THCB Quickbites – The Health Care Blog

Tim O’Connell, CEO, emtelligent

matthew holt — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 17:46:20 +0000

Tim O’Connell discusses emtelligent’s capability to take unstructured clinical data and using NLP, match it to clinical ontologies and figure out what disease patients have, and enable payers and providers to do something about it–rather than payment coding which is what NLP has usually been used for. I spoke to him at HIMSS in March where he was launching emtelligent own new large language model (LLM). Anyone with a health data set is a potential client, but Tim thinks we can use all this data and his company’s technology to radically improve our understanding of clinical care, and improve it–Matthew Holt

Ami Parekh, Included Health

matthew holt — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 16:21:30 +0000

Ami Parekh is the Chief Health Officer of Included Health. It provides navigation services & expert medical opinions (the original Grand Rounds) and virtual care (the old Doctors on Demand) and it then bought a smaller company called Included Health. Ami explains why navigation exists (clue: health plans have been terrible at it) and how it works, and what money it saves on trend (about 2%). They’re also reaching out asking about people’s “Healthy days” and are tracking that metric, and giving people more healthy days–Matthew Holt

THCB Quickbite: Aditya Bansod, Luma Health

matthew holt — Wed, 10 May 2023 13:51:00 +0000

Aditya Bansod is the CTO & co-founder of Luma Health. Matthew Holt spoke to him about their new offerings, following up on an interview with CEO Adnan Iqbal about 18 months ago. To their operational workflow tools which help providers route and manage the patient journey (think appointments, communications and much more), they have now added some data intelligence based on collating all the anonymized data they have access to and seeing what works best in actually getting patients to engage with their care.

Today (i.e. since this video was shot) Luma announced a new deal with major EMR player Meditech, which should get their tech into more hospital systems

THCB Quickbite: Michael Gould, ZeOmega

matthew holt — Mon, 08 May 2023 07:57:00 +0000

Michael Gould is AVP of Interoperability Strategy at ZeOmega, a utilization/care management company that predominantly helps payers manage population health for about 50m covered lives including AmeriHealth Caritas, home care company HealPros and more. Since 2016 they have also been in the interoperability game since they bought Health Unity. Since Michael came over to ZeOmega from Independence Blue Cross a few years back he’s been helping the data/API integration that replaces a lot of the fax and phone-based prior-auth. He told me about the cross-sell between the two sides of the company, in part driven by the new CMS regulations about prior auth–Matthew Holt

THCB Quickbite: Steve Yaskin, Health Gorilla

matthew holt — Wed, 03 May 2023 16:30:17 +0000

Steve Yaskin is CEO of Health Gorilla and probably the only non-lawyer who has read the entire 21st Century Cures Act, and decided that there was a business buried in it. If we are going to fix the data access problem and then move that data to where it is needed in the patient care experience, it’s a good bet that Health Gorilla’s health information network will be a big part of that future. Steve told me about the company, its technology for patient identity and matching (among others), and what it means to be an official QHIN exchanging data using FHIR. Will consumers and providers on their behalf demand access to data? Steve & Health Gorilla have raised over $80m to bet “yes”, and are doubling revenue every year–Matthew Holt

THCB Quickbite: Ines Vigil, SVP Transformation & Services, Clarify Health Solutions

matthew holt — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 18:40:09 +0000

Ines Vigil, SVP Transformation & Services, Clarify Health Solutions talked with me at HIMSS23. A quick discussion about what Clarify Health does, and why the health system needs a huge database of 330m patients. Quick clue is that payment negotiations and benchmarking of clinical performance is the biggest demand, and Ines now actually heads up a consulting group that providers need to be overlaid on that data–Matthew Holt

Interview with Ogi Kavazovic, CEO of House Rx

matthew holt — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 23:02:45 +0000

Ogi Kavazovic, CEO of House Rx joined Matthew Holt to explain how his company is trying to ungum the specialty pharmacy market. Its a huge market with a few huge oligopolies in charge of it, and Ogi thinks there is room to work directly with the clinics responsible for most patients using injectables and provide them a better and cheaper experience. Last year they raised $30m in a round led by Bessemer, but as Ogi says there’s along way to go!

THCB Quickbite: Ashish Shah, CEO, Dina

matthew holt — Fri, 06 Jan 2023 20:39:40 +0000

Dina is a tech company that helps coordinates care in the home. CEO Ashish Shah explains that their platform is used by care coordinators, social workers and others to make sure the DME, the skilled nursing, meals and everything else actually arrives at the home. At the moment they support Medicare Advantage plans, large provider systems and also aggregators that manage care at home.

THCB Quickbite: Zak Holdsworth, CEO, Hint Health

matthew holt — Thu, 05 Jan 2023 09:48:00 +0000

Zak Holdsworth has been delivering tech and services support for the growing Direct Primary Care (DPC) movement for 8 years. His company Hint Health supplies all the back office and now an EMR for those primary care doctors who are opting out of the insurance system and charging $1,000 a year (give or take) to manage all the care for their patients. It’s a niche but an interesting niche that is growing at 30-40% a year, and Zak’s company is helping their customers as they both start in DPC and move that care management downstream, including building out a care services cash market for their patients.–Matthew Holt

THCB Quickbite: Rami Karjian CEO & Pippa Shulman CMO, Medically Home

matthew holt — Wed, 04 Jan 2023 16:52:01 +0000

Another quickbite from the end of last year. I caught up with Rami Karjian CEO & Pippa Shulman CMO, Medically Home. The company has grown a lot since its early days growing out of Atrius Medical Group in Boston. Now they are delivering hospital at home tools and services in 19 states and have had huge investments from Mayo, Kaiser and others. Covid, as you can imagine, helped a bit! Costs are down, outcomes are up, and 20-30% of hospital care could be heading to the home. This one looks real–Matthew Holt