It’s been quite a while since Jess & I did a Health in 2 Point 00 and that one was buried in our Policies|Techies|VCs conference in the first week of September. But, as John Malkovich says, We’re back…
Commure gets $500m and maybe one day we’ll know what it does, Spring Health adds to the mental health funding party, UniteUs buys competitor NowPow; Nomad banks $63m for its nurse hiring service, and Xealth adds $24m, even though I’m not sure it’s more than a feature! – Matthew Holt
Matthew Holt
By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH
Not all who wander are lost: Nomad Health lands a $63M Series D round after a year of 5X revenue growth for their tech-driven healthcare staffing marketplace that helps hospitals hire nurses on-demand. This round, led by Adams Street Partners with participation from all existing investors, brings the company’s total fundraising up to $113M. Co-founder & CEO Alexi Nazem stops by to tell us how the startup is not only planning to expand its focus from nurses to other types of healthcare providers but how the process of doing so will transform Nomad from an on-demand staffing agency to “‘THE’ workforce management platform for healthcare.”
Alexi puts it this way: “In healthcare, the product is CARE. And, who is the product team? It’s the doctors, the nurses, the allied health professionals…and the fact that there’s no intentional management of this group of people who steward $1.5 trillion dollars of cost in the US every year is beyond unbelievable.”
The problem is twofold. First, there’s the way temporary staffing is currently being handled: by 2,500 different staffing agencies that take a fragmented, predominantly people-powered approach to sourcing, vetting, and hiring candidates. The cost is high to a health system looking to shore up their nursing staff, and the experience for job-seeking nurses is very opaque, with information being revealed about a job only after a significant investment of time within the application process. If the match falls apart, all the people involved in the process are left to try again.
This leads to the second issue – that, big picture, the status-quo way of temporary staffing is leaving behind a LOT of valuable data. Data about the clinician that is useful to the management of their career, and data about the workforce that would prove valuable to a hospital looking to better manage its care delivery resources.
We journey into the details behind Nomad’s business model, which is cutting costs for hospitals while also increasing pay for the 150,000+ clinicians on its platform. AND, while we’re there, we also find out how they expect their on-demand staffing approach to playing out in the booming virtual care space.
By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH
People with Diabetes can get ready to celebrate: “The ‘Era of Lancets’ is over.” Precision nutrition startup, DayTwo, is scaling up its microbiome-based program, which takes the guesswork (and finger pricks) out of Diabetes management by offering its members food predictions that identify how their bodies will respond to any food BEFORE they eat it. The startup just closed a fresh $37M in Series B funding (led by aMoon and Cathay Ventures) and is expanding the rollout of their fee-for-outcomes Diabetes program to health plans and large self-insured employers.
The science behind this has yielded DayTwo the largest gut microbiome dataset in the world, and years of empirical studies on exactly what happens in our bodies as our digestive systems process different foods. Josh Stevens, DayTwo’s President & Chief Commercial Officer, walks us through the research behind the offering, which uses a gut microbiome analysis to rank foods and food combinations based on how eating them will impact a person’s blood sugar – essentially revealing what foods will (or won’t) cause a member’s blood sugar to spike before they even take a bite.
Its 70,000+ members report lower A1C levels (1 point on average), sustained weight loss, and, probably most exciting, an ability to stick with the program because the app (and wrap-around telehealth support from registered dieticians) creates a completely bespoke diet that lets people learn how to eat their favorite foods and keep their blood glucose levels within range. Will this predictive approach really bring about the end of lancet-based blood glucose testing for Diabetes management? Josh says Diabetes remission is a goal made easier by this predictive approach, but how does it stack up to other food-as-medicine approaches out there? I have a gut-feeling that you’ll want to tune in and find out!
Policies|Techies|VCs: What’s Next For Health Care? is the conference bringing together the CEOs of the next generation of virtual & real-life care delivery, and all the permutations thereof. You can register here or learn how to sponsor.
This is a big week. We are one week out and we’ve started pre-recording a few sessions and they’ve been fascinating. Keynotes include government officials from the 3 most important agencies for digital health –Pauline Lapin (CMS), Micky Tripathi (ONC) & Bakul Patel (FDA). But wait there’s more! Keynotes from techies Glen Tullman (Transcarent), Sean Lane (Olive), Jonathan Bush (Zus Health), Jeff Dachis (One Drop) & Andrew Dudum (Hims & Hers). And we’re not forgetting the VCs sprinkled through the program, with a keynote from Andreesen Horowitz’s Julie Yoo.
Please look at the agenda for 20 power-packed panels and over 100 speakers – and then sign up!
Shout out to our sponsors – This week we welcome new Gold sponsor data privacy company Skyflow and new Silver sponsor Amwell. Thanks to both of them for supporting the conference. They join Avaneer Health (our Platinum sponsor) & exclusive Agency sponsor 120/80. Sliver sponsors are Transcarent & Lark . More sponsors are Aetion. Merck GHIF, Crossover Health, Zus Health, Newtopia, Aetion & Big Health! Many of them will have sessions you can catch on the web site.
It’s going to be a great conference–no need to leave your seat as it’s happening virtually September 7-10. Register here!! — Matthew Holt
THCB Gang is back from its summer break. Joining me Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) for an hour of topical and sometime combative conversation on what’s happening in health care and beyond will be patient safety expert and all around wit Michael Millenson (@MLMillenson); fierce patient activist Casey Quinlan (@MightyCasey), medical historian Mike Magee (@drmikemagee), WTF Health host & Health IT girl Jessica DaMassa (@jessdamassa); and making a rare but welcome appearance cardiologist & provocateur Anish Koka (@anish_koka). Watch it live below.
