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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
