Aetna may ‘buy into’ more analytics, digital health

May 20, 2015 | by

Rumors now mainstreamed into press surround Aetna’s apparent interest in fellow insurers Humana and Cigna. Forbes last Friday started the ball rolling with an article last Friday focusing on the main event driving insurance payer consolidation: the transition of Medicare from fee-for-service to value-based bundled payments and accountable care organization (ACO) models. Humana has substantial Medicare business and a foot in home care (SeniorBridge), but has innovated in digital health: partnerships (Healthsense, TTA 20 Dec 13), purchases (what remained of Healthrageous, TTA 16 Oct 13), employee wellness (Vitality) and app development. Cigna is a major insurer with corporate business, but has struggled a bit in the digital health arena with the flashy-but-flopped patient engagement platform GoYou. It’s piloted telehealth to reduce readmissions with Care Innovations [TTA 7 Oct 14]  and Coach by Cigna, a mobile health platform in conjunction with Samsung for the Galaxy S5 and S6 phones.

Aetna has had some success with working with ACOs, with 62 contracts covering about 1 million lives, but this Editor counts over 400 practice-based ACOs in the Medicare Shared Savings incentive program alone. Their experiment in consumer app aggregation, CarePass, came to a quiet end last August and Healthagen, their ’emerging businesses’ unit, has had some swerves in rationale including iTriage and even ActiveHealth Management, their long-time population health analytics arm. While digital health is part of it (see Mobihealthnews), (more…)

Do startups truly threaten the ‘healthcare establishment’?

May 19, 2015 | by

Or are successful startups fitting into their game? Chris Seper in MedCityNews paints the picture of one side of a quandary. The ‘healthcare establishment’ fundamentally and to its detriment does not understand and is threatened by the startup and innovation process. A startup may begin with an idea which is, in his words, ‘almost always flawed, sometimes deeply’. If the founders are smart, they will test their ideas, validate them and change them appropriately. If not, they will fail. But it is easier for the Establishment to point at the most egregious of the bad ideas and use them to rationalize the status quo.

But being congenital contrarians, we paint the house on the other side of the street. Has the Establishment caught up with–or in some cases, co-opted startups, making them and their funders ‘do their diligence’ and be more cautious before emerging? This Editor would argue yes, and largely for the better.

**The ‘Wild West’ days are over. A few years ago, a truly bad or deeply flawed health tech idea or could easily find funding, because it was all blank slate, new and ‘transformative’.The sexiest hooks were Quantified Self, sleep, employer health incentives, interactive coaching, genomics, app prescribing and (last) wearables. A lot of founders imagined themselves as the Steve Jobs of Healthcare, down to the black turtleneck. Now there is a history of success and failure. The railroads reached the dusty frontier towns.

**There’s now a ‘Startup Establishment’. National accelerators (more…)

HIMSS’ last full day highlights company partnerships

April 15, 2015 | by

[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/himss_chicago_2015-588×337.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]It’s almost time to Say Goodbye to Sinatra’s ‘My Kind of Town’, but there’s still news: Samsung+Partners Healthcare, IMS Health, AliveCor, Interoperability≠Humana, Panasonic+Cisco

  • Samsung and Partners HealthCare announced a direct-to-mobile partnership to develop chronic care management mobile software that monitors vital signs such as blood pressure, blood glucose and weight, as well as delivers mobile patient engagement, medication adherence and wellness self-management. Clinical trial is scheduled for June. Partners has always been a pioneer in the mHealth area, but playing with Samsung, Partners is flying at a slightly higher level than with Wellocracy and certainly the late Healthrageous. Partners release, Mobihealthnews (more…)

Can startups learn from digital health’s flops?

July 29, 2014 | by

The point may be debatable, but that doesn’t prevent Robin Raskin, founder of SilversSummit and Living in Digital Times, from making it. Keying off the summer edition of the Digital Health Summit, the CEOs of three well-known implosions–Zeo (the first big quantified self fail in sleep tracking, TTA 13 Mar 13), HealthRally(social networking/crowdfunding) and Healthrageous (personal health management, sold after it never fulfilled its promise to Humana, TTA 16 Oct 13) discussed their mistakes. Ten points plus each on video.Learning From Failure in the Digital Health Business (HuffPo)

‘Grizzled pioneer’ VRI receives major investment from Pamlico Capital (US)

