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Akido, Hinge Sticks the Landing, and Digital Mental Health Reviews
May 29, 2025
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Together with
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“No hospital will buy an AI widget that means their revenue goes down. There’s no market for that.”
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Venrock Partner Bob Kocher on why AI isn’t likely to reduce overall healthcare costs.
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Virtual mental health solutions were the latest segment to fall under the piercing gaze of the Peterson Health Technology Institute, and in typical PHTI fashion the reviews were mixed.
The evaluation incorporated over 5,000 articles, input from clinical advisors, and interviews with depressed or anxious patients to evaluate three kinds of mental health solutions on their clinical effectiveness and economic impact:
- Self-guided solutions – content that people can work through on their own, typically offered directly to employers or health plans (AbleTo, Dario, Headspace, Learn to Live, Meru Health, SilverCloud, Talkspace, Teladoc)
- Prescription digital therapeutics – FDA-cleared interventions often used in conjunction with clinician-supervised outpatient treatment (DaylightRx, Rejoyn)
- Blended-care solutions – build on self-guided treatment with integrated virtual care teams of therapists and psychiatrists (AbleTo, Brightside, Headspace, Koa Health, Lyra, Meru Health, Modern Health, Spring Health, Talkspace, Teladoc)
The good news? All 15 of the solutions produced meaningful improvements in symptoms of anxiety and depression, especially for patients not already in therapy.
The catch? While these solutions have the potential to improve access and outcomes, their net impact on overall spending varies by payor and category.
- Self-guided solutions demonstrate clinically meaningful improvements in both anxiety and depression (6.9-point reduction in PHQ-9), with a relatively low cost (~$2 PMPM) that’s estimated to reduce spending in commercial settings by $0.30 PMPM.
- Prescription digital therapeutics deliver equally strong symptom improvement, and because they’re expected to be reimbursed on a per user basis (~$280 per episode) rather than across all plan members, they save an estimated $0.72 PMPM.
- Blended-care platforms show the strongest clinical outcomes, but with pricing models (~$6 PMPM plus $792 in annual therapy costs per user) that tend to increase overall health spending by an estimated $2.10 PMPM.
The Takeaway
PHTI gave virtual mental health solutions a glowing report card, and it seems like even the lone negative review – blended-care platforms – have their place for patients with severe symptoms.
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- Hinge Sticks the Landing: Hinge Health’s long-awaited IPO finally landed last week, bringing in $273M after debuting at the top of its range ($32/share) and going on to pop another 18% on opening day. Now standing at a valuation of over $3B, Hinge’s debut went about as well as anyone could have hoped, a major green flag for the companies on the sidelines who were waiting to see how the market reacted to its first true digital health IPO in years. With Omada already in line to keep the momentum going, it definitely feels like we’re about to see a new wave of S-1s sooner rather than later.
- 2025 Healthcare Prognosis: Venrock released its annual Healthcare Prognosis based on a survey of nearly 300 execs from all corners of the industry. When asked for forecasts on AI’s biggest impact in healthcare, 39% said it would be cutting administrative costs, 29% expect it to be improving diagnosis or treatments, and 21% believe it will be unlocking new value from patient-specific data. It was also interesting to see that 71% of respondents felt that integrating AI into an existing company is better than launching an entirely new AI startup.
- Akido Raises $60M: Akido Labs hauled in $60M of Series B funding to expand its Scope AI clinical intelligence platform that collects patients’ symptom information to give physicians a summary of potential diagnoses and treatments. ScopeAI helps with everything from generating clinical notes to guiding medical assistants through routine care, with the end goal of addressing the workforce shortage by allowing physicians to oversee more visits.
- Innovaccer Debuts Gravity: Innovaccer revealed its solution to the constant barrage of AI “game-changers” that get released on a daily basis with the debut of its new Innovaccer Gravity platform. Gravity connects pretty much every data input (clinical, financial, operational, experiential) into a single source of truth, with 400+ pre-built connectors that provide the infrastructure for healthcare organizations to scale AI adoption and drive faster ROI. CEO Abhinav Shashank’s recent blog post does a great job framing up the importance of the launch.
