Matthew Stoudt, Co-Founder and CEO of AppliedVR

Digital Health

AppliedVR Raises $36M for VR Pain Management

Virtual reality (VR) therapeutics developer AppliedVR raised a $36m Series B round ($71m total funding) to fuel growth as it awaits a decision from the FDA on its first de-novo submission for pain management.

• AppliedVR combines VR-based cognitive-behavioral therapies with mindfulness exercises to help manage chronic pain, with patients reporting reductions in the daily life interference caused by their pain for up to several months after treatment.

• EaseVRx is the company’s flagship product awaiting FDA approval, standing out as the first VR prescription therapeutic to receive breakthrough device designation for treatment-resistant fibromyalgia and chronic intractable lower back pain.

• Research published in JMIR found that EaseVRx produced “clinically meaningful” improvement in pain outcomes, and AppliedVR is investing heavily in building evidence demonstrating its therapeutics as effective for patients, scalable for providers, and viable for reimbursement.

• The latest funding will be used to prepare for EaseVRx’s full market launch after FDA approval, as well as to build out its product pipeline that includes RelieVRx (for acute postoperative pain) and AnxietyVRx (for generalized anxiety treatment).

Industry Impact

Although other startups such as XRHealth are pursuing the therapeutic VR space, none have AppliedVR’s established client roster (AppliedVR partners with over 200 health systems) or supporting body of research.

Following its Series B, AppliedVR has a lot of momentum in a chronic pain market estimated to negatively impact the economy to the tune of $635b annually. EaseVRx’s FDA approval would provide another tailwind to help the company be among the first to make VR pain management a reality.

Wearables

Can Wearables Help Measure Patient Outcomes?

Researchers from the University of Edinburgh published a systematic review in Nature that aimed to determine the current evidence base and reporting quality for mobile digital health interventions (DHI) in the postoperative period following surgery.

Methodology – After screening 6,969 articles for patients undergoing surgeries where postoperative outcomes were measured using DHIs (defined as mobile technologies to improve health system efficiency and health outcomes), 44 studies were included in the final review.

Results – The review indicated that several types of mobile phone- or wearables-generated data can improve the assessment of postoperative recovery:

• patient-reported outcome data (from validated self-report tools)
• continuous activity data (from wearables)
• combining remote assessment with active clinical prompts or patient advice

DHI Shortcomings – Studies included in the analysis demonstrated that DHIs may facilitate patient recovery following major operations and reduce inappropriate service use, although they also revealed issues with the current evidence base that should be addressed:

• patients are rarely engaged in the development of DHIs
• only one study was designed to engage patients in reviewing their own data
• high levels of exclusion exist for patients without relevant mobile technology

Discussion

The increasing availability of high quality mobile technologies provides a new bridge between clinical services and patients’ homes, and while the authors of the study are optimistic about the technology, they stress the importance of improving reporting standards if its potential is to be fulfilled.

Going forward, the researchers suggest that studies of DHIs in postoperative settings seek to provide meaningful comparisons to non-DHI care in order to demonstrate clinical value, with particular attention paid to reporting quality so that equitable comparisons can be made to existing research.

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

• Hims & Hers App: DTC healthcare provider Hims & Hers Health unveiled a new mobile app that introduces curated programs for chronic conditions, 24/7 concierge, and 1-click checkout for treatments required by the company’s 500k subscription members. The app will serve as a “unified hub” for Hims & Hers’ telehealth offerings and original health content, positioning the company to promote long-term health, rather than just treating individual conditions as they arise.

• App-Based Meditation Habits: A study of user data from 2,771 subscribers to meditation app Calm published in JMIR found that the temporal similarity in users’ daily app use (using it at the same time each day) significantly predicted app use at 28 days and at 6 months after an initial survey. Temporal similarity was also associated with greater perceived mental health benefits, demonstrating that the measure can be used to predict attrition, and that there may be additional benefits to forming reflexive meditation habits.

• Carbon Health Connect: Carbon Health is partnering with John Muir Health to launch Carbon Health Connect, which will combine Carbon Health’s front-door clinics and home-based capabilities (recently bolstered by the acquisition of Alertive) with John Muir Health’s primary care, specialty, and hospital-based services. Carbon Health Connect aims to create one of the largest primary care networks in the eastern San Francisco Bay Area, improving care coordination for thousands of patients.

• What To Call Remote Care: Branding agency Monigle surveyed 30k US adults about remote care nomenclature, finding that respondents associated the term “telemedicine” with being fast and pioneering, “virtual care” with being safe and innovative, and “virtual visit” with safety. The terms “mobile health” and “video visit” were associated with the lowest value to patients, showing that something as simple as a service’s name can impact the perceived quality of a healthcare experience.

• Hospital-at-Home: Penn State Health and Highmark Health are partnering with acute care company Contessa to launch Home Recovery Care, bringing hospital level services and skilled nursing care to remote patients in need of acute treatment. Enrolled patients will be equipped with remote monitoring devices and treated through a combination of in-person and virtual care, a model which Contessa reports can reduce readmissions by 44% while decreasing the average length of hospital stays by 35%.

• AI Therapy Reviews: Researchers out of USC trained an AI model on 1,118 therapy session transcripts to determine if it could judge the therapist’s interpersonal skills and discern if they created the right structure for the session, finding that the AI was able match what a human evaluator could achieve with 73% accuracy. While more work is needed to incorporate a therapist’s intonation to improve the model, the authors believe that similar AI tools will soon be able to augment a therapy supervisor’s efficiency while offering therapists a tool for self-assessment.

• Mercy Lawsuit: Healthcare app developer LifeScience Technologies (LST) filed a lawsuit against Mercy, claiming that the health system disclosed confidential information about LST’s M.Care RPM platform to competitor Myia Health. Mercy has been using LST’s M.Care since 2015, only to recently begin replacing the solution with a “derivative product” from Myia Health. The optics of the situation are further muddied by the fact that Mercy has a $5 million ownership interest in Myia Health.

• Digital Transformation Priorities: A new survey of over 4k healthcare professionals from health cloud company Innovaccer found that expanding telehealth services was the top digital transformation goal for respondents (39%), followed by automating care management (30%), and automating care pathways and coordination steps (20%). Only 10% of organizations said they use real-time insights to increase collaboration, while others highlighted the need to de-silo departments due to the fact that they rarely collaborate at all (26%).

• Right on Cue: Cue Health announced the launch of its Cue+ virtual health platform, allowing members to access the company’s at-home COVID-19 test and share the results with a physician through the new Cue Health App. Cue found major success last year after its over-the-counter COVID-19 test was approved by the FDA, leading to a $481m contract with the Department of Defense that Cue is using to enable consumers to go from test result to antiviral treatment from the comfort of their own homes.

• Telehealth Success Factors: A recent study published in JAMA Network Open analyzed data from 138k telehealth visits to determine that patient factors (internet connectivity, technology literacy, educational level) were more systematically associated with successful visit completion than any clinician factors. The findings suggest that regulators should keep patient support and equity at the forefront of any telehealth policy discussions.