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Huma Acquires eConsult | 2025 MA Star Fallout
October 7, 2024
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Together with
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“Healthcare can be – and should be – disrupted to deliver care in a better way. When looking at how to do that, a great centralized approach will impact many different stakeholders, but all the dots need to connect back to the patient since they’re ultimately the end users.”
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Huma CEO Dan Vahdat
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Huma isn’t wasting any time putting its $60M of Series D funding to work, acquiring digital triage and consultation platform eConsult less than a few months after closing the round.
The move aligns with Huma’s vision of becoming the “Shopify for Digital Health” by equipping provider orgs and pharma companies with modular platforms / software development kits for a wide range of use cases.
- The Huma Cloud Platform is a no-code app builder that enables 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.
eConsult’s intelligent triage platform adds an entrypoint to Huma’s ecosystem by guiding patients through a series of medical questions before determining an appropriate pathway.
- From there, eConsult gives physicians a summary of any flags or considerations to review, then connects them to a “comprehensive array of digital health solutions” such as appointment booking, screening tools, or virtual consults.
Those capabilities strengthen the foundation of Huma Workspace for Health Systems, which was announced alongside the acquisition to provide seamless access to Huma’s library of pre-built modules and solution marketplace. Those support:
- Check-in and Triage: Captures patient symptoms and clinical history to prioritize patients with immediate needs and optimize intake.
- Communication Suite: Equips clinicians with tools to manage patients remotely, such as a full messaging suite, video, scheduling, and EHR integration.
- Remote Patient Monitoring: Allows hospitals to quickly scale applications for diabetes, hypertension, CKD, and other conditions.
- Proactive Engagement: Automates direct patient communication for screening, education, and engagement campaigns across entire populations.
Put it all together, and Huma is assembling the pieces to an end-to-end platform for delivering virtual care at scale, with over 3,000 hospitals and clinics already using it to power projects for nearly two million active users.
The Takeaway
End-to-end digital health platforms aren’t built in a day, and the acquisition of eConsult confirms that Huma isn’t afraid of using M&A to speed up the process. Huma is full-speed-ahead with adding new capabilities and growing its footprint, so it wouldn’t be surprising if more acquisitions were right around the corner.
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- 2025 Star Rating Fallout: Payors’ Medicare Advantage struggles are going from bad to worse following CMS’ release of preliminary MA star ratings for 2025, which made it harder for plans to achieve 4+ stars and the quality bonuses that come along with it. Shares of Humana stock plummeted to their lowest level in over a decade after it reported that only 25% of its members will be enrolled in 4+ star plans next year, a steep drop from 94% in 2024. Analysts expect Humana to take a hit of between $1B and $3B, jeopardizing its goal of reaching a 3% individual MA margin by 2027.
- Consequences of Diagnostic Errors: It turns out we’re probably underestimating the prevalence of harmful diagnostic errors (DEs) related to hospital care. A study in BMJ Quality & Safety analyzed data from 675 hospitalized patients, finding that 1 in 14 saw DEs and safety events related to process failures like poor assessments or testing. DEs impacted 28.5% of ICU transfers, 12.8% of deaths within 90 days of admission, 7.7% of complex cases, and 1.1% of non-high risk patients.
- Komodo’s AI Expansion: Komodo Health debuted MapAI to streamline analysis of its HealthcareMap data on 330M de-identified patient journeys using natural language queries. MapAI launches alongside another MapExplorer tool that allows companies that are new to the Healthcare Map to quickly explore various therapeutic areas by equipping them with point-and-click functionality and similar conversational AI features.
- Instacart Joins Forces With 9amHealth: A new collaboration is bringing Instacart’s Fresh Funds food stipends to 9amHealth’s virtual diabetes, weight, and heart health programs. Instacart will facilitate the delivery of healthy meals prescribed by 9amHealth dietitians to help patients manage chronic conditions and engage mindfully with their diets. Since the partnership debuted, 9amHealth programs leveraging Instacart have seen a 161% enrollment increase and a 57% member engagement boost.
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- Healthcare Ransomware Attacks Increase: A survey from cybersecurity firm Sophos confirmed that healthcare ransomware attacks are on the rise, with two thirds of health systems experiencing an incident in the past year (up from 60% the year prior). Even more concerningly, only 22% fully recovered in less than a week, compared with 47% in 2023. As a result of the longer recovery times, more organizations are caving to attacker demands to recover sensitive data, and the average ransom now stands at $1.5M.
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