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Huma Series D | Ardent IPO
July 18, 2024
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Together with
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“When it comes to care delivery, ‘different’ isn’t bad. Different – most of the time – is just different. What’s right for one place, for one setting, for one community, might not be right for another.”
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Magnolia Regional Health Center’s Dr. Ben Long
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In the latest Digital Health Wire Show, we sat down with Magnolia Regional Health Center’s Director of Hospital Medicine Dr. Ben Long to unpack the importance of affability in patient-facing solutions and why the goals of every implementation need to fit into a bigger picture. Dr. Long was a blast to have on, and his literature degree helped us sprinkle in plenty of easter eggs for the C.S. Lewis lovers out there.
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Our readers know better than anyone that building scalable digital health solutions can be a years-long voyage, which is why Huma Therapeutics closed $80M in Series D funding “to help cut that time down to days.”
Huma will be the first one to let you know that it’s the “Shopify for Digital Health,” offering modular platforms / software development kits that help provider orgs and pharmaceutical companies with use cases such as:
- multi-channel patient engagement across entire populations
- scalable remote patient monitoring programs
- companion apps to support patients through treatment and drug therapies
- digital clinical trials, including de-centralised trials to accelerate research
That technology has powered projects in over 3,000 hospitals and clinics, with 1.8M active users across its products in 70+ countries.
- Huma’s partners include providers like the NHS and Johns Hopkins University, as well as pharma giants like Bayer and AstraZeneca – which also participated in the round.
- The Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) behind Huma’s products also recently became the only configurable, disease-agnostic solution fully cleared by regulators in the U.S., E.U., and Saudi Arabia.
Up next is the Huma Cloud Platform, a no-code app builder that enables other companies to spin up their own solutions using a combination of GenAI prompts and pre-built templates.
- The platform includes a library of modules and device connectivity tools for any therapeutic area, APIs and integration capabilities, and a marketplace that creates a flywheel of new features from existing users.
- The best part? Huma’s SaMD clearance “solves all of the regulatory hurdles that developers usually face, freeing up their time and energy” to scale their apps.
Put it all together, and Huma’s tech infrastructure, partner roster, and regulatory grounding make a compelling case that we’re closer to a “Shopify for Digital Health” than we’ve ever been.
The Takeaway
Shopify brought an online presence within arms reach of millions of vendors that wouldn’t have had the resources to pull it off without them, and Huma is looking to make that same experience possible in digital health. Although healthcare is a far cry from slinging t-shirts and cookies, enabling people to focus on their craft instead of technical potholes seems like an end-goal worth striving for in any industry.
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Building a Clinician-Led Culture of Innovation
Nabla Chief Clinical Director Andrew Lundquist sat down with the Digital Thoughts podcast to discuss how one of the best ways to improve patient care has been hiding in plain sight: give clinicians more time. Listen to the full episode to learn about the new technologies helping to tackle some of healthcare’s most timeless challenges.
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Curate, Create, & Share at the Point of Care
It’s hard to find a more unique vantage point on AI than Playback Health co-founder Dr. Langer, whose role as the Chair of Neurosurgery at Lenox Hill allows him to actually use the platform he helped create. Head over to Dr. Langer’s latest blog to see how Playback is helping him spend more time caring for patients and enabling providers to “Curate, Create, & Share” at the point of care.
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K Health’s First-of-its-Kind AI Knowledge Agent
K Health’s AI Knowledge Agent is a first-of-its-kind GenAI system purpose-built for the clinical setting, with a familiar feel hiding some major innovation under the hood. Discover how the AI Knowledge Agent is bringing new levels of personalization to answering patient medical questions and changing what it means to have a “digital front door” in the process.
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- Ardent Health IPO: By the time you read this, Ardent Health could be the first major hospital operator to IPO in several years. At some point this week, Ardent is planning to raise ~$300M through an NYSE debut at between $20 and $22 per share, with the 30-hospital org joining larger peers like HCA ($84B, 182 hospitals) and Tenet ($13B, 61 hospitals). SEC filings revealed that Ardent plans to use the offering to capture more bargaining power on its current turf and expand to new markets where it can use its “best practices and established model to realize growth.”
- Headway Nabs $100M: Mental health startup Headway closed a $100M financing round that reportedly vaulted its valuation to $2.3B, according to Bloomberg sources. That’s nearly double the valuation Headway notched less than a year ago through its $125M Series C in October, underscoring the market’s appetite for companies bringing technology into the mental health arena. Headway connects patients with therapists while also handling benefits navigation and online appointment booking.
