Thursday short takes: Fold Health VBC $6M round, Vivalink’s RPM in Burma rural health, Vytalize adds two to board, layoffs at TytoCare, IntelyCare

July 13, 2023 | by

Fold Health celebrated its first birthday by securing a $6 million round. Investors were Iron Pillar and global angel investors for total funding of $12 million. Fold’s platform is for primary care providers transitioning to value-based care and outcome-based payment models and need to manage workflow, care management, and patient data. Their claim is that it is the first end-to-end platform of this type that seamlessly integrates with EHRs. The founders originally came from athenahealth via their Praxify acquisition. Athenahealth provided the initial $6 million seed funding round. Fold release, TTA 21 July 2022

Vivalink, an RPM developer with a suite of medical wearables including a multi-function ECG patch, is part of a rural healthcare initiative on the border of Thailand and Burma. They have donated multiple sets of the rechargable ECG monitor which pairs with a real-time patient monitoring mobile app that can operate ‘off the grid’ in what appears to be a store and forward mode. It is lightweight and small at 7.5 grams in weight and 3.5 inches in length. In this remote area, clinicians can use the ECG patch to monitor patients in the preoperative assessment area, during the surgical procedure under sedation, and during the recovery period. The company promotes both conventional RPM monitoring and decentralized clinical trials. Vivalink release

Vytalize Health, a management services organization (MSO) that organizes independent primary care practices into Medicare accountable care organizations (ACOs) that enjoyed one of the few mega-fundings in H1 at $100 million, added two board members with substantial payer, quality reporting, and provider experience: David Wichmann, the former CEO of UnitedHealth Group from 2017 to 2021; and Amy Compton-Phillips, MD, currently the chief medical officer at Press Ganey and former Providence Health executive. Vytalize is in a highly competitive Medicare ACO/MSO segment with competitors such as Aledade, Privia Health, Evolent Health, CVS Health, Optum, and Collaborative Health Systems (Centene). FierceHealthcare, Vytalize release

Layoffs continue to affect healthcare both in the US and overseas.

  • New York/Tel Aviv-based TytoCare has laid off 20 employees, 10% of its 200-person workforce. 10 are in Israel, where it employs 135 people. TytoCare, which TTA has covered since 2016 as it’s diversified from home-based telehealth + device diagnostics primarily for child home care into providers and health plans and most recently for respiratory wheeze detection, had a last round of $50 million in March 2021. CTech/Calcalist (Israel), Becker’s, Jewish Business News
  • Boston-based IntelyCare, which helps providers organize nursing shifts, manage workflow, and staffing, has laid off staff after a reorganization. The number was not disclosed but was estimated at about 30. Most information is paywalled, but its last funding was a Series C at $115 million. Boston Business Journal

 

Week-end news roundup: Fold Health launches OS ‘stack’; admin task automator Olive cuts 450 workers; 38% of UK data breaches from cyber, internal attacks; hacking 80% of US healthcare breaches; does AI threaten cybersecurity?

July 21, 2022 | by

Startup Fold Health launched this week. It’s developed a suite of modular tools that are interoperable with existing EHRs or platforms to enable them to work better, together. Fold’s main claim is to “move primary care beyond the constraints of a 15-minute visit and provide a revolutionary consumer first experience through micro, automated workflows and campaigns of care.” There is an athenahealth connection, in that the founders were from Praxify, a virtual assistant/patient engagement app bought by athenahealth for $65 million in 2017. It has a $6 million seed investment from athenahealth. FierceHealthcare

On the other side of the funding mountain,  Olive, an AI-enabled data cruncher that automates routine administrative healthcare processes such as revenue cycle management, has pink-slipped 450 employees, about one-third of its staff. In a letter to employees excerpted in Axios, Olive cites ‘missteps’ and ‘lack of focus’. It follows hiring freezes, major staff departures, and overpromising/underdelivering, including not using AI or machine learning for automating tasks, featured in an April Axios investigation. Olive has gone through over $850 million in nine rounds of funding (the last July 2021, Series H–Crunchbase). FierceHealthcare

Cyber attacks with internal breaches account for 38% of UK organizations’ (of all types) data losses in 2022. This is based on the Data Health Check survey of 400 IT decision makers compiled by Data Barracks, a cloud-based business continuity organization. The second and third reasons for data loss are human error and hardware failure. Of those surveyed, over half have experienced a cyber attack, most commonly caused by ransomware. 44% paid the ransom, 34% didn’t and used backups. Their recommendations include frequent backups and keeping track of how many data versions–both will minimize downtime and data loss. Release, full report

By contrast, returning to the US and healthcare, malicious hacking activity accounts for nearly 80% of all breaches. Fortified Health Security’s mid-year report on the state of healthcare cybersecurity, reviewing HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR) data,  noted that in first half 2022:

  • Healthcare data breaches primarily originated at providers– 72%. The remainder were at business associates at 16% and health plans at 12%.
  • The number of records affected was 138% higher than the first half of 2020 at over 19 million records
  • Breaches were concentrated in relatively few organizations: Seven entities experienced breaches of more than 490,000 records each, in total 6.2 million records or 31% to date.  
  • OCR’s data breach portal recorded 337 healthcare data breaches that each impacted more than 500 individuals, a small decline from 2021’s 368
  • Hacking incidents rose to 80% from 72% in 2021. Unauthorized access/disclosure incidents totaled 15%; loss, theft, or improper disposal accounted for only 5 percent of breaches.
  • AI and ML-enabled security offerings can bolster cyber infrastructure. Organizations should also look at how IT staff shortages impact their planning and security.    HealthITSecurity

Can AI (and machine learning-ML) lessen breaches–or open the door to worse problems, such as algorithmic bias, plus data privacy and security concerns? Vast quantities of data pumped through AI or ML algorithms are harder to secure. If the algorithms are built incorrectly–such as eliminating or underrepresenting certain populations–what comes out will be skewed and possibly misleading. In the Healthcare Strategies podcast, Linda Malek of healthcare law firm Moses & Singer, who chairs their healthcare, privacy, and cybersecurity practice group, discusses the problems. She suggests some best practices around transparency, security, privacy, and accuracy when developing an AI algorithm, including collecting as much data as possible, and as diverse as possible, for accuracy. Additionally, the design should incorporate privacy and security from the start. HealthcareExecIntelligence