Esther Farkas

Want the inside story on what AI tools are being piloted at ScionHealth? This week I chatted with VP of Strategic Operations & Initiatives, Sarah Hughes, MSHA, MBA about how they’re using Eon, LUMINARE, and Operait Health to build out their AI toolkit. — 🟩 Q: What are your biggest tech-related priorities for 2024? 1) Workforce support—How can we deploy technology solutions that make our staff’s lives and daily work easier and more efficient? For example, we are currently deploying a technology platform, M7 Health, which has built a dynamic nursing workforce management system to help us understand and optimize each nurse’s work-life preferences with regard to scheduling and career goals. 2) Patient activation and engagement—How can we better engage and activate patients on both the front end (i.e., scheduling appointments and interacting with our organization) and the back end (i.e., continuing to engage with us to manage their health)? 🟩 Q: Where are you currently exploring AI-driven solutions? We’re running pilots to address a few different administrative and operational efficiency use cases: Incidental findings on radiology reads—We’re working with Eon to automatically scan radiology reads to identify and manage patients with incidental findings, and proactively reach out to them to schedule follow-up care. Sepsis early detection—We’re currently testing LUMINARE's platform, which implements the hospital’s sepsis protocols by automating intervention, streamlining communication, and simplifying reporting and analytics. Operating room scheduling—We’re also looking at a vendor called Operait Health which has built an AI-first solution to optimize surgical demand and right-size OR staffing by forecasting gaps in the OR schedule and placing cases unrestrained by blocks. 🟩 Q: Which areas are you most excited about the potential for new solutions? We’re excited about the potential for virtual remote care in the home on the long-term acute care (LTAC) side. We’ve already seen success with these models in our community hospitals, and we believe there’s potential to similarly deliver a better patient experience at lower cost by bringing care into the home for a subset of our LTAC patients. 🟩 Q: Any general advice for healthcare IT leaders out there? It can be easy to underestimate the legacy IT “tax” of bringing in any new vendor, given that any new solution must work with our existing tech stack. Vendors need to factor this in when discussing implementation timelines, and health systems need to ensure they include all the right internal stakeholders, including operational leaders, early in the conversation to appropriately plan for integrating and deploying solutions into day-to-day operations. — p.s. I loved this conversation because of all the practical wisdom Sarah shared. We're on the lookout for similarly insightful health IT leaders to feature. Who should talk to?

23

1 Comment

For #MemberMonday, please meet Kristen Berman, CEO & Co-Founder of Irrational Labs. Her team specializes in behavioral economics, driving engagement in HealthTech. Plus, she has an awesome product teardown Substack, and started a compound featured in The New York Times, Vox, and The Atlantic 🚀 𝗧𝗲𝗹𝗹 𝘂𝘀 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗳 I’m CEO & Co-Founder of Irrational Labs. We’re a behavioral economics and design consulting shop that works on behavior change; we co-founded Google's behavioral economics group.  I also have a popular Substack where I do product teardowns (link in comment) Fun fact: I started a 20-person compound in Oakland called Radish, featured in The New York Times, Vox, and The Atlantic (link in comment) 𝗧𝗲𝗹𝗹 𝘂𝘀 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗻𝘆 At Irrational Labs, we are experts at behavior change, focused on driving engagement for patients, members, and providers. We give you psychology insights about your users and translate those into behavior-change strategies and designs. Sample projects include: • One Medical's onboarding flow, driving a 20% lift in bookings\ • Optum's and other payers’ product launches, telehealth adoption, and mobile app design • Behavior change strategy and design for Roche, Belong Health, Talkspace, TytoCare, and Aetna, a CVS Health Company • Partner regularly with the biggest names in the Valley (LinkedIn, Intuit, PayPal) If you need to understand and build for your user’s psychology -- hit us up! We’d love to talk with you. You can send me (Kristen Berman) a DM or email at kristen@irrationallabs.com. 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗵𝗮𝘀 HealthTech Hang 𝗺𝗮𝗱𝗲 𝗮𝗻 𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗰𝘁? I went to a HealthTech Hang dinner and made a friend AND got a warm intro to a potential client!  #MemberMonday #HealthTech #BehaviorChange

25

2 Comments

Exciting news from Monica Chopra, Jeffrey De Flavio, MD, Samantha Adelberg, and the rest of the Auxa Health team as they officially announce their $5.2M Seed round. The team's deep industry expertise and drive for change have led them to solve critical infrastructural friction to providing quality healthcare and adoption of value-based care. Auxa's AI benefit navigation platform is simplifying the complexities of healthcare by streamlining all of the fragmented and siloed data and information to make it actionable in real-time for healthcare organizations. For the 70% of Americans who aren't getting access to the health and social care benefits they deserve, Auxa's solution will be pivotal in enabling equitable care. We're thrilled to partner with co-investors Zeal Capital Partners, AlleyCorp, Laconia, and Chaac Ventures on this journey and look to share many more milestones ahead. Cc K50 Ventures, Ryan Bloomer, Daniel Vásquez, Nick Talwar, Stefanie Ng https://lnkd.in/dPDY7-Db