February 28, 2014 | by

US telehealth monitoring and medical alert provider VRI (Valued Relationships, Inc.) of Franklin, Ohio earlier this month received a majority investment/recapitalization from Pamlico Capital, a Charlotte, North Carolina-based private equity firm. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Current lead executives CEO Chris Hendriksen and President Andy Schoonover will remain in active management and retain significant ownership in VRI, which they founded in 1989. Regarding the investment, Mr. Schoonover to this Editor stated that the funds will be used for expansion purposes. “It is another vote of confidence (alongside the Cardiocom acquisition) that telehealth is getting great results and is here to stay. The capital will support VRI’s growth objectives, particularly in executing a couple of large projects with health plans that VRI has booked for 2014, and the hiring of additional sales talent.” 

Despite being in a rather ‘non-buzzy’ area of telehealth, the investment attracted the interest of some major players. VRI was assisted in evaluating its options by well-known digital health financial advisor Triple Tree; legal counsels were McDermott Will & Emery for VRI and Alston & Bird LLP for Pamlico. Pamlico specializes in the ‘middle market’ and has previously invested selectively in mid-sized healthcare providers such as Greenway (EHR), Healthcare First (home health software) and Physicians Endoscopy (surgical centers). Overall, and interestingly, this appears to be a positive, long-term vote for telehealth and medication monitoring, as well as for the viability of traditional medical alerts and some of the patient engagement/hospital readmission reduction models VRI has been developing with major payers such as Humana. Pamlico Capital release, Triple Tree release.

Humana, Healthrageous and some object lessons

October 16, 2013 | by

The acquisition of the assets of Partners HealthCare spinoff Healthrageous by insurance and health service giant Humana is reverberating in the field in the US, particularly those in the buzziest digital health sectors. Some may look away, but a hard look provides some object lessons at the sheer unpredictability of the field for those who are innovating and attempting to shape consumer behavior and health. (Not behavioral health)

  • Healthrageous had an impressive lineage and credibility. Developed over three years at Partners HealthCare, it was spun off in 2010, PHC members on the board, leadership from well-known/regarded figures such as Rick Lee and Mary Beth Chalk–and enjoyed abundant, rapid startup funding–$12.5 million in two rounds, the last exactly one year ago, from equally impressive investors, reportedly $15 million total. No raiding the credit cards here.
  • It occupied what everyone for the past few years thought of as a sweet spot–personal health management targeted to employers/benefit managers along with health plans to lower costs that combined sensor-based telehealth data with individualized coaching and feedback–and data from a broad base of 10,000 users. (more…)

First M&A roundup for 3rd quarter: more action, less value, whither digital health?

October 14, 2013 | by

VC/research firm TripleTree is first out of the gate with its roundup of merger and acquisition activity in healthcare, July through September. The news and directions are mixed. Deals are up 28 percent from the two previous quarters but down 12 percent in total deal value. Most are in the healthcare facilities area with home care giant Gentiva acquiring Harden Healthcare and insurance giant Humana adding to its LTC, Medicaid/Medicare portfolio with American Eldercare. 19 healthcare companies had successful IPOs totaling ~$3 billion of transaction value. Two highlighted here are Envision Healthcare Holdings (ambulance and outsourced physician services) and Benefitfocus (benefit administration software and tracking). Given that they are the creator of the iAwards at the annual Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance in May which focuses on digital health, the decidedly non-buzzy companies getting the action here are perhaps another indicator of the funding cooling preceding M&A as projected by Rock Health back in July [TTA 9 July], with their 3rd Quarter report due out shortly.

Another change at Care Innovations

October 8, 2013 | by

Louis Burns, CEO of Care Innovations since its founding in 2011, announced his retirement at the end of this year. His immediate successor starting 7 October as CEO (on his LinkedIn profile, but not on the CI website) is Sean Slovenski, formerly VP for Health and Productivity Solutions at Humana and founder of Hummingbird Coaching Services, a provider of online wellness coaching and behavior management services purchased by Humana in 2010. This follows the retirement earlier this year of Intel-er Doug Busch, formerly COO. Neil Versel interviews Mr. Slovenski for Mobihealthnews, but what strikes this Editor in the interview are three things: his background and demeanor could not be more different than Mr. Burns; his expertise in population health and consumer-directed wellness may indicate a significant directional change for long-term-care focused Care Innovations–certainly away from the Intel/GE mindset; and the outlook continues to be ‘mañana’ for telehealth and telecare. Care Innovations release.