|
CoachCare Expansion | Benchmarking vs. Improvement
August 1, 2024
|
|
|
|
|
Together with
|
|
|
|
“In many ways the RPM and virtual care market is in its relatively early stages, and there’s still a large white space of customers that aren’t utilizing these types of services. In my view, we’ve barely scratched the surface in areas like primary care and cardiology.”
|
|
CoachCare President and Co-Founder Wes Haydon
|
|
|
In the latest episode of the Digital Health Wire Show, MedAllies Chief Medical Officer Dr. Holly Miller takes us through all things TEFCA. Dr. Miller is an interoperability legend with over two decades of healthcare IT experience, and outside of her work with MedAllies has also co-chaired or sat on leading HIT committees including Carequality, CMS, HIMSS, and KLAS.
|
|
|
|
CoachCare locked in a $48M growth investment to advance its mission of becoming the go-to virtual care management platform for providers, and it has a clear blueprint for how it plans to get there.
After digging into CoachCare for the funding coverage, one of the things that jumped out the most was how well the company seems to be executing on the M&A front:
- January 2017: CoachCare got its start as a virtual coaching platform for weight and lifestyle management programs.
- January 2020: The pandemic era emergence of new RPM and CCM reimbursement pathways prompts CoachCare to lean in on commercializing the technologies it built to use internally, with a platform combining connected devices and outreach / monitoring services to give providers everything needed to spin up their own virtual care programs.
- January 2023: CoachCare kicks off its acquisition spree with NVOLVE, a remote patient monitoring startup focused on MSK, pain management, and orthopedics.
- April 2023: CoachCare scoops up Carbon Health’s cardiology and nephrology-focused healthcare platform – Alertive.
- September 2023: WebCareHealth gets brought on to add new RPM, video conferencing, and real-time messaging expertise to the CoachCare platform.
- December 2023: Verustat joins the portfolio to bolster CoachCare’s presence in primary care and cardiology.
- June 2024: CoachCare also closed on another soon-to-be-announced acquisition just last month, which saw Dedica Health round out the solution suite with one-to-one care management and navigation.
The end result of all that M&A is that CoachCare now has a platform that can deliver specialized RPM and virtual health services for everything from hypertension and behavioral disorders to stroke recovery and high-risk pregnancies.
- Along with $48M in newly raised capital, CoachCare just took a step up to the RPM big leagues, and will now be competing for many of the same customers as the established leaders in the space.
The Takeaway
CoachCare is pedal to the metal with its M&A playbook, and an extra $48M pretty much guarantees that more acquisitions are right around the corner. As long as CoachCare continues finding attractive targets for reasonable costs, its next arc of growth will be defined by its ability to execute, hire, and integrate new capabilities into a cohesive offering.
|
|
|
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.
|
|
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.
|
|
RPM Made Easy with a User-Friendly Platform
Seamlessly integrate Withings RPM with your existing EHR system and empower your care team to focus on what matters most – patient care.
|
|
- Hospital Benchmarking vs. Improvement: Trilliant published a top tier analysis on the misalignment between healthcare benchmarking and hospital performance improvement initiatives. Most current ratings lack comparative elements, which leads health systems to make arbitrary parallels between “top” hospitals without a complete picture of how dissimilar they are. The analysis also points out the lack of measures related to cost of care in tandem with quality, despite some hospitals having comparable quality but starkly different costs (perfectly illustrated by this beautiful chart).
- AvaSure Acquires Ouva AI Tech: AvaSure acquired Ouva’s smart room solutions to enhance its acute virtual care portfolio following a successful partnership to weave Ouva’s AI capabilities throughout the AvaSure platform. AvaSure supports over 1,200 health system and hospital clients with services spanning virtual nursing, inpatient monitoring, and clinical consults. Ouva’s care automation tech is now getting added to the mix, and as a cherry on top the acquisition will also double AvaSure’s in-house AI engineering resources.