44

4 Comments

Ply Health (YC S24) helps behavioral health providers get in network with insurance companies faster by using AI to automate and monitor submissions. Providers simply input their information into Ply once, and with a couple of clicks, can apply to join any of the ~1,400 US insurance company networks. The process to join each insurance company’s network is highly manual and fragmented. On top of that, forms that aren't filled out properly cause significant delays, which in turn costs practices tens of thousands of dollars of missed revenue. Ply’s platform solves for speed and accuracy of enrollment submissions using a combination of automation and an experienced ops team as humans-in-the-loop. Samantha Wu and David Zhang founded Ply Health because of Sam's first-hand experience with the contracting and credentialing process while running BizOps for health-tech startup Finni. With Ply, behavioral health providers get into the network so they can start seeing patients ASAP. Congrats Sam and David on the launch!

130

8 Comments

Atropos Health CEO Brigham Hyde joins MobiHealthNews' investment series to provide the vendor’s perspective on digital health funding. Brigham states that the era of easy money and inflated valuations is over. Today, startups must demonstrate real value, backed by solid financials and strategic foresight, and he offers tips on how they can do so. He also discusses how AI continues to be a hot topic but warns that, in a tougher market, success hinges on creating real-world utility, not just riding the AI hype. #HealthTech #AIinHealthcare #Investment #DigitalHealth #digitalhealthinvestment #VentureCapital #Startups #investmentseries #MobiHealthNews #HIMSSMedia HIMSS #AtroposHealth HIMSS Media

6

2 Comments

Thanks Daisy Wolf for hopping on our Healthy Savings podcast and chatting. Great to get your perspective on why folks should be starting healthcare companies today, more than ever as well as some of the areas that you think are especially ripe for disruption and new solutions with AI. Full episode here! https://lnkd.in/dqetgRgj https://lnkd.in/dpWWSSVs

83

5 Comments

Cerebral, an online mental health service, has agreed to a $7.1 million settlement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over allegations that it violated the FTC Act by improperly sharing consumers' personal and protected health information with third parties for marketing and advertising purposes without obtaining their affirmative express consent. The proposed FTC Order, if approved by the court, would permanently ban Cerebral from disclosing consumer personal data to third parties for marketing and advertising purposes and require the company to obtain consumer consent before disclosing personal data to third parties for most other purposes. This case reflects the continuing uptick in the FTC's enforcement actions against companies that fail to properly safeguard and obtain consent for the use of sensitive consumer health data. Just last week, the FTC proposed a $2.5 million settlement with another health service, Monument, over similar allegations of improper data sharing practices. These enforcement actions underscore the FTC's heightened scrutiny of how online health services handle and disclose their users' personal and protected health information. https://lnkd.in/grFtR2eY

9

1 Comment

Vendors with at-risk fee models. I sat down this past weekend with a friend and CEO of a VC-backed early-stage healthcare vendor in the value-based care outcomes space. Her name will remain anonymous but she is enormously talented and well-respected. She asked for my input on what their fee model should be, selling into health plans and employers. She is considering going fully at-risk. Here’s what I mentioned to her: Full risk value-based care has actually been around for many years. It’s not new but has recently captured more thought and attention in healthcare. The idea is to bring down medical costs through prevention which is also in the best interest of the patient. Vendors, health plans and providers are financially rewarded for performance. There are shared savings, partial risk, full risk and hybrid models that many vendors have chosen. Sword Health and many other larger vendors have recently chosen to offer full risk fees based on defined outcomes. For startups, this is a challenging model to adopt. They need steady revenue, investors may want to see early captured revenue traction and product/service validation, the product/service is often not fully baked or tested and is often missing key functional features, and because companies at this stage often don’t have material deal and client volume yet, which allows the company to absorb some losses if they don’t deliver the outcomes expected, it remains a challenging model for early companies. For growth stage companies that are app-based, service-based or platform-based, they are often more financially secure and often start to implement and test partial at-risk fee models. Critical to at risk models is ensuring the clients (health plan, provider, employer) are able to do their part. This includes data-sharing in a timely manner, proper integration and communication with care teams, and having and sharing with the vendor defined metrics (financial, outcomes, data quality and meaning, care improvement) they are seeking to achieve. Lastly, I shared with her that outcomes based vendors often have multiple fee models based upon the client. PEPM, PMPM, hybrids, at-risk, flat fees, large implementation fees and more modest licensing or recurring fees and vice versa, adjusting fee amounts annually, etc. The very best model is to listen to each and every client, understand what fee model works for them and within specified parameters, determine if that works for you at any given time, ensure your fees are tracked and easily managed, and adapt with your clients one by one along the way continually capturing feedback while sharing insights with them. That helps create a stickier client and you are riding the wave together. When done well, accurate financial forecasting becomes much easier, retention is there, revenue spikes short and long-term, and your competition never knows what’s coming next around what fee model you use.

