Chris Hogg, CEO of Marley Medical

Primary Care

B2C2B as a Digital Health Go-To-Market Strategy

In a recent editorial at MobiHealthNews, Marley Medical CEO Chris Hogg laid out the case for why business-to-consumer-to-business (B2C2B) could be the best future go-to-market strategy for virtual care.

After serving as the CCO of Propeller Health (acquired by ResMed in 2018), Hogg went on to found Marley Medical in August of this year, aiming to help people manage common chronic conditions by taking a new approach to the market.

• Early digital health companies faced problems fitting innovative products into a lagging reimbursement framework, finding themselves misaligned with existing code descriptors. Without a standard classification, most companies began working directly with payors and employers, offering them services that they could then market to their members (B2B2C).

• The B2B2C model allows digital health vendors to be compensated by payors in a variety of ways, usually tied to enrollment or engagement. After finalizing the contract with the payor, the vendors begin overcoming implementation challenges and marketing for new members, hurdles that often lead to slow enrollment and limited revenue.

• Virtual care’s emergence as an effective care delivery method shifts the landscape, allowing digital health startups to classify their products as “traditional clinical services” qualifying for reimbursement. It also allows them to work with and market to individuals while unlocking the ability for payors to compensate them for providing services to their own user base (B2C2B).

• The B2C2B model gives companies control over user acquisition while enabling their offerings to be subsidized by payors – a compelling go-to-market strategy. The need to directly acquire users causes companies to focus on specific populations and build people-centric products with tangible impacts, as opposed to ones that are easy to market to payors or employers.

The Marley Medical Strategy

In a telehealth playing field that seems to be getting more crowded every day, Marley Medical is looking to set itself apart by focusing its virtual primary care offering on specific populations with chronic disease, engaging directly with patients before working with payors as an in-network provider. With Hogg at the helm and a fresh go-to-market blueprint on its side, Marley Medical is in a good position to show how effective B2C2B can be.

Primary Care

HLTH: UnitedHealthcare Launches Virtual-First Health Plan

UnitedHealthcare made headlines at HLTH by announcing the launch of NavigateNOW, a virtual-first health plan that offers an integrated approach to providing care both virtually and in-person.

• NavigateNOW is a collaborative effort between UnitedHealth’s payor arm and its Optum subsidiary that seeks to capitalize on the industry-wide shift towards hybrid care. The virtual-first health plan is designed to provide patients with a personalized virtual care team for medical and behavioral health services with a seamless hand-off to in-person treatment if needed.

• Availability begins later this year in nine initial markets, with a goal of expanding to large employers and over 25 markets by the end of 2022. NavigateNOW offers members no copays for common services, unlimited 24/7 physician access, and reduces plan premiums by approximately 15%. 

• The collaboration leverages Optum’s primary care and behavioral healthcare services, with UnitedHealthcare’s national provider network available for in-person visits. The integrated care model is designed to identify health issues earlier, encourage preventive care, and deliver services in the most appropriate setting.

The Takeaway

It’s a strategic priority for UnitedHealth to take advantage of the overlap between Optum and UnitedHealthcare, and NavigateNOW is the first major launch in that initiative. NavigateNOW is UnitedHealth’s first virtual-first primary care plan, and combining Optum’s digital resources with a large clinical footprint gives the service strong value proposition within the digital health market.

Explore Nuance’s Personalized Patient Experience

Personalized digital experiences drive better outcomes for patients and providers. Explore how Nuance is using AI automation to advance the quality of service across the care journey here.

The Wire

• Included Health Debut: Doctor on Demand and Grand Rounds took to the HLTH stage to unveil their combined company’s new name, Included Health, while outlining the results of a new survey that found 60% of respondents believe there’s a need for better access to mental health. Included Health aims to integrate virtual care and navigation for its members, removing barriers to care for the 43% of people that feel the healthcare system is too exclusive.