- Less Telehealth After PHE: A study in JAMA Network Open drew a straight line between policy decisions and virtual care access, finding that fewer behavioral health clinics offered telehealth after the end of the PHE. The researchers called 1k outpatient mental health facilities posing as patients before and after the end of the PHE in May 2023, revealing a slight 3% decline in the number of clinics offering telehealth (799 before, 765 after). Clinics that continued offering telehealth supported fewer services, with a large dropoff in availability of audio-only visits for alcohol use disorders.
- Spotlight on MA Upcoding: Medicare Advantage plans collected over $50B between 2018 and 2021 for “questionable diagnoses” that were added to patient records but never actually treated. A Wall Street Journal investigation found that many conditions were suspiciously prevalent among MA beneficiaries, which it linked directly to payor upcoding. One of the most eye-popping stats was that only 17% of MA beneficiaries who had an HIV diagnosis added to their record by a payor ended up seeking treatment, versus 92% who were diagnosed by a physician.
- Kins Series A: Redesign-backed Kins raised $7M in Series A funding to bring its hybrid physical therapy model to more states beyond New York and Massacheussettes. Unlike much of its virtual MSK competition, Kins’ licensed therapists typically meet patients in their home for their first session, then patients can choose whether they want to shift to virtual visits from there. This space has been white hot following a massive round from Sword and a flattering report from PHTI.
- Highest Market Value Per Employee: One of the best follows on social for healthcare visuals – Reza Zahiri – put out a great graphic highlighting the companies with the highest market value per employee in the medtech industry. Da Vinci surgical robots look like they’ve been as good for investors as they’ve been for patients, pushing Intuitive Surgical’s market cap to $152B, which equates to $11.2M per employee. That puts Intuitive in a league of its own, with the next highest rankings going to Dexcom ($4.8M per employee) and Insulet ($4.6M).
- Consumer Voices on Weight Care: As GLP-1s continue to dominate the headlines, Rock Health decided to mix things up by going straight to consumers for a fresh look at the market, with a new report that’s a breath of fresh air from the usual payor / provider / pharma perspectives. The 2024 Rock Health Weight Care Experience Survey broke down the opinions of thousands of consumers on digital weight care solutions and medications like GLP-1s, exploring everything from access barriers to the types of wraparound support people want in their weight loss journeys.
- Story Health x Guidehealth: Story Health and Guidehealth announced an alliance that will integrate Story Health’s cardiology-focused virtual care platform and health coaches into the Guidehealth platform. Among providers that work with both companies, Guidehealth’s Healthguides will identify qualified cardiovascular patients and assist with their enrollment with Story Health, then Story Health will directly engage patients to get and keep their care on track, and Healthguides will ensure providers are kept updated and involved in any care escalations.
- Thyme VBC Raise: Value-based cancer care enabler Thyme Care rounded out this week’s investment-heavy news cycle with a mix of $55M in equity funding and $40M of debt financing. The capital injection will support Thyme’s rollout of national health plan coverage and power provider growth in new regions. Thyme “challenges inefficiencies and waste in today’s FFS environment” by using its close relationships with oncology practices, primary care groups, and health plans to take on two-sided risk.
- This Is Your Brain on Shrooms: A new study in Nature used functional MRI to analyze the impact of psilocybin – the magic ingredient in magic mushrooms – on the brain. Researchers had 18 volunteers take either high doses of psilocybin or methylphenidate (Ritalin) before running them through a scanner. Psilocybin caused “profound and widespread” brain changes, in particular desynchronizing the default mode network. Most of the effect faded when the drug wore off, but the small differences that persisted for weeks added to the evidence supporting psilocybin’s potential to treat mental illnesses like depression and PTSD.
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Clear Arch Health Reduces Readmissions at Altru
When Altru Health System set out to reduce hospital readmissions, it turned to Clear Arch Health to find the solution. Learn how Clear Arch Health’s complete RPM platform and clinical monitoring system helped Altru lower readmissions while improving post-acute care quality.
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Pioneering Real Change in Diabetes Care
Withings’ newest Rx device is the first and only cellular scale to measure a patient’s electrochemical skin conductance, which may help in the early detection of diabetic peripheral neuropathy and reduce the risk of developing diabetic foot ulcers. Learn about the Body Pro 2 here.
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The State of Payor Enrollment and Credentialing
We’re on the brink of a new era in healthcare. From AI-enabled chatbots to GenAI, Medallion’s latest report sheds light on how healthcare organizations are prioritizing automation, actively shaping their future with it, and hoping it can live up to its promise. Get the full report here.
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