34

4 Comments

I’m more of a value + application person.  I’ve worked with amazing tech developers who keep my guardrails up, but developing new products for product-market fit is key. That said,  I want to show appreciation to NYU Langone Health's initiative to use AI for making doctors' notes more patient-friendly.  It is a testament to the potential of generative AI in enhancing healthcare communication. This approach not only promises to bridge the gap between patient understanding and professional medical knowledge but also showcases the practical value of AI in improving patient-provider interactions. By making health information more accessible, we're stepping into a future where healthcare is inclusive, empowering patients through education. This development represents a promising application of generative AI with significant product value. Learn more here.

1

For many of us in health tech startups, it's so much more than "just a job". It's personal. We are passionately driven to positively improve people's lives. While that may sound Pollyannaish to those outside the industry, IYKYK. 😏 But it's also hard. Frustrating. Complex.  So if you need to feel reinvigorated about working in health tech, read this article.  And if you are NOT in health tech, it may be even a more compelling read! Lots of meaty quotes await, but this one in particular stuck with me: "what’s needed is people who can build better experiences to engage patients in their health". Patient engagement. All. Day. Long. https://lnkd.in/gmt36nBX

35

3 Comments

Here's another fundraising roundup spotted in the healthcare wilds 👀 🍃 ✅ Sword Health raised $130M (new valuation: $3B). ✅ Better Health raised $14M to deploy expanded payer partnerships. ✅ Alzheon, Inc. | Preserving Future Memories raised $100M Series E to advance development & commercialization of its Alzheimer’s treatment. ✅ CinRx Pharma raised $73M to continue its ‘Hub and Spoke’ model of startup formation. ✅ Eko Health raised $41M to scale AI-driven heart and lung disease detection. ✅ Anterior (formerly Co:Helm) secured a $20M Series A to unlock admin efficiencies for healthcare payers. ✅ SamaCare raised a $17M Series B to scale specialty drug prior authorization platform. ✅ Plenful secured a $17M Series A to streamline pharmacy operations with AI-powered workflow automation. ✅ Grayce raised a $10.4M Series A led by Maveron amid a caregiving crisis. ✅ Stitch Employment Services Inc PEO raised $8.75M in seed to support independent medical practices. ✅ Posterity Health secured $6M to fund expansion and technology acceleration. ✅ Sware raised $6M to accelerate life sciences innovation by automating FDA-mandated software validation. ✅ Keragon raised $3M, as announced in @Conno Christou’s LinkedIn post. As always, if I missed you, let me know! Each week I'm spotlighting an innovative healthcare startup. I just ask for a bit more transparency. All submissions are confidential; submit yours here 👇 https://lnkd.in/gF4DrAvJ Looking for more fundraising roundups, alongside healthcare industry news and analysis? Subscribe to Hospitalogy, my 2x/week newsletter. Join 33K+ other investors, executives, and healthcare professionals: https://lnkd.in/g-nfRqW6

40

3 Comments

Question for my network: how do you evaluate your digital health and health tech initiatives? Do you use any frameworks or services, etc? I am not one of those "tech can solve everything" people, but I do think it is a primary enabler for the future of health, equity, and "doing more with less" since we can't seem to magically triple our workforce or funding for it. Digital Health initiatives have been a little willy nilly and certainly aren't a silver bullet. But—for that reason, more and more attention is now being given to both evaluating digital health/health tech initiatives (finally!), AND bringing the health equity lens into their development/implementation (heck yes!) For the latter, I was interested to read the development of this Digital Health Equity-Focused Implementation Research (DH-EquIR) model! This framework outlines how you might start to integrate considerations of health equity into the implementation of your digital health technologies. Key takeaways: 👏 Inclusive Design: Technologies must be accessible and culturally sensitive, designed with input from diverse communities. 👏 Equity-Focused Planning: Integrate health equity considerations at every stage to reduce disparities. 👏 Continuous Evaluation: Monitor and adapt interventions to meet the needs of underserved populations. 👏 Sustainability: Ensure financial sustainability and interoperability for long-term success. 👏 Collaboration: Engage stakeholders from all sectors to drive impactful health solutions. It is promising to see health equity being promoted through thoughtful and inclusive digital health solutions designed to meet people where their real challenge is at, and I recognize that tech, people, and workflows go ✋in ✋ Frameworks like this are helpful as directional guidance to start with. I am also seeing a lot of "Digital Determinants of Health" crop up, though still meaning different things by different groups. Source: Construction of the Digital Health Equity Focused Implementation Research Conceptual Model - Bridging the Divide Between Equity-focused Digital Health and Implementation Research (https://buff.ly/3RbWmDQ) ----------------------------- (AI was used to generate this strange and misshapen/spelled image, but I actually kind of liked it!!)