If you’d rather listen than watch, the audio is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels
By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH
Just ONE-year in market, and Calibrate has already closed a $100M Series B co-led by Founders Fund and Tiger Global, with participation from Optum Ventures, Forerunner Ventures, Threshold Ventures, and Redesign Health. Why is this virtual care startup getting so much attention (and funding) from so many notable health tech investors? Founder & CEO Isabelle Kenyon is here to introduce us to the telehealth-plus-prescription-drugs business she’s building to help people lose weight.
This is NOT a Noom. Calibrate’s business model is built around a class of $700-$1,300-per month, prescription weight loss drugs called GLP-1s, which it helps its members sort through for both fit AND health insurance coverage (Isabelle says 90% of Calibrate members get the drugs covered by their health plan.) Once the drug is prescribed, the Calibrate member is wrapped in a telehealth-driven, lifestyle intervention program that addresses sleep, eating, exercise, and emotional health to help support the reset of their metabolism. As a result, Calibrate members are losing an average of 14% of their body weight, a significantly better, more sustainable outcome than achieved in clinical research when the drugs were prescribed without support.
There are lots of compelling aspects to the Calibrate story here, and we get through all of them: the 175M-person total addressable market of Americans diagnosed with obesity… the recent FDA-approval of Novo Nordisk’s new GLP-1 drug called Wegovy… and how Calibrate will use its fresh funding to build-out an Enterprise program aimed at meeting the shifting thinking employers, Medicare Advantage plans, and other health insurers have about obesity treatment as “preventative care” against more costly chronic diseases.
What else could this “behavior change + drug” framework – and its unique de-coupled payment model – be applied to? Diabetes, cholesterol, and hypertension sound like they’re all on the table, but how defensible is this? What stops a pharma company from doing this themselves? Isn’t this digital therapeutics?? A VERY interesting discussion about the often-taboo subject of weight loss, pharma, and the disruption of the healthcare delivery system behind both.
It’s M&A day here on Health in 2 Point 00! On Episode 229, Jess and I chat about the big news that Headspace and Ginger are merging to create Headspace Health (for more deets tune into Jess’s interview on WTF Health here). Next up, Connect America buys remote patient monitoring platform 100Plus. Finally, AllStripes raises $50 million in a Series B, bringing their total up to $67 million – this is a rare disease play for clinical trial recruiting. —Matthew Holt
By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH
The thinking behind the merger-of-equals between on-demand mental health company, Ginger, and mindfulness and meditation company, Headspace, is revealed in this in-depth chat with Headspace CEO CeCe Morken and Ginger CEO Russell Glass. The combined entity will be known as Headspace Health, with CeCe as its President and Russell as its CEO, and we’re chatting with both of them about go-to-market, strategic direction, and whether or not the next stop is an IPO.
“Low-cost, quality mental healthcare” is where these two minds seem to meet – playing on both Ginger’s reputation for being among the lowest cost providers of on-demand coaching and mental health therapy for the employer market, and Headspace’s budget-friendly, tech-first approach to mental wellness education and training for the masses. This is a critical point of differentiation, especially on the clinical side, where the cost of therapy is oftentimes a barrier for access to it.
Headspace will be rolled out to Ginger’s enterprise clients immediately (playing what sounds like a preventative medicine / early-detection role), but what might be even more exciting are plans to integrate Ginger’s therapy and coaching services into the direct-to-consumer product that has made Headspace a household name.
Is this the move before the BIG MOVE into the public markets? How will the integration work on the data side? And, for you long-time health tech followers and lovers of the digital therapeutics space, I ask about V1 of the Headspace Health brand, which, you might remember, announced bold plans to build the first-ever FDA-approved mindfulness DTx. The new combined entity is not only taking the name – it might one-day get back into the development of mental health digital therapeutics.
Lots to hear in this one as this Headspace Health positions itself to win in both DTC and Enterprise markets, starting Day 1 with 100M lives and 2700 enterprise clients around the world.
It’s the return of #HealthIn2Point00 after an overly long summer break (well, I went to HIMSS and Jess didn’t last week!). We have deals with Maven raising a big round, Cricket Health (from a few weeks back) filling its coffers and another fertility play, Carrot Fertility, getting $75m. Finally Sharecare gets its checkbook out — again–and buys a home care company. We have more to catch up on tomorrow–Matthew Holt
By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH
Innovation in Medicaid is HAPPENING – and not only is it capable of creating better, less expensive healthcare for Medicaid members, but Cityblock Health is proving that it can also be the underpinning of a business worth over $1B dollars.
Dr. Toyin Ajayi, Cityblock’s co-founder & President, walks through the company’s novel business model, which goes AT-RISK to take care of some of the highest risk patients in all of healthcare. Here’s how it works: the startup contracts with health plans that provide Managed Medicaid services, helps them identify groups of patients that are of highest risk or rising risk, then takes over the financial and clinical accountability for that group. Cityblock then envelopes those members in a suite of highly personalized services that address both their healthcare needs and the social care challenges that are connected to them. In short…Cityblock is a medical practice built at the bustling intersection of value-based care and social determinants of health.
Toyin talks through some examples of the unique challenges facing the 75,000+ members Cityblock works with, particularly what they are learning about what it takes to “earn the right” to provide this population with care. But, is the high-touch, tech-infused core of their model defensible? What stops a huge national Managed Medicaid health plan like Centene or Molina from simply replicating this within their own multi-billion-dollar enterprises? Competition, expansion, funding, and outcomes – we get into it all, and hear Toyin’s near-term vision for Cityblock as it puts the nearly $500M its received in venture funding to work on “transforming the healthcare ecosystem for those who need it most.”
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