👷 Fueling Founders: Fall is always the main fundraising/exit time for Founders - we resurface a Summer blog post from Michael Greeley on how this moment in time is different and the bar is higher for Founders.
📲 Telehealth Corner, Industry News: We liked the Sesame/Costco partnership for bringing affordable virtual care to Costco’s ~120M members, plus a few more industry highlights.
🗞️ Healthie Highlights: In Sept we released updates to our Lab Ordering integration with Change (now a part of Optum), added an Invoices Report, and made it easier to customize subject lines for emails to clients. See what else is new!
👋 Building in Virtual Care: The Federal Government is slowly moving to an era of stricter enforcements and definition of penalties; growth tactics that work in other industries may not apply as much in healthcare
🗺️ Healthcare Market Maps: Market Maps show us Investor/Founder interest - these two detail the Healthcare Labor Shortage + Gen AI landscape
Fueling Founders: Fundraising Season 👷
We want to resurface this article from July ‘23, in which Michael Greeley lays out the macro shift in investing climate that has occurred in healthcare, because we believe it was prescient when we wrote it:
“What are we likely to see in the second half of 2023? Financings will be hard and likely get even harder. Over the last three years, companies with incomplete stories/teams/data were still able to raise capital, maybe less than hoped for and/or on terms that were not terribly attractive. Today those same companies – no bids. On the other hand, companies with compelling and complete teams with proof and attribution of product/market fit are raising significant rounds at reasonable to good valuations. The healthcare technology sector is squarely in the midst of the “anoint the winner” phase. Significant and enduring companies are being created now that will be industry leading technology vendors for many years to come.”
Founders - you’re competing for funding in one of the toughest climates in several years, for both running a business and raising a round. Investors best alternative is often simply not writing a check ✍️ at all, whereas in the past the market’s pace meant deal-making was essential. Speaking of running a business → we liked this piece from Matt Scult describing how virtual mental health 🧠 companies are cutting clinician time to save money, which he sees 👀 as the ‘Big Blunder in Digital Mental Health’.
Additionally, it’s a hard time to get bought: “Year-to-date the ratio of investments to exits is 12.4x, underscoring the pileup of companies looking to be acquired/sold/taken public.”
We want to express our heartfelt ❤️ appreciation for all the healthcare Founders out there making it through this tough period, and navigating their teams and companies to more stable waters 👏
Telehealth Corner: Industry Strides 📲
Here are the three biggest stories we thought moved the telehealth industry and virtual care adoption📱forward in the past month:
Behemoth retailer Costco partnered with Sesame, a no-middleman virtual care service, to make virtual health more affordable and available to its 119 million members nationwide 👥. This is notable because Sesame is a direct network of doctors 🌐, there’s no insurance middle-man and often patients pay cash directly. Costco has historically moved slowly into healthcare, focusing on Rx 💊 and Optical 👁️ mostly; this partnership represents one of their largest leaps to date
Leading EMR NextGen was acquired by Thoma Bravo, one of the largest private equity firms in the US. Ultimately, it's in the interest of the whole industry for mission-critical EMR/software companies to thrive, not just survive. NextGen has gone through some legal troubles lately and now may have the cash and leadership stability to help continue stable growth 📈This transaction, which could close as early as Q4 of this year, also shows the exit 🏃 path/potential for infrastructure companies
Transcarent, one of the leading virtual care/navigation companies primarily for employers/employees, announced the launch of “National Independent Provider Ecosystem”This broadens the reach of its national telehealth/navigation network to include premier hospital systems 🏥, often organizations that have not participated in such open networks, in the pastTranscarent’s network plans on fusing virtual primary care and navigation with in-person, critical hospital care, all facilitating value-based arrangements where possible. This model could increase access and make the healthcare experience easier - its a model we find ourselves rooting for 🙂
HLTH 2023 🦄
The Healthie Team will be attending HLTH, and we'd love to meet with you in person! Stop by booth V-1742 or schedule time in advance to meet with us.
Healthie Highlights 🗞️
Improved workflows for Optum Lab Ordering integration: We’ve released an update that allows Healthie users to open the Optum lab ordering iframe from within Healthie without needing to enter in a username and password 🔒.Check out this video to see the new streamlined flowThe Healthie integration with Clinical Exchange Lab Orders and Results (from Change Healthcare, part of Optum) is currently live for Enterprise customers → get started here.
Customizable email subject lines: You can now select from different preset subject lines, or add your own custom subject for automated emails that send to clients from Healthie 🎉 Watch our quick tutorial video here.
New: Invoices Report: Keep track of open/outstanding invoices 🧾, ensuring that you are able to have a holistic and accurate overview of organization financials. Get an overview of our Invoices Report here.
Upcoming Webinar [Rupa + Healthie: Streamlining the Lab Ordering Workflow] - Join the Healthie and Rupa teams on Tuesday, October 24th at 12 PM EST to learn about how our integration streamlines the lab 🧪 ordering workflow by providing a centralized platform where clinicians can place orders for 35+ specialty labs from just one dashboard. Rupa’s platform can also help end users identify potential health risks and develop personalized health plans to mitigate them!
The Feds sent letters to 66 hospitals warning them about pixel tracking software on their websites/mobile apps 📱. This is significant because (1) we’re in a new era of federal enforcement of virtual-focused laws and (2) we see the challenges healthcare must overcome relative to other virtual-based businesses (e.g., consumer)
Pixel tracking allows companies to track user behavior 👤, previous sites visited, and much more. Companies across the world 🌎 use this to shape their ideal customer profile and on-site experiences … hospitals 🏥 were using this too and recently got a slap on the wrist.From Pixel tracking being installed inside patient portals, to event tracking during patient onboarding on websites 💻, the Feds are cracking down on gray areas of marketing tools collecting PHI.
In the letters sent to the hospitals, the Feds are tying the pixel-collected-info to Personal Health Information (PHI). While it’s not clear that pixel technology always collects PHI 🧑💻, its certainly possible that it would and could compromise patient data integrity.
Ultimately, pixel-tracking is a basic growth/retention tactic used in other industries like Fintech, Consumer and other Tech Products. We can see that healthcare companies will have to work smarter and more creatively to discover, interact with and retain their “customers” (the end patients) 👪.
We are at the very beginning of the Generative AI revolution, and especially its application in healthcare. This market map from Sequoia, a large VC fund, shows us that GenAI adoption is not just back-office, but front-office 🏢 as well.
