News roundup, lockdown edition: Oscar Health’s $140M raise, IPO filing; Centene’s Diameter Health investment; Abbott’s telehealth-guided COVID antigen test

December 23, 2020 | by

Before we break for the Christmas and New Year’s festive season, though most of us are partially or fully locked down for travel and get-togethers, binge-watching the telly for comfort, a few items of interest–we’ll keep it short:

An Oscar Health Double Header. Not only did this relatively new payer in the individual, small group, and Medicare Advantage markets gain a $140 million funding round last week, adding to a $225 million raise in June (Fierce Healthcare), but they quietly filed their S-1 registration with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to go public on Monday (Healthcare Dive, Oscar release). Since their founding in 2012, the company has raised $1.6 bn in 10 rounds. The fresh funding will go towards 19 new markets and four new states in 2021, adding to their current 18 states and 211 counties. 

Speaking of payers getting into other lines of business, Centene Corporation, which has Medicare plans with different brands in all 50 states, seems to be moving in a different direction with some recent acquisitions and investments. Centene was the lead investor in an $18 million Series B round for Diameter Health, an enterprise data interoperability developer. Optum Ventures, LRVHealth, Connecticut Innovations, and Activate Venture Partners also participated. Fierce Healthcare Centene recently finalized their acquisition of Apixio (AI-assisted clinical data mining of unstructured data) [TTA 14 Nov] and is acquiring Pantherx, a specialty pharmacy focused on orphan medications and rare diseases, to blend into their Envolve Pharmacy Solutions unit. It does appear that Centene is moving into the UnitedHealthcare/Optum model of dividing services and innovations which can be sold to third parties (Optum) from their health plan and pharmacy businesses (UHC), which may be less profitable in the next few years.

An antigen test for COVID-19 with a telehealth spin is Abbott Pharmaceuticals’ BinaxNOW 15-minute antigen test. It is the first at home, telehealth guided test to get an FDA emergency use authorization (EUA). The Ag Card Home Test requires a prescription and used telehealth to guide users through the sample self-collection process, then to help them read and understand their results. MedTech Dive  It was followed up this week by Quidel’s EUA for a dipstick-style collection with a reading in minutes, similar to that of a pregnancy test, but is only cleared for healthcare settings for now. MedTech Dive

Above: Rockefeller Center, 2011. This year’s tree was mangy and the decorations leading to the plaza scarce.

Healthsites, eHealth Africa mapping health facility locations in West Africa to improve emergency care

January 4, 2019 | by

News from an area not known for health tech. eHealth Africa is partnering with the Global Healthsites Mapping Project to create a dataset of health facility locations across West Africa. The goal of the global project is to improve outcomes in the medical and humanitarian sectors by establishing an accessible global baseline of health facility data. 

The project was initiated during the Ebola epidemic in March 2016 with support from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Kartoza. eHealth Africa’s expertise is in health facility data collection and presentation. eHealth Africa will be working with Healthsites using two platforms they developed: Gather, a human-mediated data collection and curation application that crowdsources and quality checks facility information; and Aether to facilitate interoperability over several systems, allowing for a large-scale data exchange between numerous organizations. The mapping app that Healthsites uses to establish the baseline of facility data is OpenStreetMap. 

Improving emergency care can lead to a 45% reduction in mortality rates and a 36% reduction in disability–The Lancet  The primary use cases center around epidemic preparedness, support for disaster response, immunization programs, and maternity care. Most of this involves responding to outbreaks more effectively, preparing for sudden influxes of patients, allocating resources and availability of resources, but also the health of women giving birth in remote areas.

Project partners include the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Doctors Without Borders (MSF), The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), the International Hospital Federation, and CartONG. The eHealth Africa blog is a great spot to track health tech used in the field in Africa.