- Hyro’s Voice of the Patient Survey: Hyro’s Voice of the Patient survey showed that 23% of patients skip calling to cancel appointments due to long hold times, while the same share fail to cancel because there’s no online option – contributing to a 37% spike in no-shows at U.S. health systems last year alone. A fifth of the 1,500 patients surveyed also cited long hold times as a reason why they forgo refilling prescriptions, and 32% have experienced health complications as a result. The solution? Two-thirds of patients want their providers to use GenAI to help tackle the issue.
- HCC and MA Explainer: Digital health stories frequently wander into the weeds on dense topics like Hierarchical Condition Category codes, risk scores, or Medicare Advantage, which take some explaining for those of us who weren’t born with a perfect understanding of the U.S. healthcare system. If you’re also in that bucket, STAT put out a great video unpacking each of these topics, and it’s well-worth the 7 minutes whether you’re new to the industry or just looking for a refresher.
- Loyal Lands $33.5M: Patient engagement startup Loyal closed $33.5M in Series B funding to accelerate product development and expand its partnership roster beyond the 38 health systems it already works with. Loyal enables health systems to consolidate disparate technology stacks into a single engagement platform that can reach more of their patients. The announcement included CEO Chad Mallory stepping down to a senior advisory role and a couple new board appointments to gear up for the next chapter of growth.
- The State of Telemedicine: Single Aim Health crunched some LinkedIn data to analyze recent changes in the virtual clinical workforce, uncovering some interesting stats in its State of Telemedicine 2024 Report. The fastest growing telehealth startups since 2022 – as measured by full-time remote clinician hiring – were Grow Therapy, Charlie Health, and Alma. Obviously a ton of mental healthcare in that camp, versus a lot of virtual weight-management and a legally dubious e-prescriber in the “losing clinicians” bucket, which included Found, Noom, and Cerebral.
- Google Drops One Medical: Amazon’s One Medical just lost its contract with what was once its biggest employer customer – Google. According to a scoop from Business Insider, One Medical is honing its focus on medium-sized businesses while it overhauls its strategy to better serve larger clients. Google said the decision had nothing to do with the primary care provider getting acquired by its tech-giant frenemy Amazon, but the loss will certainly be felt given that the contract made up ~10% of One Medical’s revenue prior to the acquisition.
- AI Improvement Hurdles: As ambient AI continues sweeping across the industry, a study in Nature found that these “first wave” solutions – which were mostly trained on human-generated medical records – could hit major speed bumps along their tech improvement curves. As the proportion of medical records with data populated by these AI tools increases, researchers expect the next generation of solutions to face some serious difficulty training on records produced by the previous-gen. It turns out that AI models quickly collapse when trained on this “recursively generated” data.
- Story x Zing: Story Health and Zing Health announced a partnership that will make Story Health’s cardiovascular virtual care platform and health coaches available to Zing’s historically-underserved Medicare Advantage members. Zing will identify eligible members with the greatest heart failure risks and connect them with Story Health’s cardiovascular care program, including coaches focused on “addressing social barriers to care.” This is the latest in a growing list of Story Health VBC partnerships, including Saint Luke’s, WVU, Intermountain, and ChristianaCare.
- CytoReason Scores $80M: Israeli startup CytoReason scored $80M in unlabeled funding to advance the development of its computational disease models and establish a U.S. headquarters in Massachusetts later this year. Pfizer, NVIDIA, and Thermo Fisher Scientific participated in the round, and CytoReason counts six of the top ten pharma companies among the partners using its tech to increase the speed and accuracy of R&D decisions for immunology, inflammation, immuno-oncology, and other therapeutic areas.
|
|
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.
|
|
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.
|
|
A First Principles Approach to Responsible AI
Playback Health has over 15 years of experience breaking down complicated technology problems into basic elements then reassembling new solutions from the ground up, and just published a short-and-sweet guide to help others take a “first principles approach” to responsible AI.
|
|
|
|
|