• Predicting Readmissions: A study published in JMIR text-mined two years of EMR data to extract psychosocial topics discussed with patients to test whether the topics were useful in predicting 30-day readmissions. The text-mined factors improved readmission predictions by 8.5% for geriatric patients, 7.0% for the general hospital population, and 6.6% for frequent admitters, demonstrating significant value in readmission models.

• Google Outlines Health Strategy: Google Chief Health Officer, Karen DeSalvo, MD, gave a HLTH keynote outlining the company’s healthcare strategy following the recent disbanding of Google Health. The plan focuses on connecting patients to health information through YouTube partnerships, delivering proactive insights through Fitbits, and providing more value through existing products such as Care Studio, which is now available as a mobile app that enables physicians to view patient medical records while away from the computer.

• b.well Partnership: Iowa-based health system UnityPoint Health is partnering with b.well Connected Health to implement a new digital consumer strategy, using the b.well platform to enable patients to easily aggregate and share their health data. The b.well partnership will also give patients access to all of UnityPoint’s digital solutions in a centralized location, reducing fragmentation of services like appointment scheduling and prescription refills to make care more proactive and convenient.

• Digital Health Investment: A Frost & Sullivan survey of 349 healthcare IT decision-makers found that over 50% of hospitals are accelerating IT investments to address pandemic-related challenges. Data visualization tools were reported as the top investment priority over the next two years, allowing hospitals to improve operations and drive engagement with insights from their patient data. Other growth areas included RPM technology, AI for enterprise communications, and security.

• SonderMind Acquires Qntfy: On the heels of raising a $150m Series C, digital behavioral health company SonderMind announced the acquisition of Qntfy, a predictive analytics platform bridging the gap between data science and human behavior. The acquisition is intended to enhance the machine learning capabilities of SonderMind’s personalized mental health solutions, easing the burden of having to coordinate measurement-based care independently.

• Primary Care Survey: The Larry A. Green Center and the Primary Care Collective recently surveyed 1,263 primary care clinicians to assess the impact of COVID-19, finding that 71% reported more complex patient visits while 54% were unable to hire staff for open positions in their practice. Most respondents (64%) said using telehealth had been essential to maintaining access for patients, although 21% have had to pull back on telemedicine use since reimbursement was reduced.

• Impact by One Medical: Primary care organization One Medical is advancing its digital chronic illness offerings with the launch of “Impact by One Medical,” which combines longitudinal high-touch care, education, and health navigation with a technology platform to help patients manage chronic conditions. The program includes 24/7 virtual support, access to in-person care, and integrations with popular remote monitoring tools like Apple HealthKit.

• Pre-Anesthesia Telehealth Evaluations: A study from the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center found that using telehealth to conduct pre-anesthesia evaluations for cancer patients (n=120) lowered travel time and expenses while having no significant impact on cancellations. Median round trip distance and time saved by the telemedicine group was 80 miles and 121 minutes, indicating that telehealth is an effective way to improve access for cancer patients who frequently travel significant distances to specialty centers.

• TytoCare Partnership: Amazon announced a new partnership with TytoCare to enhance the remote examination company’s telehealth capabilities. TytoCare combines remote exam kits with an AI-powered platform to help physicians diagnose and monitor patients remotely. The partnership gives the company new video features within Amazon Chime, including HD resolution, tablet compatibility, multi-party calls, and screen sharing.

• Phone Homes: According to research from UCL anthropologists, people view their smartphones the same way they view their homes, as a place where they can “go home” to relax or distract themselves from other in-person activities. The researchers observed that “we have become human snails carrying our home in our pockets,” with smartphones allowing us to find immediate comfortability in a familiar space that lends itself to connecting with distant friends and family (and, of course, healthcare providers).

• RamSoft Adds Imaging Sharing: Medical imaging software company RamSoft recently made image sharing a standard feature in its PowerServer image storage/viewing platform. The new feature allows imaging facilities to share patient images and reports with physicians/patients using a QR code, rather than the traditional method of burning and sending CDs. There are quite a few image sharing options, but this is one of the first that comes standard with an image storage/viewing platform.