As you read this I am winging my way to Tokyo to be at the Health Tech Sum Japan 2023, which means no THCB Gang. So to tide you over I am letting you imagine you’re listening to me there, but here! Adam Turinas, a fellow expat Brit (and Chelsea fan) had me on his podcast, The HealthTech Marketing Show this week. Half an hour of whether Digital Health is Dead and what that means–Matthew Holt
TOMORROW: ZS Impact Webinar on Digital Health
Join ZS’s Ahmed Albaiti with me, Matthew Holt, author and founder of The Health Care Blog, as we discuss the considerations and approaches that policy experts, regulators, clinical leaders and the venture capitalist community can take to affect a future for connected health technologies.
Date: Wednesday, November 22, 2023
Time: 12:00 PM Eastern Standard Time
Duration: 30 minutes
The Future of Digital Health: How UX Design is Shaping the Industry
By PARV SONDHI
As the digital health world continues to expand, more and more people are turning to apps to manage everything from diabetes and obesity to depression and anxiety. People rely on these apps for their physical and mental health, so it’s crucial that product developers ensure a safe, effective, and engaging experience for them. Healthcare experts agree.
A team of researchers and health system leaders recently introduced a new framework called “Evidence DEFINED” for evaluating digital health products. This framework offers hospitals, payers, and trade organizations a precise set of guidelines to assess the validity and safety of a digital health product. It also gives digital health companies good benchmarks to work from.
As digital health companies create new products in the space, they should keep specific points in mind — from user experience design to considerations for data privacy. While clinical outcomes will always reign supreme, the framework suggests that patient experience, provider experience, product design, and cost effectiveness can’t be discounted.
Here are a few critical considerations that product delivery teams should plan for when creating digital health apps.
Clear navigation
First things first: a user won’t use an app that’s hard to navigate. To help people stick to their health goals, developers need to create apps that are intuitive and easy-to-use. When a user logs onto an app, they want to find the content they need immediately and be guided through the experience step by step.
A lot of different people use health apps, and not all of them are tech-savvy. Health apps need to be accessible to all demographics, including people of various ages who speak different languages. It’s also important to remember that digital health apps can be used across multiple platforms, so the navigation should remain clear when switching between devices.
While navigation might seem like a no-brainer, it’s often overlooked when designing for digital health.
Continue reading…Interview with Oxeon CEO, Sonia Millsom
Sonia Millsom is the relatively new CEO at Oxeon, which became the dominant executive search (headhunter) firm in digital health over the past decade or so. The company was built by Trevor Price and team. Sonia discussed the transition to her leadership, the other things Oxeon does (venture studio, relationship to TownHall Ventures), and the state of the employment market in digital health. TL:DR on that, it’s slowed but they are doing a lot of work and still growing.–Matthew Holt
Interview with Sonia Milsom, CEO Oxeon
Sonia Milsom is the relatively new CEO at Oxeon, which became the dominant executive search (headhunter) firm in digital health over the past decade or so. The company was built by Trevor Price and team. Sonia discussed the transition, the other things Oxeon does (venture studio, relationship to TownHall Ventures), and the state of the employment market in digital health. TL:DR on that, it’s slowed but they are doing a lot of work and still growing. Matthew Holt
HLTH 2022: Market State-of-Play with Stephanie Davis of SVB Securities
By JESSICA DAMASSA
“If last year was EUPHORIA…‘We made it! Digital health is relevant!’ This year, it’s a little more panic. More, ‘Are we okay???’” SVB Securities’ Senior Managing Director Stephanie Davis says that she’s been getting asked for a lot of advice this year, so we jump on the bandwagon. Should digital health and health tech be worried? What about exits? What areas of health innovation are still hot? Which are not? And, what the heck is “creative destruction” and why is it her favorite buzz phrase from HLTH 2022?
Stephanie answers all our questions, reassures us of the healthcare market’s resiliency, and offers up some high-level perspective on which “wallet” (payer, pharma, or provider) startups will want to align with to weather the short-term.
Rural America is a Fertile Field for Digital Health
BY ERIC LARSEN and TOMMY IBRAHIM
Our rural health care system has suffered badly during the COVID-19 pandemic. It entered the pandemic with severe structural weaknesses, including magnified health disparities and inequities, lower rates of vaccination in the general population, and high risk of rural hospital closures. Beginning with these challenges, rural providers have been harder hit by the pandemic than just about any other health care sector.
Juxtaposed against this struggle is the optimism for digital health – one of the few bright spots of the pandemic. We have witnessed a veritable digital health revolution – record capital infusions of $37.9 billion to digital health companies in 2021, a proliferation of digital health companies (11,000 by some estimates), a wave of healthtech IPOs (29), and an unprecedented talent migration of Silicon Valley programmers, technologists, and engineers into health care. With this investment and talent boom comes staggering growth in new digital health tools. From telemedicine to remote diagnostics to the delivery of medications directly to a patient’s home, it seems that for every health care access need there is a digital solution.
