Headspace Health CEO Russell Glass on the state of AI for mindfulness applications.

Digital Health

Headspace Health Acquires App-Maker Sayana

Headspace Health isn’t skipping a beat in its mission to create a comprehensive behavioral health platform, acquiring AI-enabled wellness app developer Sayana less than six months after forming through the merger of Headspace and Ginger.

Sayana emerged from the Y Combinator incubator in 2020 with $125K in Seed funding and a goal of introducing as many people as possible to self-care exercises rooted in cognitive behavioral therapy, acceptance commitment therapy, and dialectical behavioral therapy.

The company’s solutions leverage a chat-based AI avatar named Sayana to encourage users to track their moods, allowing it to personalize content delivered through its three primary apps:

• The Sayana App provides mood tracking and journaling tools coupled with mindfulness exercises to provide insights into how users are feeling over long periods of time.
• Sayana Sleep aims to match user moods to sleep patterns in order to help those struggling with insomnia fall asleep through custom relaxation sessions.
• Sayana Workplace uses the same approach but targets it towards employers by helping their employees manage workplace stressors.

The acquisition brings Sayana’s AI expertise and team to the Headspace Health platform to improve its own recommendation algorithms and coaching offerings. The employer-facing component is also interesting given Headspace Health’s enterprise operations, which are a key growth driver for the company and are distributed by over 3,500 employers looking to increase productivity by improving employee wellbeing. 

Data, AI, and Accessible Care

Although Sayana’s 300k+ user base is fairly substantial, it’s tiny in comparison to the 70M+ members commanded by Headspace Health. More user sessions training the AI models should improve the recommendations and ultimately lead to better outcomes for users (and a large competitive advantage for Headspace Health if well executed).

Mental healthcare is a complicated challenge, and requires a scalable solution beyond hiring more therapists and putting them in front of a screen. With the acquisition of Sayana and its AI-enabled chatbot, we’re beginning to get a good idea of what Headspace Health’s solution might look like.

Primary Care

Aledade Acquires Care Planning Company Iris Healthcare

Value-based care enablement company Aledade announced the acquisition of Iris Healthcare, a provider of Advance Care Planning (ACP) solutions for the seriously ill.

• Aledade uses data analytics and guided workflows to help primary care practices with the shift to value-based care. The company’s platform helps practices identify and better manage their highest risk patients.

• Iris Healthcare provides ACP services aimed at reducing unnecessary care while ensuring that critically ill patients receive care consistent with their values and preferences by formally documenting those wishes in an advance directive.

• The tuck-in acquisition will see Iris’ ACP offerings folded into Aledade’s new health services unit called Aledade Care Solutions, which is designed to give the company’s partners more ways to address their current inefficiencies.

• Combining Iris’ services with Aledade’s predictive algorithm and data will help better identify patients who could benefit from ACP, which demonstrated better outcomes and higher patient satisfaction following a successful pilot program last year.

Change the Model, Change the Results

Aledade’s software-led model for assisting providers is highly scalable, allowing it to be more capital efficient than competitors that are building value-based primary care clinics from scratch. The company’s contracts collectively cover more than 1.7M patients (up 20% from last year), and it’s operations rank it among the coveted healthcare startups that are turning a profit.

Aledade was profitable for the second straight year in 2021 with gross revenue of $300M, a figure that it expects to double by 2023.

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

• Remote BP Monitoring: JAMA recently published a study of remote blood pressure (BP) monitoring from 162 patients, finding that clinicians acted on 343 (62.1%) of 552 EHR alerts for persistently elevated BP home readings, while there were no changes to the care plan for the remaining 209 alerts (37.9%). Inaction was tied to the fact that the alerts did not account for information such as office-based readings and upcoming appointments, suggesting a need for refined alerts and clinician support in remote BP monitoring programs.

• DeepScribe Raises $30M: AI-enabled medical transcription startup DeepScribe raised $30M ($37M total funding) to help develop its scribe solution that records natural patient-physician conversations before uploading the notes directly into discrete fields within EHRs. DeepScribe reportedly saves physicians 3 hours per day by automating their notetaking workflows – a tough problem with major outcome implications of getting it right or wrong.

• Telehealth Disparity Study: A UC San Diego study of 8,997 adult cancer patients found that Hispanic patients had 14% lower odds of using telemedicine than white patients, while all Spanish speakers had 29% decreased odds of using the service. Although many studies have pointed out similar disparities, this research also tied a 10% increase in a zip code’s COVID-19 infections with an 8.3% decrease in telemedicine use, further demonstrating a need for culturally tailored telemedicine to reduce health disparities for vulnerable populations.

• Healthcare Collaboration: Modern Healthcare published an article exploring how big tech is shifting its focus from disrupting healthcare towards a more collaborative mindset. The author predicts that we’ll see more partnerships between traditional and non-traditional healthcare players in 2022, due in part to hospitals’ abundance of patient data and the fact that they can serve as a “test bed” for new innovations.

• Physician Happiness Survey: Medscape’s 2022 Physician Lifestyle & Happiness Report found that close to 60% of 13k surveyed physicians reported being happy outside of work (compared with 80% prior to the pandemic), and that over half would take a salary decrease to have better work-life balance. The full report includes interesting findings on physician burnout (accelerated sharply as the delta variant spread), vacation time (20% take over 5 weeks), and popular vehicles (Toyotas claimed the top spot for the fifth straight year).

• TigerConnect Funding: TigerConnect recently closed a colossal $300M growth investment (funding total now $400M) from Vista Equity Partners to build out its suite of tools that enable better care team communication. The funding will also be put towards expanding TigerConnect’s services beyond its core communications platform into areas such as nurse alarm management, physician scheduling, and patient engagement.

• mHealth Engagement: A new study published in JMIR revealed a positive dose-response relationship between patient engagement and outcomes among 300 people living with elevated depressive symptoms. In a 9 month mHealth intervention, highly engaged patients (n=72, completed ~53 of 72 interventions) and low engagement patients (n=78, completed ~11 of 72 interventions) showed widening differences in depressive symptoms, quality of life, and perceived stress at the 3-, 6-, and 9-month follow-ups, with the researchers emphasizing the need to take a long-term view of engagement in mHealth design.

• DexCare Series B: Providence Health spinout DexCare recently raised $50M in Series B funding (total now $71M) to help develop its patient acquisition and navigation platform as it aims to become the “operating system” for digital care. DexCare assists health systems with the transition to hybrid care through its platform-as-a-service solution that enables real-time demand aggregation and appointment booking across all service lines.

• Patient Portal Impact: The expanded role of online patient portals for medical image viewing hasn’t had much of an impact on most radiologists. A Journal of Digital Imaging study of three healthcare systems and 254 of their radiologists found that patients viewed 14% of available exams and just 36% of the radiologists were ever contacted by patients about online images. The majority of radiologists didn’t feel online viewing impacted their roles (76%), while only 9.3% felt a positive impact.

• MSK’s New CDO: Rémy Evard is joining Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center as chief digital officer and head of technology, leaving his role as the chief information officer of VC firm Flagship Pioneering. Evard is only the second executive to hold the title of chief digital officer at MSK since the role was established in 2019, and will helm the execution of MSK’s digital strategy for improving scientific research, patient care, and medical education.