Northwell Health CEO Michael Dowling

We sat down with Withings Health Solutions VP Antoine Robiliard to get a sneak peek at the new BPM Pro 2, the first cellular blood pressure monitor to collect patient-reported outcomes and empower remote care programs to scale. Definitely a demo you don’t want to miss.

Digital Health

HLTH 2024 Recap and Major Announcements

That’s a wrap on HLTH 2024, and the showfloor was every bit as electric as outside on the Vegas strip.

Over 12k attendees made the trip out to Sin City, and they all had the same two things on their minds: Busta Rhymes and artificial intelligence.

The blind excitement of 2022 and the hallucination trepidation of 2023 gave way to calculated strategies on using AI to deliver results for patients, platforms, and everyone in between.

It was also refreshing to see the good ol’ fashioned innovation happening outside of the Cirque du Chatbots, and we rounded up the biggest announcements from the exhibit hall to help keep them all straight:

• Artera overhauled its Harmony platform with a string of new features and an AI agent dynamic duo for Staff (translation, predictive text for patient comms, message shortening, EHR-integrated conversation summaries) and Insights (no-show reports and engagement analysis).

• Blue Shield of California partnered with Salesforce to streamline the prior authorization process by co-developing a tool that’ll allow physicians and patients to receive PA answers in near-real-time during visits. 

• Caregility is doubling Lee Health’s virtual acute care infrastructure to nearly 1,000 patient rooms by building on its existing fleet of telehealth wall systems and carts with additional APS200 Duo dual-camera devices.

• CHAI – The Coalition for Health AI – published its draft frameworks for certifying independent Health AI Assurance Labs and standardizing the output of these labs with CHAI Model Cards, which are pretty much a “nutrition label” for AI solutions.

• CirrusMD is making physician-first, on-demand healthcare available to over 55k for-hire-vehicle drivers in New York State through a new collaboration with The Black Car Fund.

• Clarify Health joined forces with Prealize Health to help payors and providers anticipate utilization trends and proactively allocate resources. The fresh faces in Clarify’s C-suite also send a pretty clear signal that it sees market consolidation on the horizon and wants in on the M&A action.

• CopilotIQ merged with Biofourmis to create “the first end-to-end platform” for delivering in-home care from pre-surgery to acute, post-acute, and chronic condition management. Massive news that we’ll be circling back on next week.

• GE HealthCare launched an AI Innovation Lab to accelerate progress across areas like clinical decision-making, cancer recurrence predictions, and model training for medical imaging.

• Healthie and Zocdoc are now able to access and update each other’s calendars using all the latest availability and booking information.

• HealthSnap unveiled its new Principal Care Management program that delivers disease-specific pathways to patients with complex chronic conditions, enabling providers to comply with CMS requirements for PCM through automated eligibility reporting, care coordination, and tailored treatment plans.

• Luma debuted the next iteration of its Patient Success Platform with the introduction of its LLM-powered Spark solution, which unlocks new capabilities like automated fax processing and “patient-facing omnichannel concierge” (AKA conversational phone chat).

• Oracle Health debuted an end-to-end payments solution that handles gateway routing, processing, and acquiring under a single agreement, as well as a separate medical claims processing product dubbed Oracle Health Clinical Data Exchange.

• Solera Health shared key findings from its new report showing that strategically supplementing in-person care with a multi-condition virtual care network could lead to a 2.3%-3.1% reduction in total cost of care. It was great kicking off the show with Solera diving into the details.

• Spring Health took the lid off its Specialty Care solution that provides rapid access to intensive treatment for acute behavioral needs, addressing the harsh fragmentation within the mental health system by supporting 50+ conditions through a single platform.

• Suki is bringing its AI documentation capabilities to Zoom’s telehealth platform, marking the startup’s second partnership along the same vein after teaming up with Amwell earlier this year.

• Upfront is now live on the athenahealth Marketplace, bringing its suite of patient engagement solutions within closer reach of more providers.

• Withings Health Solutions announced the launch of the BPM Pro 2, the first cellular blood pressure monitor to collect patient-reported outcomes and empower remote care programs to scale. Easily one of the best demos we’ve ever seen.

• Wolters Kluwer Health showcased the integration of UpToDate within Abridge’s ambient AI platform that allows draft clinical documentation to include direct links to the latest, evidence-based recommendations.

We had a blast catching up with everyone at HLTH, and want to give a warm welcome to all of our new readers we met at the show! Stay tuned for deeper dives into many of these in next week’s Digital Health Wire.

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RPM Designed to Streamline Your Workflow

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Navigate the Future of Healthcare AI at Elevate

Join Medallion at Elevate on October 30th and experience the top minds in healthcare coming together to share bold ideas and connect in an informal, down-to-business setting. This was hands-down the best virtual conference we attended last year, and the lineup for 2024 is packed with execs from orgs like from VillageMD, Multiplan, and Community Health Systems. Take advantage of Elevate by registering here.

