering Jonathan Belanger

Startups

Talkiatry Hauls in $130M Series C

Times are tough, which means business is booming for virtual behavioral health providers like Talkiatry – a telepsychiatry startup that just hauled in $130M in Series C funding.

Since launching in 2020, Talkiatry has built a network of over 320 psychiatrists, who serve patients with conditions ranging from anxiety and depression to OCD and PTSD.

• Talkiatry operates in 43 states, and is in-network with more than 60 payors, reportedly covering 70% of commercial lives in the US.

• It’s also begun leaning in on partnerships with health systems, and recently scored a major contract with HCA Healthcare.

Unlike most behavioral telehealth companies that got their start at the onset of the pandemic, Talkiatry’s physicians are W-2 employees, rather than contractors.

• This allows Talkiatry to standardize the quality of physician care and influence patient outcomes over time, crucial ingredients to any recipe for value-based care success.

• That model also makes Talkiatry one of the few companies that can demonstrate superior outcomes to major payors. A recent cohort study showed that Talkiatry led to a 68% reduction in hospitalizations, 32% fewer ED visits, and $700 lower monthly care costs.

The benefits of Talkiatry’s model compound with scale: as its full-time psychiatrists continue demonstrating superior outcomes, it can sign more partnerships with payors and reach more patients. That puts it in a solid position to take on additional risk.

• Talkiatry earmarked the fresh funds to scale up its VBC offerings and begin taking on more downside risk, a move that few behavioral health companies have been willing to make given the difficulty of proving performance. “There’s no blood test for depression.”

The Takeaway

Demand for behavioral health resources only continues to climb, yet there are still significant barriers to delivering the care that’s being called for – particularly a shortage of providers and a lack of technology to help fill the gap. Talkiatry overcomes both of these hurdles by offering virtual treatment from in-house psychiatrists, and it now has $130M to continue scaling its model for patients in need.

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The Wire

• OpenAI Teams Up With Color: OpenAI is teaming up with cancer testing startup Color Health to use its just-released GPT-4o model to flag missing diagnostics and suggest potential treatment paths. The new co-pilot ingests patient data from medical notes, such as family history and individual risk factors, to create comprehensive care plans for the “clinician-in-the-loop” to review. This is OpenAI’s latest foray into healthcare after partnering with Moderna in April to speed up business processes like selecting optimal dosages for clinical trials.

• You’re Using Your EHR Wrong: Awell’s Jonathan Belanger put out a stellar blog post on the limitations of traditional EHRs, and the ways that forward-thinking care delivery orgs can move past them. Many organizations are attempting to deliver differentiated care with an undifferentiated EHR interface, without the features they need to tailor the user experience to their unique needs. Belanger outlines why innovators like Oak Street and Firefly are taking a different approach by reimagining their EHRs to create user experiences that center around their competitive advantages.

• Debt Relief’s Limited Impact: A study from the National Bureau of Economic Research showed that eliminating people’s medical debt doesn’t improve their financial well-being or increase their use of healthcare services, and could actually hurt their overall mental health. The counterintuitive findings highlight the limited impact of debt forgiveness programs, and make it clear that effective solutions need to come further upstream, such as preventing hospitals from pursuing aggressive debt collections in the first place.

• Nomad Lands $22M and New CEO: Healthcare staffing marketplace Nomad Health closed $22M in unlabeled funding and named a new CEO after laying off 17% of its workforce earlier this year. Nomad’s platform allows temporary workers to search for healthcare job openings nationwide, filter the results by salary / specialty, and apply for positions or manage their resumes. Former Nomad COO Justin Lambert is taking over the CEO role from Dr. Alexi Nazem, who will remain on the board of directors.

• Multimodal AI Disease Prediction: A Science commentary from the one-and-only Eric Topol laid out the transformative potential of multimodal AI for identifying people at high risk of major diseases. Using Alzheimer’s as one example, Topol explains how multimodal AI can already predict the disease up to 7 years before diagnosis by incorporating various data types like EHR info on cholesterol or blood pressure, polygenic risk scores, and retinal imaging.

• Ransomware Surge: Cybersecurity firm Recorded Future counted 44 healthcare-related incidents in the weeks after Change Healthcare forked over $22M to its attackers, a record high monthly total. Although it isn’t too surprising that one of the largest successful ransoms in history caused a surge of new attacks, this year had already started on a rough trajectory. Every month of 2024 has seen more healthcare ransomware attacks than the same month in any previous year, and the forecast isn’t looking great for H2.

• Stitch PEO Debut: Stitch PEO just became the latest startup to hatch from the Redesign Health incubator, debuting with $8.75 in seed funding to help medical practices reduce their HR burdens. Stitch is a professional employer organization with a comprehensive HR platform that automates routine processes like onboarding and compliance. It also uses a co-employment model to pool employees from different practices and negotiate the best possible benefits, including health, disability, and 401(k).

• Predicting Cardiac Arrests: University of Washington researchers found that common EHR data can be used to identify people with higher risks of suffering out-of-hospital cardiac arrests (OHCAs). The researchers analyzed EHR data from 2,366 individuals with OHCA and 23,660 matched controls, finding significant differences in the OHCA group (longer QT intervals in their ECGs, substance abuse, fluid and electrolyte disorder, higher heart rate). The EHR machine learning models identified OHCA individuals far more accurately than a model based on cardiovascular risk factors (AUROC: 0.80-0.85 vs. 0.66).

• Healthcare’s Automation Conundrum: Philips’ latest Future Health Index report underscores a serious conundrum around healthcare automation: 92% of healthcare leaders see automation as a necessary tool for addressing staff shortages, yet 65% say their staff is skeptical about over-automating their workflows. Quality assurance is a concern, while many fear staff could lose skills by building a reliance on automation. Training will be key to ensuring that staff continue to develop their expertise and that automation supports rather than replaces professional judgment. 

• One Medical Safety Issues: Leaked documents revealed serious patient safety issues at One Medical, raising concern that Amazon’s “frugal approach to healthcare” may be putting lives in danger. Since Amazon acquired the primary care company in February 2023, senior patients have been routed to call centers staffed by contractors with limited training, which have failed on at least a dozen occasions to escalate calls involving “red flag” symptoms. One patient reported a blood clot and swelling, only for the call center to schedule a future appointment instead of prioritizing the issue for immediate review.

• CVAUSA Adds athenahealth: Major cardiology MSO Cardiovascular Associates of America selected athenahealth as its practices’ go-to health IT platform. The alliance gives CVAUSA’s 23 practices preferred status to purchase athenaOne, athenahealth’s suite of EHR, revenue cycle management, and patient engagement solutions. Given that over half of CVAUSA’s practices were acquired in the last 18 months, the athenahealth partnership might be a key step in bringing these practices under a unified IT structure.

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