3

Some VC investors believe that brick and mortar - referring to a physical presence of some kind - should be avoided at all costs. Yet, the track record of clinic and hybrid care businesses in health care indicates otherwise. ==> One Medical (sold for $3.9 billion to Amazon), Oak Street (bought by CVS for $10.6 billion), Lifestance (IPO at $7.5 billion market cap), and PE-backed Premise Health (acquired by OMERS Private Equity for $1.1 billion) If a clinic is indicated as the optimal way to deliver care for that patient population, there are creative ways to build and operate them. Full article below with advice and strategies on how to build and operate hybrid clinics from my teammate Anarghya Vardhana from Maveron, Amir Dan Rubin from OneMedical Group, Steven Eidelman from Modern Animal and more!

13

1 Comment

An interesting read if you are in the digital health space.

2

🚀 Navigating Health Tech Strategy: Who’s Responsible For What You Solve? During a strategy session with a health tech company, a recurring question surfaced—one that I encounter often in my work: Who’s actually responsible? Who owns this area, and more importantly, who’s going to pay for it? This isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer. It’s a complex issue that varies from company to company, and it’s something I delve deeply into in my course. But let me give you a quick insight: 🔍 Key Questions to Consider: Who’s Responsible for Operational Delivery? – Who’s being commissioned or funded to execute this? Who Owns the Outcome? – Not just delivery, but who truly holds the responsibility for the result? Sometimes, these responsibilities overlap, but increasingly they span both a provider and the local system. For those creating clinical outcomes, making a case to an ICB (Integrated Care Board) can be a challenge. ICBs are often cash-strapped and juggling multiple priorities, so understanding the dynamics of WHO SUPPORTS (and could make the case upward) before you approach them is essential. Tip: Identify who will support and fund your initiative before making your case. Cold approaches to an ICB can be tough, but with the right backing by a provider, you’ll be in a stronger position. 💡 Want more insights? Stay tuned—details on my upcoming course will be available soon! Waiting list link in comments 👇 #HealthTech #Strategy #ICB #Leadership #HealthcareInnovation

51

8 Comments

Thank you, Sumit Nagpal, for shining a light on two incredibly important movements in what can often feel like a challenging healthcare startup environment. This is a huge win for women's health and signals the dawn of a new era for consumer health. I firmly believe in moving away from a one-size-fits-all solution for men and women, and recognizing the need for a completely different approach – sometimes in obvious ways, and sometimes not. People have access to more knowledge and data about their health than ever before, enabling them to make informed decisions about their well-being. Consumer health is ripe for a comeback! #consumerhealth #digitalhealth #menshealth

20

📰 News: 📰 --- Is the Health Care Industry Ready for AI? 🏥🤖 On July 17, 2024, the Boston Health Care AI & Technology Investor Summit, hosted by Foley & Lardner LLP and co-sponsored by Endeavor Venture Funds, brought together hundreds of key players to discuss the future of AI in health care. From health systems and academic medical centers to investors and entrepreneurs, everyone had something to say! Here are a few eye-catching figures from the event: - --5 Basic Principles--: The White House’s “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights” lays down five key principles for AI: Safe and Effective Systems, Algorithmic Discrimination Protections, Data Privacy, Notice and Explanation, and Human Alternatives. - --48% of Companies--: Almost half of the businesses are already setting up structures to vet and oversee AI. - --3 New AI Laws--: States like Utah, Florida, and Colorado are ahead of the curve with new AI regulations set to roll out as early as February 2026. Panelists highlighted AI’s potential to reduce physician burnout by assisting in data aggregation and analysis, helping radiologists review imaging scans, and optimizing genomic predictions. Yet, measuring ROI remains tricky. Investors stressed the need to involve clinicians in AI product development to ensure alignment with industry needs and meaningful returns. As AI adoption in health care accelerates, stakeholders must navigate regulatory landscapes and ethical considerations. The conversation on safe and effective AI use is far from over. What do you think about AI in health care? Are we ready, or do we need more groundwork? Share your thoughts and follow Bernier Group for more insights! 🚀💬 #AIDriven #Digital #AI #Data #SMB #SME #Strategy #Innovation #Business #ArtificialIntelligence #AnniQ https://lnkd.in/etuK32mp

2