League CEO Michael Serbinis

Telehealth

Calm Acquires Ripple, Appoints New CEO

Wellness company Calm announced the acquisition of Ripple Health Group as it becomes the latest meditation app developer to set its sights on the healthcare market.

While the terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, Ripple’s CEO David Ko will now serve as Calm’s co-CEO alongside Calm co-founder Michael Smith.

• Calm’s app provides users with audio content that helps them reduce stress, improve sleep, or strengthen their overall mental fitness. Calm’s 100M downloads make it the most popular meditation app of all time.

• Ripple is the developer of a pair of apps that aim to reduce the burden of caregiving. Care Memo allows patients to communicate with their care teams, while LikePaper helps users organize medical information and set reminders.

• Following the acquisition, the Ripple team will focus on building Calm Health, an upcoming employer solution designed to support employee mental health that will replace Calm for Business after its launch later this year.

• Calm Health will include “content, community, and coaching to drive outcomes across the full spectrum of mental healthcare,” building on the lessons learned from Calm for Business, which covers over 20M lives.

The Takeaway
Unlike Headspace and Ginger’s merger from late last year, which aimed to reach the meditation app’s large user base with additional teletherapy services, Calm’s acquisition of Ripple was geared more towards obtaining talent than existing products. The Ripple team and the appointment of Ko as CEO should help to accelerate Calm’s push into the mental health space, and Calm Health is now a core focus of the company’s product roadmap.

Digital Health

League Raises $95M To Scale Health OS

Healthcare navigation platform League recently completed a $95M Series C round to support the scaling of its Health OS platform-as-a-service solution, which aims to be the digital infrastructure for an integrated health ecosystem.

• Health OS enables payors, providers, and employers to build their own comprehensive healthcare consumer experiences with a secure and interoperable foundation. 

• The platform is built on the FHIR standard and leverages the Google Cloud Healthcare API to tie together data from EHRs, wearables, and third-party partners to create personalized “digital front doors” for patients.

• League reports that hundreds of companies ranging from Humana to Shopify have adopted Health OS to ensure employees can quickly access the services that they need, helping them to feel supported in managing their health while performing at their best.

• The company attributes its success to the fact that it allows its clients to keep up with rising consumer expectations for healthcare convenience without having to invest the labor and resources to create a homegrown solution.

IPO Rumors

The latest raise pushed League’s total funding to $205M, and the announcement seems to hint that future funding could come from the public markets. The round’s lead investor, TDM Growth Partners, stated that it understands “the scaling journey of pre-IPO companies and what it takes to transition them successfully to the public markets.”

Although no timeline was given for an IPO, TDM made similar investments in AllBirds and Slack less than a year prior to them going public, so it wouldn’t be too surprising if League was following a similar tempo.

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

• Athelas Funding: Remote patient monitoring startup Athelas became a digital health unicorn after completing two consecutive $132M funding rounds, pushing the company’s valuation to $1.5B. The Athelas platform and proprietary LTE-connected devices enable clinicians to monitor chronically ill patients in their homes. The services and devices are offered with no upfront expenses for the providers, which has allowed Athelas to quickly scale the number of patients it serves to 40k, up 10x in the last year.

• Withings Acquires 8fit: Withings is acquiring fitness app 8fit that provides personalized nutrition and activity programs to help users reach their goals. Withings is aiming to improve 8fit’s workout and meal planning recommendations by incorporating smartwatch-generated user data in the model. The acquisition is part of a three-year $30M investment Withings announced to combine medical devices with personalized health and wellness plans.

• Hybrid Care for Asthma: A combination of telehealth and in-person visits may be the most effective strategy for treating asthma patients, according to a new study published in the Journal of Asthma. Researchers analyzed EHR data for 502 asthma patients, finding that telemedicine use was significantly lower among non-English speakers (OR=0.12) and school-aged children (OR=0.43). Focus groups with 12 parents of pediatric patients revealed that nearly all agreed that a physician’s in-person presence was more effective for counseling pediatric patients, due to children being more actively engaged during in-person visits, but that accessing specialist care without having to travel made telehealth appropriate once rapport has been established.

• $190B in Health Tech Losses: Healthcare strategist Air Gottlieb recently outlined how publicly traded health tech startups have had their market caps shrink by a combined $190B since their 2021 peaks, a decline of over 73%. Gottlieb predicts that the repricing of these companies could cause many startups to reevaluate the timing of their planned IPOs, delaying them until market conditions improve, while the reduced valuations make it likely that we’ll start to see more consolidation as larger healthcare businesses look to take advantage of the discounts to acquire revenue.

• Medicine’s Great Resignation: A recent survey of 20k healthcare workers from the AMA found that 1 in 5 doctors are planning to leave the profession within the next two years, while nearly 1 in 3 intend to reduce their work hours. Burnout, fear of COVID-19 exposure, and workload were predictors of intent to leave, although workers that felt valued by their organization were less likely to report an upcoming career change.

• Info-Blocking Influx: Current Problems in Diagnostic Radiology lived up to its name by detailing how complying with the 21st Century Cures Act’s information-blocking rules can lead to a surge in questions to referring physicians. A survey of 249 MGH referring physicians found that the majority were contacted by patients about their radiology reports (195, 78%) and received a higher volume of patient calls (165, 66%) during the 60 days after MGH began giving patients immediate access to their radiology reports.

• Walmart + Health at Scale: Walmart is partnering with Health at Scale to provide personalized provider recommendations across 25 medical specialties and 34 procedures to employees enrolled in the company’s health plan. Health at Scale’s Precision Navigation tool uses machine learning to assess a patient’s unique health needs before identifying providers who have successfully treated patients with similar characteristics, and then pairs patients with the providers most likely to deliver the best outcome.

• Exchange Ultimatum: A JACR editorial by some of medical imaging’s biggest influencers called for the major image exchange companies to start working together or face consequences. The authors blamed competitive motives (not technology factors) for the fact that images are still mainly exchanged via physical media, proposing a vendor-to-vendor exchange model. They also asked exchange vendors to “immediately commit” to this model, while encouraging healthcare institutions to only contract with committed exchange vendors by 2024.

• Jasper Series A: Jasper Health recently completed a $25M Series A funding round to help develop its cancer care navigation platform. The platform helps cancer patients organize their care needs and understand their treatment options, while its intelligent recommendation engine and cancer care coaches have been proven to reduce expenses for the healthcare providers, payors, and employers that Jasper works with.