Providence St. Joseph Health CEO Rod Hochman

Digital Health

Pandemic Lessons Led to Google Health Shakeup

The recent dismantling of Google Health following the departure of its chief, David Feinberg, MD, could easily have been interpreted as evidence that the company was retreating from healthcare.

To clear up any confusion, Google Chief Health Officer Karen DeSalvo, MD, spoke with Bloomberg about the search giant’s reorganization. She revealed that the changes reflect a shift in focus related to Google’s work during the pandemic, and that the company is in no way “retrenching on health.”

For Google, the pandemic was an unexpected crash course in health sector operations, expediting many of the lessons that could otherwise have taken years.

Dr. DeSalvo stated that the company’s work on services ranging from contact tracing to population mobility tracking played a large role in the decision to restructure its health unit.

• Google’s old strategy revolved around consolidating the company’s wide ranging healthcare efforts, such as disease detection and clinical decision support, into a centralized product unit to be commercialized. Dr. Feinberg was hired in 2019 to lead the new division, Google Health, but his team members were disbanded into research and wearables units shortly after his departure.

• Google’s new strategy is an effort to embed healthcare initiatives into its core products, such as Search and YouTube, rather than launching independent commercial services. This strategy is designed to have a wider influence on health by meeting consumers where they already are.

Industry Impact

With a majority of Google’s revenue coming from advertising, working with sensitive health data quickly attracts attention from regulators. One of Google Health’s early projects under Feinberg got particularly messy when a search tool created for the Ascension hospital network prompted a federal inquiry over data privacy concerns.

Although the Ascension search tool is still operational and secure, Dr. DeSalvo admits that the company must tread carefully when navigating the healthcare space, but believes that the reorganization will help to deliver superior medical care and human outcomes.

Telehealth

Second Opinions for Anthem Members

Anthem recently signed on with The Clinic to begin offering its members easy access to virtual second opinions. 

• The Clinic began in 2019 as a joint venture from Amwell and Cleveland Clinic that provides virtual care and digital health records to payers, providers, and patients. The service combines Amwell’s telehealth services with patient support from Cleveland Clinic’s 3,500 physicians.

• Second opinions are expected to be a $7b market by 2024 (up from $2.7b in 2019), according to research from both companies. Cleveland Clinic studies have shown that second opinions result in a modified treatment plan in 72% of reassessments, as well as a change in diagnosis for 28% of life-altering cases.

Looking Ahead

Anthem is initially making the second opinion service available to its large employer clients, with the potential to expand to smaller employers going forward.

The Clinic CEO Frank McGillin signalled that more is on the way for the partnership, saying that the second opinion services are “just the start of our work with Anthem.” The Clinic anticipates a continued increase in demand for routine expert second opinions when dealing with life-changing health conditions.

Nuance’s Patient Engagement Must-Haves

Consumer demands are shifting, and they’re looking to get more out of their digital health technology. Nuance outlines the 5 must-haves for your patient engagement strategy here.

The Wire

• Healthcare Deserts: GoodRx mapped US healthcare deserts to visualize which counties provide “less than adequate” access to hospitals, pharmacies, PCPs, trauma centers, or low-cost health centers. The well-illustrated article includes interactive maps highlighting the percentage of each county’s population that lives within an “acceptable distance” of each service. The data shows that 20% of counties are hospital deserts (most people have to drive over 30 min to reach a hospital), while trauma center deserts are twice as common at 40% of counties.

• Flo Funding: Women’s health app Flo recently closed $50m in Series B financing ($65m total funding), bringing the company’s valuation to $800m. Flo will use the funds to add more personalized insights to its existing menstrual cycle prediction features, allowing users to take a proactive approach to their health. The subscription-based app boasts over 200m members after seeing 4x user growth in the last year as more consumers begin to adopt mHealth tools with a focus on preventative care.

• Adolescent Telehealth: A new JMIR survey of 1,047 PCPs sought to characterize recent experiences using telehealth with adolescents (ages 11-17 years) and gauge post-pandemic support for the technology. A majority of respondents agreed that adolescent telehealth increases access to care (69%) and enables high-quality care (53%), although 15% believed that it encourages healthcare overuse. Most PCPs (65%) supported offering adolescent telehealth for primary care after the pandemic, while even more believed that reimbursements should continue for telehealth visits (82%).

• Consumer-Centric Care: Kaufman Hall’s latest 2021 Healthcare Consumerism Survey found that only 7% of the 100 included healthcare organizations were Tier 1 for consumer-centric care, defined as best-in-class digital infrastructure and costs. The report classified 46% of health systems as Tier 2 (currently investing in infrastructure), while another 39% were Tier 3 (plans for consumer-oriented strategies but no current infrastructure).

• Teladoc + Proximie: A recently announced partnership will see Proximie’s virtual operating room solution integrated with Teladoc Health’s Solo ecosystem for hospitals and health systems. Combining the two platforms will allow multiple stakeholders to connect into operating rooms to enable virtual surgical mentoring and technical support. Although the partnership is focused initially on the US market, it will eventually expand to Teladoc’s network of over 600 global healthcare organizations.

• Telediagnosis: The Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine recently interviewed telehealth stakeholders to identify “telediagnosis” best practices and research questions. Interviewers determined that telediagnosis effectiveness studies should focus on determining what symptoms require in-person assessments, the correct ratio of in-person to virtual care, and the metrics that indicate a success or failure in telediagnosis – a tall order given that diagnostic errors still lack standardized measurement in an in-person setting.

• Neuroglee Partnership: Digital therapeutic provider Neuroglee is partnering with Mayo Clinic to co-develop a clinical care program combining Mayo Clinic’s Healthy Action to Benefit Independence & Thinking (HABIT) program and Neuroglee’s adaptive learning platform for personalized interventions. The announcement follows $10m in Series A funding ($12.3m total funding) that will enable Neuroglee to develop its platform for treating mild cognitive impairment related to Alzheimer’s disease, which includes reminiscence therapy (pictures from a patient’s past used to evoke memories), cognitive games, and learning modules.

• Online Scheduling: A new report from patient access solutions provider Kyruus found that over half of the US News & World Report’s top 20 hospitals do not offer online scheduling capabilities for new patients. Despite a heightened need for digital scheduling following the start of the pandemic, only 4 of the hospitals had a live virtual assistant to help patients, while just 3 allowed users to filter for virtual care options.

• Corti Consultations: Danish patient consultation platform Corti.ai raised a $27m Series A round ($32m total funding) to help it expand its patient base from 15m to 100m consultations per year by entering the US market. Corti’s machine learning platform uses “deep listening” during patient consultations to compare patient symptom descriptions to millions of other cases to offer real-time decision support.

• Telehealth Utilization: FAIR Health’s Monthly Telehealth Regional Tracker found that telehealth made up 4.5% of medical claims in June 2021, down from 5% in May and a peak of 13% in April 2020. Mental health conditions dominated telehealth diagnoses in June, accounting for over 61% of total telehealth claims. By comparison, acute respiratory diseases were the second most common diagnosis, but comprised only 3% of telehealth claims.