Here’s a selection of stories we gathered on healthcarehandout.com this week.
Things That Happened
Healthy Decline. An 18% decline in consumer health care spending has been an outsized contributor to the overall decline in GDP we’re experiencing.
Look in to my AI. Google Health built a deep learning tool to detect diabetic retinopathy and rolled it out for live testing in Thailand. While the tool itself proved accurate in detecting the disease, the trial was plagued by issues of image quality and slow internet speeds.
Retail therapy. UHG’s Optum is reportedly in talks to acquire virtual therapy provider AbleTo for $470M. Optum Ventures has previously invested in the New York based company, which is currently headed by CEO Trip Hofer, an Optum alum.
Prescription drones. CVS and UPS are partnering to offer drone delivery of prescription medication to residents of The Villages, a 100,000+ resident retirement community in Florida. Glimpse of the future? Perhaps, but it’ll be harder to deploy this sort of service into environments with less centralized control and uniformity.
Home sick. There have been consistent anecdotal reports of declines in hospitalizations for serious acute conditions, and now researchers at Cigna have confirmed them. “Hospitalizations decreased 28% for epilepsy and seizures, 24% for gastrointestinal bleeds, and 22% for aortic aneurysms and dissections. Hospitalizations for acute appendicitis and acute coronary syndromes, which include heart attacks, dropped 13% and 11%, respectively.” While there could be monthly variations at play, that’s less likely as declines have been noted for multiple unrelated conditions.
Medical Win Ratio. Several major insurers, including Humana, Cigna, and Anthem, have reported their quarterly earnings this week and the story across the board is that they’re largely unaffected by the pandemic. At the same time, AHIP has been lobbying Congress for relief for the industry.
Telewealth. Teladoc reported earnings this week, and it’d seem they’ve enjoyed the same growth nearly every other telehealth company has seen. Q1 revenue is up 41% YOY, while the 2 million virtual visits they performed represents a 92% increase YOY. And the company is optimistic that this isn’t just a temporary phenomenon; they’re predicting 8 million or more visits in 2020.
Sleeping-in-place. Withings completed what they’re calling the Lockdown Lowdown Study using aggregate data from their 2 million+ devices to see how their users’ behavior and health has changed during shelter-in-place orders. While the data is surely skewed by the fact that Withings customers would tend to be more active to begin with, there’s a ton of interesting stuff in the report. Some highlights:
Americans have gained, on average, 0.21 lbs
Average steps per day has only declined 7% in the US
Americans are actually sleeping more
45% Medical Collective Health and One Medical completed a study comparing overall health expenditures for employees using One Medical vs those using traditional primary care. They found fairly significant reductions in spending for One Medical members, with a headline figure of 45% less expense overall. While we should take any study produced by a company with a grain of salt, these results are impressive.
Testing limits. While commercial labs like LabCorp and Quest Diagnostics are critical to our ability to test at scale for the coronavirus, they too are facing difficulties from the pandemic. Demand for ordinary medical testing has declined significantly, with LabCorp reporting a 50%+ drop. Both companies have furloughed employees.
Now App-pear-ing. Pear Therapeutics has taken advantage of the FDA’s special temporary rules on digital mental health products to launch their digital therapeutic for schizophrenia. Akili also used this special period to launch their digital therapeutic for children with ADHD.
Drug Drug Revolution. A bunch of companies are trialing vaccines and treatments for COVID-19. It’s honestly hard to keep track. STAT’s tracker makes it a lot easier.
Ring ring. Smart ring maker Motiv was acquired and will shift focus away from health tracking via ring to biometric authentication via ring.
Things That Started Up
Rome Therapeutics raised a $50M Series A. They're using a machine-learning driven approach to drug development, mining the vast stretches of the human genome that's largely repeating and has been mostly ignored by previous researchers.
SkyCell raised $62M in growth capital. They’re operating a network of climate controlled shipping containers that transport temperature-sensitive pharmaceuticals.
Medici raised a $24M Series B. They’re building an asynchronous telehealth platform that embraces multiple modalities for communication including text, voice, and video chat.
Mojo Vision raised a $54M Series B. They’re developing augmented-reality contact lenses and working towards an FDA Breakthrough Device designation for visual impairment indications.
Particle Health raised a $12M Series A. They’re building a HIPAA compliant API to make sharing healthcare data easy and scalable.
Tomorrow Health raised a $7.5M Seed. They’re building a platform for purchasing home health products and supplies.
Dascena raised a $50M Series B. They’re building algorithmic diagnostics to detect diseases earlier, allowing for earlier intervention in hospital settings.
Vida Health raised $25M. They’re building a platform for connecting health practitioners (nurses, therapists, nutritionists, etc.) with patients coping with chronic conditions.
Things To Read
Siddhartha Mukherjee comprehensively details the many failures throughout our public health and healthcare systems in preparation and response to the coronavirus crisis. His conclusion: “Everyone now asks: When will things get back to normal? But, as a physician and researcher, I fear that the resumption of normality would signal a failure to learn. We need to think not about resumption but about revision.”
Christina Farr tells the inside story of how teams at Apple and Google worked together to quickly build their contact tracing system tools.
Scott Alexander takes a deep dive into the Amish healthcare system. The Amish pay far less for healthcare per capita than Americans do, but experience comparable results in terms of health and longevity. Nikhil Krishnan analyzed the piece in a series of tweets.
Julie Yoo argues that primary care needs a new operating system. Specifically, it needs a revised technical infrastructure that supports a new mode of unbundled frontline care.
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