The Wire

• Tennr Series B: AI automation startup Tennr nabbed $37M in Series B funding hot on the heels of closing its Series A back in March. Tennr has seen “hockey-stick” growth after developing a series of novel techniques for scaling vision-language models, which it uses to read and respond to the tangled web of documents healthcare practices send one another for clinical and financial needs. 

• Megas Down, Seeds Up: Healthcare venture capital appears to be recovering from its post-pandemic slowdown, according to SVB. This year’s VC investment has totaled between $4B and $4.5B per quarter, with seed stage companies accounting for 42% of the rounds (not funding totals). However, the sector only saw 22 mega-rounds of +$100M, compared to 98 in 2021.

• Google Vertex AI: Google Cloud expanded its healthcare suite with Vertex AI Search, which allows payors and providers to comb through patient notes and other data for clinical information. Vertex AI Search integrates Gemini 1.5 Flash and MedLM while providing links to internal sources of information to increase providers’ confidence in its answers and prevent hallucinations.

• RESET Re-Release: PursueCare re-released the Pear-developed RESET and RESET-O prescription digital therapeutics for substance and opioid use disorders after acquiring the tech during the winddown. Pursue will now use the app-based PDTs to provide a self-guided, 12-week course of cognitive behavioral therapy for helping patients comply with treatment and cease drug use.

• Virtual Demand Outpaces Supply: A whopping 94% of consumers want to keep using virtual care, yet nearly half of health systems offer the same or fewer virtual visits than they did in 2022. Deloitte’s latest research also found that 24% of consumers are willing to switch doctors if virtual options aren’t offered, although virtual was only preferred over in-person care for simple services like prescriptions refills. In-person care was heavily preferred for dermatology (68%), chronic care (62%), post-surgery (60%), and OB-GYN (52%).

• Ovatient Launches Behavioral Telehealth: Ovatient joined forces with MetroHealth System to begin offering behavioral telehealth that’s seamlessly integrated with virtual and in-person primary care. The new services include individual therapy, single session interventions, and skills groups, touting the same deep integration with partner systems’ existing infrastructure that Ovation honed with its co-founders MetroHealth and MUSC Health.

• Health Note’s AI Scribe: Health Note launched its Health Note AI Scribe to streamline patient outreach, self-scheduling, front-office management, and EHR administration. As the name suggests, Health Note AI Scribe also uses NLP and GenAI for ambient scribing to help clinicians minimize the hours spent logging medical notes. It’s available through Epic and Athenahealth, and is already delivering over 500k clinical summaries per month.

• UnitedHealthcare Offers Calm: As more people hunt for solutions to help manage their mental health, UnitedHealthcare began offering Calm to more than 13 million commercial members. As a result, customers will have access to Calm’s industry standard screenings and a comprehensive library of programs designed by psychologists to address common behavioral challenges.

• Blood Testing Barriers: A Tasso survey revealed 33% of patients delay or avoid diagnostic blood tests due to inconvenient testing locations and discomfort during collection. Out of 600 adults surveyed, 37% reported a fear of needles, 69% were unwilling to travel more than 10 miles from home, and 78% experienced anxiety from blood draws. Three-quarters of respondents who experienced pain during venipuncture were willing to pursue less painful options even if it meant higher OOP costs.

• FDA Digital Health Committee to Meet: The FDA’s new Digital Health Advisory Committee will hold its first meeting November 20-21 in Maryland. The committee debuted in late 2023 to guide the regulation of technologies like AI and machine learning, augmented / virtual reality, and wearable devices. Generative AI will be a major focus for the meeting, with the FDA concentrating on safety and effectiveness as well as pre-market performance evaluation and post-market monitoring. We’re still waiting on the first approval for a generative AI-based medical device.

Carle Health Goes All-In on Nabla

Nabla Copilot is rolling out at Carle Health after a successful pilot saw a majority of participating clinicians slash their documentation time by over an hour. The full case study has everything you need to know about how Nabla’s customization features, Epic integration, and ease of use are bringing joy back to medicine for Carle’s clinicians.

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.

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.

The Industry Wire

1. Cigna and Humana reportedly revive merger talks.
2. CVS replaces CEO.
3. NYT: Why hospital gowns are so ugly.
4. Over 2,400 Kaiser mental health workers on strike.
5. Private equity healthcare moves are rebounding.
6. The perverse consequences of no-tuition medical school.
7. IRA cut Medicare OOP drug costs by $1B in H1 2024.
8. AHA urges congress to expand hospital-at-home, reform telehealth.
9. Cleveland Clinic and Amazon One Medical to open primary care clinics.
10. Senate scrutinizers Pfizer and Lilly’s DTC telehealth sites.