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Jenny Schneider on Homeward’s $50M Series B, 30K-Patient Partnership with Priority Health

By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH

Just FIVE MONTHS after launch, rural health startup Homeward is proving its potential for growth with MORE funding – today announcing its $50 million Series B (that’s $70 million total for the folks keeping score at home) – AND a huge 30,000-patient partnership with Priority Health. Co-founder & CEO Dr. Jennifer Schneider is here to breakdown both bits of news and give us some context about what they indicate about the rural healthcare market.

There are a couple surprising facts in this one that add up to why investors like ARCH Venture Partners and Human Capital (co-leads), General Catalyst (which led the Series A), and Lee Shapiro and Glen Tullman (old buddies and former Livongo colleagues who went in on this with personal funds outside of their fund 7wireVentures) were excited to jump into a quick Series B.

Surprising Fact 1: 90% of all rural Medicare beneficiaries are covered by just 7 payers, which makes the Priority Health deal a bigger deal than even that massive 30K patient population might indicate.

Surprising Fact 2: Homeward’s market of rural Americans is actually TWICE as large as the diabetes market that spurred the investment and growth of Livongo.

For all the math, the details on how the business actually works five months in, and how Homeward is actually going to market as a ‘healthcare infrastructure’ provider rather than just a next-gen medical group, you’re going to have to give this one a watch!

BREAKING at ViVE: Jenny Schneider on Launch of New Biz, Homeward

by JESSICA DAMASSA, WTF HEALTH

BREAKING! Livongo-famous Jenny Schneider stops by to talk to us first, on-site at ViVE in Miami, about the brand-new business she’s just launched today to “rearchitect” rural health and care. Called Homeward, the startup is coming out with a $20 million Series A backed by General Catalyst, and a novel model that will integrate virtual-and-in-person primary care and cardiology care for Medicare beneficiaries in rural markets. We get into the business model, care model, some shocking statistics about just how dire the market need is, AND all the gossip about the old friends she’s bringing into the business with her. PLUS: Bonus dishing on Glen Tullman’s new business Transcarent, and what connection Homeward might have to the SPAC that Jenny co-founded with Glen, Hemant Teneja and Steve Klasko of General Catalyst. Coming at you fast with this one!

Health in 2 Point 00, Episode 133 | PBMs galore, Genome Medical, & the FCC’s Rural Health Program

Episode 133 of Health in 2 Point 00 is brought to you by the letter P — that’s P for PBMs, of course. In this episode, Jess and I talk about Genome Medical extending their series B and getting another $14 million on top of the $23 million they already raised for their remote genetic counseling services, the FCC adding another $198 million to their rural health program, bringing the funding to a whopping total of $802 million, Anthem’s PBM IngenioRx acquiring pharmacy startup Zipdrug, and Capital Rx, a startup PBM, announced a deal with Walmart. —Matthew Holt

We Spend More on Health Care Than Other Rich Countries but Have Worse Outcomes?

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By FRANK de LIBERO

flying cadeuciiHere it’s argued that we need to retire the health care fallacy, “We spend more on health care than other rich countries but have worse outcomes.” The fallacy implies U.S. health care is deficient in spite of being costly. Indeed our health care costs too much, but there is little evidence that our care is less effective than care in other countries. On the other hand, there’s plenty of evidence that our social determinants of health are worse.

The argument segues off a recent article by Victor Fuchs. The case is presented by using a simple linear model to explore how life expectancy might change when we substitute the numbers of other countries’ determinants of health for U.S. numbers. After making these substitutions and holding health care spending constant the model predicts U.S. life expectancy is right there with the other OECD countries, 81.6 years compared to their average 81.4 years. This what-if modelling makes clear what should be obvious but the fallacy hides, that health care is only one part of population health.