Continue reading…Matthew’s health care tidbits: Digital Health is dead (well, not quite)
Each week I’ve been adding a brief tidbits section to the THCB Reader, our weekly newsletter that summarizes the best of THCB that week (Sign up here!). Then I had the brainwave to add them to the blog. They’re short and usually not too sweet! –Matthew Holt
For today’s health care tidbits, the elephant in the room has truely come home to roost, and now it’s landed on the phone wire, it’s close to breaking it. OK, I have stretched that metaphor to death but you’ll get my point. Writing on THCB earlier this month Jeff Goldsmith and Eric Larsen picked up on something I’ve been saying for a while –the fall in valuation of publicly traded digital health companies will have a knock effect on private companies.
It took a while–those public companies stock prices started falling from their heights 14 months ago–but in the last month the venture capital scene has gone quiet. The days of sub $20m ARR companies getting mutli-hundred million dollar valuations are over for now. They will be back at some point in the future, as that’s how Silicon Valley has always worked, but it’ll be a while and in the meantime everyone is going to have to figure out what to do in the new world.
The “What to do?” question is getting harder as the data starts to come in, and it’s getting ugly. On the one hand the two fastest growing digital health companies ever have both had their comeuppance. Livongo was a tremendous exit for its investors and ended up trading at 20 times future revenue before it got acquired by Teladoc for $18bn mostly in stock. This quarter Teladoc wrote off much of its investment in Livongo and the whole company is now only worth $5bn. Clearly those “synergies” between telehealth and chronic care management didn’t work. The other rocket ship was Cerebral, which went from nothing in Jan 2020 to by Jan 2022 having over 100,000 patients and thousands of providers on its system as it raised over $300m from Softbank et al. Its aggressive & expensive customer acquisition costs, with its controversial controlled medication prescribing patterns, brought it way too much controversy. Its young CEO is gone, and it’ll be a slow climb back with bankruptcy and collapse the likeliest of outcomes.
But the part of digital health that’s trying to replace the incumbents is not the only place showing ugliness. The technologies and services being rolled out are often not working. Exhibit A is a randomized controlled trial conducted a Univ of Pennsylvania. One set of heart patients was set up with connected blood pressure cuffs, a pillbox that tracked their Rx adherence and lots of coaching help. The others were sent home with the proverbial leaflet and told to call if they had problems. You’d assume many more deaths and hospital readmissions in the second group. You’d be wrong. There were no differences.
So digital health needs to see if it can produce services companies that move the needle on costs and outcomes. The advantage is that they are eventually competing with hospital systems whose DNA doesn’t allow them the ability to let them cross the chasm to the new world. The bad news is that those systems have huge reserves which they can use to subsidize their old world activities.
I’m hoping digital health’s impact in the next 2 years will be as big as it was in the past 2, It’s by no means dead or over, but I am pessimistic.
Digital & Tech Are Changing Pfizer: Pharma Co’s Chief Digital & Technology Officer Takes Us Inside
By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH
What does digital transformation look like at a global healthcare giant like Pfizer? Lidia Fonseca, Pfizer’s Chief Digital & Technology Officer, shares her strategy for building the life sciences company’s digital data and technology solutions, including her thinking about digital therapeutics, digital diagnostics, and digital biomarkers. As Lidia puts it, this is not about trying to simply implement a “digital strategy,” but is, instead, about building a “business strategy for digital world.”
There’s probably no better story that illustrates how that “business strategy for a digital world” is playing out than the fascinating example of how Pfizer’s Digital team helped accelerate the development of the Covid19 vaccine and oral treatment. Lidia takes us inside and talks through how her team used tech to safely speed-up everything from development timelines to clinical trials and even go-to-market in areas around the globe that were experiencing outbreaks.
Beyond the tech team’s ability to effectively wield data that changed the game when it came to Covid, Lidia also shares what’s next for the pharma co when it comes to digital health and digital medicines. Beyond the pill? Around the pill? Instead of the pill? What’s Pfizer’s position on digital therapeutics as it continues to work to bring new breakthrough medicines to patients? We get into all the ways digital and technology are manifesting themselves within an organization like Pfizer AND get Lidia’s best advice for other healthcare organizations who are redefining their businesses with technology.
Vida Health Starts Prescribing: Meds, Labs, Devices, & More for Mental Health & Diabetes
By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH
Big news coming out of Vida Health today as the chronic condition care startup announces that it will now be able to prescribe meds, med devices, lab tests, and more to its members. This puts Vida Health among the first of the digital health chronic care companies to evolve its offerings beyond apps-and-coaching, leading on this trend to take digital health chronic care into a more full expression of virtual care.
Vida Health’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Patrick Carroll, introduces us to the new offering which he tipped us off about when we met him a few months ago, new to his role at Vida and coming in hot from Hims & Hers where he built similar services as he took that company public as CMO.
The new prescribing services will cover both sides of Vida Health’s integrated model: mental health and cardiometabolic health, but in different ways. On the mental health side, Pat says members will be able to receive prescription meds for anxiety and depression ONLY at this time; on the cardiometabolic side, members working with Vida Health will NOT be able to get prescription drugs to help with diabetes or heart health, but would instead be able to get continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) prescribed, specialized diets, and labs, like A1C testing, that require a script.
Do these prescribing services begin to turn Vida Health into a primary care provider? If not, how do these new prescribing and medication management roles integrate with whatever other primary care offering is in place through a member’s plan or employer without adding cost or confusion to the patient experience? We talk through the evolution of both care model and business model as Vida Health adds another layer to its full-stack chronic condition management platform.