- Ambience Beats Clinicians at Coding: Ambience Healthcare released data showing that its “coding-aware” AI scribe outperforms physicians in coding accuracy, and by a wide margin. Trained using OpenAI’s Reinforcement Fine-Tuning tech, Ambience’s new model achieved a 27% relative improvement over physician benchmarks. The AI identifies precise ICD-10 codes from patient encounters that feed into the scribe, allowing it to generate a fully informed note that clinicians can use to confirm accurate documentation and coding in real time.
- Apple Watch Guide: The American College of Cardiology put out a great resource designed specifically to help doctors and patients better leverage the most popular consumer health wearable in the world: the Apple Watch. As worried patients increasingly bring up concerns related to Apple Watch health alerts during appointments, the guide lays out exactly what irregular ECG notifications or atrial fibrillation warnings mean (and what they definitely don’t mean). It also includes helpful tips on how to best incorporate the wearable into clinical practice.
- TigerConnect Launches CareConduit: TigerConnect unveiled its workflow automation platform CareConduit, designed to eliminate manual processes by integrating fragmented hospital systems and streamlining care communications. CareConduit integrates systems like EHRs and virtual nursing hardware with AI workflow automation to alleviate notification fatigue and deliver actionable information to the right caregiver at the right time, enabling the first wave of intelligent features launched at HIMSS earlier this year.
- Axle Gets an A: Axle Health locked in $10M of Series A funding to take a “technology-first approach” to solving the operational challenges that have historically limited the scale of home healthcare. The funds will accelerate the development of Axle’s EHR-integrated logistics platform, which enables provider orgs to seamlessly deploy clinicians for in-home visits through AI-driven smart scheduling, route optimization, and automated patient engagement.
- White Plains’ New Layer: NY-based White Plains Hospital is bringing on Layer Health to automate reporting across multiple clinical registries and expedite the chart review process. Layer’s AI platform leverages LLMs trained on longitudinal patient data to automate the data abstraction that underpins clinical and administrative workflows ranging from quality reporting to revenue cycle management. Our coverage of Layer’s recent $21M Series A has all the details.
- Ezra Pulls Whole-Body Screening Claims: Wellness screening firm Ezra pulled text from its website claiming its full-body MRI service was superior to Prenuvo’s after the competitor filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau. The complaint alleged that Ezra’s claims were misleading and unsupported, a stance echoed on a page on Prenuvo’s website directly challenging Ezra and its business model. Ezra was acquired earlier this month by diagnostic lab testing company Function Health.
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Ambient AI That Delivers Real ROI
Riverside Health has partnered with Abridge to address clinician burnout and improve patient experiences. Abridge’s more accurate documentation has also supported a significant increase in the health system being appropriately compensated for care delivered. Learn more about how Riverside Health saw ROI in multiples from more accurate documentation here.
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How Navina Empowers Privia Health Physicians to Excel in VBC
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- Ensuring Compliance With Medical AI Scribes: AI scribes are transforming how providers document patient encounters, but new innovations come with new compliance risks. Head over to Playback Health’s quick-start guide to maintaining compliance in the age of AI, and see how Playback Health Pro is giving providers peace of mind with 100% data ownership, SOC 2 verification, and HIPAA-compliant encryption every step of the way.
- Elevate 2025 – Medallion’s Virtual Conference Returns Sept 17: Now in its fourth year, Medallion’s annual conference is back – bringing together healthcare leaders to explore this year’s theme: Elevate the present. Reframe the future of healthcare. Hear from industry voices like Tom Lawry, author of Hacking Healthcare, UPMC Chief Medical Information Officer Robert Bart, and many more. Reserve your spot now.
- Why McFarland Clinic Tapped Nabla to Support Clinicians: As Iowa’s largest physician-owned multi-specialty group, McFarland Clinic needed a partner that could help deliver high-quality, coordinated care across a wide range of specialties. Find out why McFarland tapped Nabla to reduce documentation burden and bring time and presence back to the patient encounter, all within their Epic workflow.
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