The Fuchs Essay 
Victor Fuchs’s recent essay1 impressed me. He wrote of the lack of a positive relationship between life expectancy and health care expenditures (HCE) in OECD countries. A chart was included for empirical support. I liked the idea behind the chart which demonstrated his point using data from select countries and our 50 states. Professor Fuchs has written on this topic for years (e.g., in his 1974 book “Who Shall Live?”). I posted on the fallacy in March 2013 but was not as nuanced.2

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Rapid Advances in Health IT Adoption and Use in the Safety Net

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By Michael A. Wittie

safety net clinic
Federally funded health centers are making strides adopting and using electronic health records (EHRs) to treat some of the nation’s poorest and most at-risk patients since the enactment of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, according to a new first-of-its-kind study.

We know that health IT can help improve care quality. ONC and the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) are working hard to ensure that all providers adopt and use EHRs. In the past, some researchers External Links Disclaimer found that there might be a digital divide in health IT use, meaning that providers who mostly serve certain groups of people – particularly the poor and racial/ethnic minorities or people in rural areas – may be using health IT less than others.

Community health centers remain the largest provider of health care to underserved individuals in the US. They provide health care to more than 20 million Americans every year, including many who are poor, uninsured, or have no regular source of care.

In the past, health centers used health IT at a lower rate than other providers. In 2006, a survey showed that only 26% of health centers had any EHR capacity at all.

To ensure that the benefits of health IT and care transformation be available to all Americans, regardless of insurance, wealth, or location, the HITECH Act provided  federal resources to help health centers adopt EHRs.

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Advancing Health Equity in the Digital Age

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By Karen DeSalvo, MD & J. Nadine Gracia, MD

Karen DeSalvoDuring National Minority Health Month, we acknowledge the potential for health information technology (health IT) – from electronic and personal health records to online communities to mobile applications – to transform health care and improve the health of racial and ethnic minorities.

Lack of access to quality, preventive health care, cultural and linguistic barriers, and limited patient-provider communication are factors that aggravate health disparities.

By increasing our investment in health IT policies and standards, we can help improve the quality of health care delivery and make it easier for patients and providers to communicate with each other – a huge step toward addressing the persistence of health disparities.

The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project External Links Disclaimer found in 2012  that African Americans and Latinos are more likely to own a mobile phone than whites and outpace whites in mobile app use, using their phones for a wider range of activities.

The study showed that African Americans and Latinos use their mobile phones more often to look for health information online. This has very important implications for personal management of health and interaction with the health care system.

However, barriers to widespread adoption of health IT remain.

For example, a 2014 consumer engagement report found that minorities were less likely to adopt online patient portals to access their health information than were non-Hispanic whites.

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How the Best of Intentions Is Hurting Care for Americans Who Live In Rural Areas

By Ashish Jha, MD

Ensuring that Americans who live in rural areas have access to health care has always been a policy priority.  In healthcare, where nearly every policy decision seems contentious and partisan, there has been widespread, bipartisan support for helping providers who work in rural areas.  The hallmark of the policy effort has been the Critical Access Hospital (CAH) program– and new evidence from our latest paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that our approach needs rethinking.  In our desire to help providers that care for Americans living in rural areas, we may have forgotten a key lesson: it’s not about access to care.  It’s about access to high-quality care.  And on that policy goal, we’re not doing a very good job.

A little background will be helpful.  In the 1980s and 1990s, a large number of rural hospitals closed as the number of people living in rural areas declined and Medicare’s Prospective Payment System made it more difficult for some hospitals to manage their costs.  A series of policy efforts culminated in Congress creating the Critical Access Hospital program as part of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997.  The goals of the program were simple: provide cost-based reimbursement so that hospitals that were in isolated areas could become financially stable and provide “critical access” to the millions of Americans living in these areas.  Congress created specific criteria to receive a CAH designation: hospitals had to have 25 or fewer acute-care beds and had to be at least 35 miles from the nearest facility (or 15 miles if one needed to cross mountains or rivers).  By many accounts, the program was a “success” – rural hospital closures fell as many institutions joined the program.  There was widespread consensus that the program had worked.

Despite this success, there were two important problems in the legislation, and the way it was executed, that laid the groundwork for the difficulties of today. Continue reading…