| | | |  By Casey Ross, Katie Palmer, Mario Aguilar, and Mohana Ravindranath | | | A $2.4 billion trio forms to transform kidney care If any merger speaks to the business imperatives of the moment, it is the one announced Monday by Fresenius Medical Care. The company’s value-based care arm is merging with digital health upstart Cricket Health and InterWell Health to create a $2.4 billion venture focused on chronic kidney care. By merging with two innovators in the market, Fresenius, part of a German conglomerate, is betting that it can drive business growth by seamlessly combining its dialysis centers with Cricket’s AI technology and InterWell’s network of 1,600 nephrologists. A similar strategy is being employed in other health care domains by companies such as One Medical and Amazon.
By merging the physical and the virtual, the traditional and the tech-driven, they believe they can create a more efficient and effective product for consumers. It sounds great on paper. But the proof will be in the real-world execution. | The human effort behind effective AI Northwestern Medicine built an AI tool to flag radiology reports with incidental findings of suspicious lung nodules. But its high accuracy in laboratory testing was only the beginning of the story. It took three years and thousands of hours of work to embed the system in clinical care and ensure effective follow-up for patients. Casey interviewed employees across the health system to document the amount of human effort required to translate AI to clinical settings. Read the full story here. | Can tech combat clinician burnout? Tech, specifically the hours of extra work needed to complete electronic patient records, is often reported as a driver of burnout. But as more clinicians reach a breaking point, some hospitals are attempting to use tech to prevent attrition. One of the main strategies discussed at HIMSS last week in Orlando was the use of AI to automate paperwork on things like quality assurance or inventory, and voice recognition to complete IT requests or fill out clinical notes. Even simple fixes to let nurses to fill in a data point once and auto-populate it going forward can make a big difference, Helen Brogan, chief nursing officer of an Arizona health center, told STAT.
“These seemingly minor inconveniences will add up shift over shift and contribute to nursing dissatisfaction and burnout,” she said. Mohana’s latest story examines the tech strategies being tested by hospitals to combat burnout. | Digital health technology delivers precision recruitment at scale in research study Evidation researchers, along with researchers from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) were able to 1) directly recruit subjects for a Covid-19 study via a mobile application they were already using, and 2) create an AI risk model that allows targeted recruiting of persons most likely to become infected during the study, while also recruiting a representative cohort. Read more. | Health apps are an international policy obstacle The explosion of digital health apps is a regulatory challenge for the Food and Drug Administration — and its equivalents around the globe. A paper in npj Digital Medicine describes how nine countries are tackling the problem of ensuring apps intended for clinical use are safe, effective, and that the differences between them and more generalized ‘wellness’ apps are clearly identified for users.
“Public debates across countries reveal a demand for ‘someone’ to provide a quality stamp on the apps that fulfill basic medical and privacy criteria, that is, to provide a labeling of apps that denote which have achieved standards or endorsement of some type,” the authors write. Despite building policies to address similar issues of data use, clinical evidence, security and privacy, and usability, they found strikingly different regulatory approaches, suggesting international collaboration be valuable. | Pandemic telehealth takeaways from Medicare 
OIG analysis of CMS data, 2022 As policymakers grapple over the fate of telehealth provisions put in place during the pandemic, data on usage and costs over the last two years will be critical. A new report from the Office of the Inspector General shows that telehealth use among Medicare beneficiaries mirrors that of the broader population, with a spike in the early days of the pandemic leveling out at a significantly increased level. Medicare paid out $5.1 billion for that care — 76 times the prior year’s expenditures — for fee-for-service enrollees in the pandemic’s first year, but overall health care usage plummeted.
Notably, 25% of all virtual care services that year, over 28 million cases, were provided over the phone, emphasizing the value of Medicare’s audio-only telehealth reimbursement during the period. | Dollars & deals -
Recora, the developer of virtual cardiac rehabilitation tools, raised $20 million in a Series A round led by SignalFire. The company uses virtual tools to help manage cardiac patients beyond the initial 12 weeks of rehab. -
PathAI, a maker of AI tools and services in pathology, struck a deal with the health data aggregator Datavant to supply its tool with patient information from clinical trials, electronic health records, and other sources. -
TimeDoc Health, a Chicago-based developer of virtual care management tools for health providers, scooped up $48.5 million in a Series B round led by Aldrich Capital Partners. The company plans to use the money to hire additional care coordination staff as well as sales and marketing personnel. - MedMe, an online pharmacy scheduling and documentation tool used by pharmacies across Canada, raised $2.7 million in a seed round led by M12, Microsoft’s venture fund. The company is looking to expand to the U.S.
| New hires - Digital therapeutic company AppliedVR named orthopedist Charisse Y. Sparks as its chief medical officer. Sparks was previously a VP at DePuySynthes, Johnson & Johnson’s orthopedics company.
- Quit Genius, a digital clinical for treating substance addictions, has tapped Justin Yang to be its medical director. Yang previously served as medical director for a medication assisted treatment program at Manet Community Health Center in Massachusetts.
| | | Thanks for reading! More Thursday,  | | | | Have a news tip or comment? Email Us | |
No comments