| | | |  By Casey Ross, Katie Palmer, Mario Aguilar, and Mohana Ravindranath | Good morning! Mohana here with breaking news on a major acquisition just announced by Amazon. | | | Amazon to acquire One Medical in $3.9B bid Retail giant Amazon announced this morning it plans to acquire virtual- and in-person primary care company One Medical in a cash deal valued at $3.9 billion. The goal of the $18 per-share deal is to offer more convenient and affordable health care both in-person and virtually, the companies said. The two aim to combine One Medical’s technology and team with “Amazon’s customer obsession, history of invention, and willingness to invest in the long-term,” One Medical’s CEO Amir Dan Rubin said in a release. Rubin will remain head of One Medical upon completion of the merger. The news comes just a few months after Amazon announced plans to grow its network of brick-and-mortar clinics in 20 U.S. cities, following the expansion of its virtual care services through Amazon Care. | Burnout draws nurses to telehealth  Nurses fleeing bedside jobs are now hunting for virtual jobs offering them more flexibility and better commutes. Remote nursing is proving a highly competitive hiring landscape, both for the job-hunters and the companies recruiting them. Care Medical, the practice behind Amazon Care, is offering $15,000 sign-on bonuses. “The burnout problem is causing an oversaturation of nurses wanting these jobs,” Sadie Glisson, a registered nurse who runs a job board for remote positions, told STAT. “Usually, nurses will apply to a couple hospitals around them, and they’ll probably get offers from all of them,” said Glisson. “But with remote jobs they’re applying to 50, 100 jobs and not hearing anything.” The crush comes amid an expansion of new kinds of roles for nurses, such as chronic care management — in which nurses coordinate care for patients with conditions like diabetes — and keeping tabs on patients being monitored remotely in “hospital-at-home” programs. Katie has the full story. | What is Apple Health? A very long answer In a new 59-page report, Apple gives the most substantial accounting of its work on health to date. Nearly everything in the document has been reported in some way before, but the effort to portray it all as part of a unified strategy is significant. The company’s many projects and features — spanning fitness, health monitoring, research, and care delivery — over the last eight years have appeared somewhat scattered. Now doctors, health care executives, researchers, and ordinary people can turn to a single source of truth about how it all fits together.
Apple separates its efforts into two buckets: consumer-facing features that can help people live healthier lives, like sleep tracking or walking steadiness alerts, and the work it’s doing to support the health care system and medical community, like enabling women’s health research, Parkinson’s symptom tracking, and remote cardiac care with its products. Apple is also careful to highlight two key pillars underlying all its work: Scientific validation and privacy. | Startups buzzing about ‘clinical robustness’ scores An attempt to quantify the impact digital health companies have on clinical outcomes caused a stir among startups. In partnership with venture fund Rock Health, researchers devised a “clinical robustness index”: a simple calculation adding together a startup’s completed clinical trials and their FDA regulatory filings. Following its publication in JMIR last month, Rock Health has fielded a crush of inquiries from startups wondering how they stack up against competitors, said Sean Day, a consultant for the fund and lead author on the study. If companies thought they had above the average score of 2.5, corresponding author Simon Mathews said, “my sense is some wanted to confirm where they were and wanted to use it for marketing.” But individual scores shouldn’t matter too much, said John Torous, director of the digital psychiatry division at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Instead, companies should ask themselves if they have high-quality evidence — not a certain quantity of trials or filings.
Mathews said he hoped the index pushes patients, providers and payers to demand more clinical evidence from digital health companies. “There needs to be a reason for companies to go down this route, and historically companies have not had an incentive or a penalty for not producing robust solutions,” he said. “That really speaks to the lack of maturity in this industry.” Mohana has more. | In-depth biopharma, business, and policy analysis at your fingertips Sign up for STAT Plus to receive in-depth analysis of the biotech and pharma industries, exclusive one-on-one interviews with industry pioneers, and inside intelligence from Capitol Hill. Don’t be the last to know. Subscribe today to start reading. | Study of the week: Can digital audio recordings predict Alzheimer’s? Voice recordings could be helpful in identifying or predicting dementia, researchers found in a small new study published in Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease. When used in conjunction with other factors — demographic and clinical traits, for instance — digital voice recordings and techniques like speech-to-text analysis showed promise for predicting dementia’s onset. Given that recordings can be taken “even in the lowest-resourced settings,” they could provide a “low-cost, easily scalable worldwide solution to address persistent health disparities in diagnosis, treatment, and clinical studies of cognition-related disorders,” authors wrote. | A few deals and even more layoffs | Names in the news -
Daryl Tol, former president and CEO of Advent Health Florida, will serve as General Catalyst’s first head of the health assurance ecosystem. -
Private asset firm HealthQuest Capital, whose investments include Thirty Madison and Everly Health, has named Risa Lavizzo-Mourey and Jon Roberts to its advisory board. Lavizzo-Mourey most recently served as president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Roberts was chief operating officer at CVS Health. | What we’re reading - SVB Leerink’s mid-year health industry trend report, SVB Leerink
- DOJ cracks down on $1.2 billion telehealth fraud schemes, Reuters
- Opinion: 10 tips for vendors seeking to create or expand digital health and virtual health solutions, STAT
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