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CB Insights 50, CoachCare Acquisition, and Big Changes to Medicare Advantage
December 5, 2024
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Together with
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“We were promised AI like Data from Star Trek, but right now, what we have in healthcare is more like a Roomba.”
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Avandra Imaging CEO Ryan Tarzy
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CB Insights unveiled its annual Digital Health 50 rankings of the most promising private digital health startups, and this year’s list certainly included many of the industry’s brightest stars.
Here’s the methodology / our disclaimer: The final cut was selected from a pool of 10k+ applicants based on “proprietary metrics” – Commercial Maturity and Mosaic Scores – along with data on partnerships, growth stats, and market adoption. (CB Insights is of course happy to share this data with its customers, but promises that being one of them doesn’t land you a spot on the list.)
With that out of the way, here’s a look at the Digital Health 50 (high-res version):
It’s tough to compare this list to last year’s given the ever-evolving categories and methodology, but CB Insights called out four key themes for the latest cohort:
- AI is becoming foundational infrastructure: 36 of the 50 companies are building AI products, ranging from operational automation high-flyers like Laguna to specialized healthcare LLMs like Hippocratic AI. No surprises here.
- Workflow efficiency is a key priority: 19 of the companies are streamlining administrative or clinical tasks, spanning document processing startups (Tennr) to ambient AI heavyweights (Abridge). These players seem like an obvious inclusion, but the same could be said last year when ambient AI was nowhere to be found.
- Diagnostic innovations dominate: 11 companies comprised this year’s largest category, developing next-gen diagnostics across imaging (Airs Medical), pathology (Proscia), and non-invasive diagnostics (Alimetry). Diagnostics was in a three-way tie with Clinical Intelligence and Virtual Care, although the categories have some hazy boundaries.
- More specialized platforms: Virtual and hybrid care representation doubled in this year’s cohort, reflecting the shift from general telemedicine toward condition-specific virtual models in areas like mental health (Talkiatry) and cancer care (Resilience).
The Takeaway
Lists like these never fail to get pushback because of the methodology or glaring exclusions, but this year’s cohort feels pretty well aligned with the high momentum names that keep popping up in our own coverage. Major congrats to the companies that were included.
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A Look Under the Hood at Nabla
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- Big Changes for MA, Maybe: CMS proposed additional guardrails around prior authorization practices for Medicare Advantage Plans in response to growing concerns over AI improperly denying care. The proposed rule included other MA reforms aimed at cracking down on predatory marketing, improving provider directories, and changing the criteria for reporting medical loss ratios. These are definitely some big changes at the eleventh hour of the Biden administration, but the next White House will ultimately have the final say on which of the proposals get finalized.
- Rising Telehealth Satisfaction: Cancer patient satisfaction with telehealth has come a long way in the last few years. Annual surveys of 27k patients at a comprehensive cancer center showed that 74% rated their first telehealth visit as good as or better than an in-person visit. Satisfaction grew significantly over time, with 69% of patients ranking telehealth as good as in-person visits in 2020, a figure that jumped to 81% by 2023.
- CoachCare’s Acquisition Revolution: Virtual care management platform CoachCare added to its string of recent acquisitions by picking up Revolution Health Solutions, which provides specialized tools for RPM, chronic care management, and remote therapeutic monitoring. The move follows hot on the heels of CoachCare closing $48M to accelerate its M&A roadmap, and will integrate Revolution’s turnkey solutions and dedicated clinical teams to support more patients across a broader spectrum of conditions.
- Harvard/MGB AI Guidelines: A novel framework for ensuring responsible use of AI in healthcare was published in npj Digital Medicine following a collaborative effort between Harvard Medical School and Mass General Brigham. Unlike Monday’s top story on NYU’s ChatGPT roll out, the new case study uses ambient documentation to demonstrate the practical application and challenges of implementing generative AI in clinical environments.
- RevSpring Forms Blast: RevSpring added Forms Blast to its growing portfolio of patient engagement and billing solutions. As the name would suggest, Forms Blast gives providers a way to push digital forms to patients through omnichannel campaigns while helping patients automatically pull accurate information from their ID or other documents using optical character recognition.
- Hippocratic Patent: Hippocratic AI obtained its first U.S. patent for its Polaris constellation architecture, which bolsters its primary LLM (the conversational interface) with 19 support models to safeguard areas such as medicine reconciliation and overdose prevention. While Hippocratic’s early single-LLM prototypes correctly answered 80% of questions posed in clinical non-diagnostic conversations, Polaris 1.0 exceeded human accuracy, and Polaris 2.0 correctly answered 99% of questions.
- Emory + Guidehealth: Emory Healthcare launched a new Population Health Collaborative to support its primary care physicians and clinically integrated network with Guidehealth’s value-based managed services platform. Guidehealth will augment Emory’s existing primary care capacity by equipping over 500 PCPs with AI-based protocols to screen for patient health risks and slow disease progression, while also supporting clinical teams with remotely embedded Healthguides.
- Top 10 Health Tech Safety Risks: ECRI released a report on its top 10 health tech safety risks for next year, naming AI as the biggest threat in 2025. The safety institute warns that AI’s potential to perpetuate bias and hallucinate answers could lead to a massive amount of preventable harm if left unchecked, calling for stronger AI governance from health systems to mitigate the risk. Other hazards included the unmet need for better home care technology (#2), cybersecurity threats (#3), and faulty medical devices (#4).
- Movano Makes Moves: Movano Health received FDA 510(k) clearance for its health-monitoring EvieMED Ring that combines biometric data (including blood oxygen levels and heart rate) with wellness metrics (energy, mood, sleep, and activity logging). Adding to its B2B prospects, Movano has a pilot study with a large payor on the docket for 2025, and the EvieMED Ring is already being used by MIT to support a trial investigating long COVID and chronic Lyme disease.
- Downstream Telehealth Impact: A JAMA Health Forum study of over 780k pediatric primary care visits found that telehealth visits resulted in far more in-person follow-ups than if the initial visit was in-person (14.4% vs. 4.3%). Although medication prescribing rates were higher for in-person appointments than telehealth visits (39.8% vs. 29.5%), downstream ED visits and hospitalizations were comparable between both groups.
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