| | | |   | Good morning! Mario here with the latest from HLTH, with an assist from Jayne Willliamson-Lee and Katie Palmer reporting from the STAT Summit. | | | A dispatch from HLTH A few more bits from my interviews in Las Vegas this week: -
“Verily's an archipelago… When you first swoop into Verily, there's all these different islands: This group over there is working on a glucometer and that group’s working on retinal imaging, etc.": Verily president of clinical studies platforms Amy Abernethy explained how the company’s seemingly disparate data collection and analytics efforts are beginning to coalesce under a single strategy. Sitting right next to her was Vindell Washington, who leads Verily’s chronic care service Onduo and added that “there are some really obvious connections that do not happen in the house of medicine that we're actually trying really hard to make.” -
“I know how hard it is to get a millennial to a bar on a Friday night in an Uber and actually make money doing that, let alone trying to do that in health care. We think it's almost impossible.”: Dan Trigub, CEO of home health care company MedArrive, explained how his experience standing up the health care businesses at Lyft and Uber informed the company's decision to help Medicare Advantage and managed Medicaid companies provide care, rather than build a direct-to-consumer business. “We don't care about our brand, our logo, we’re not spending money on marketing,” he said. -
“If you don't have a product that consumers want to engage with, that they're delighted by, and that they're willing to use over many, many years, because that is the journey that is heart health, you're going to fall way short of what's possible.”: Jarrad Aguirre, the co-founder and CEO of startup Miga Health explained why the company is working so hard to create a free heart health app with industry-leading user experience. The early stage company announced a $12 million seed round to pursue an ambitious concept to build a company around heart health. Though Miga is developing a consumer app it hopes will attract users and support clinical outcomes, its future business will be built around a medical group that provides clinical care. -
“The software engineer is a very expensive labor resource for a company — they have clout. The clinician is that in the provider world.”: Bessemer Venture Partners vice president Morgan Cheatham explained a new investment thesis he developed around the opportunity for companies to gain traction by building tools that clinicians really want to use, rather than relying on top-down sales to health care organizations. He compared this to the success that developer tools companies had with engineers at the end of the aughts. An example in health care: MDCalc, a clinical calculator widely used by doctors. | Cerebral's CEO at the STAT Summit Online mental health startup Cerebral has had to shift its business dramatically in the last year, as federal agencies and prosecutors have investigated its business and reports suggested its prescribing practices put patients at risk. On stage at the STAT Summit on Wednesday, Mohana brought questions about those challenges to CEO David Mou, who stepped into the role in May. Mou expressed confidence about the company’s clinical practices — even touting its approaches to screening for suicidality as an advantage over traditional care.
But he emphasized that behavioral health isn’t an either-or proposition: “I don’t think it’s telehealth versus brick and mortar,” he said. “I think it’s evidence-based care versus not evidence-based care, high quality care versus not high quality care.” Read more from the conversation here. | Will patients buy Amazon Clinic’s privacy promises? Amazon’s recent moves — including the planned acquisitions of One Medical and iRobot — have raised concerns from privacy experts about how new streams of data will compound the company’s surveillance of consumer behavior. Add one more to the list: With the launch of Amazon Clinic on Tuesday, the e-commerce giant will pull in far more information about patients who use the direct-to-consumer telehealth platform.
“We know from recently published research that people don’t trust big tech companies with their health data,” medical ethics and health policy researcher Matt McCoy told Katie. “What is Amazon doing to protect [health informatiom] that should make people feel different?” Read more. | With the right technology, prescribers raise their prescription pickup rates by 3.2 percentage points Prescribers are trading in faxes and phone calls for technology that addresses affordability and adherence concerns upfront. With Real-Time Prescription Benefit, patient-specific plan and cost information is delivered right into the prescriber’s electronic workflow, and prescribers can easily choose options that are less expensive or don’t require prior authorization —significantly increasing pickup rates. Learn more in the impact report. | The 'ongoing public health crisis' in medical devices The fallout continues over the sweeping recall of millions of devices made by Philips Respironics — including CPAP machines and ventilators — after it was found foam degrading in the machines could harm patients if inhaled. A new report published in JAMA Internal Medicine lays out the troubling timeline of the crisis: Although the recall occurred in June 2021, there had been patient safety complaints for more than a decade. And while the FDA had received more than 69,000 adverse event reports as of this August, Philips had only shipped a fraction of replacement devices by that time.
That’s left some patients with sleep apnea or respiratory failure to make a difficult decision waiting for their devices to be replaced – either continue their potentially dangerous exposure or discontinue their treatment. “This ongoing public health crisis highlights the need for reforms to medical device regulation in the US to better protect patients,” the authors warn. | Fauci on disinformation and science turning political  The longtime leader of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases spoke at the STAT Summit about how science and medicine became politicized during the pandemic — and how he, specifically, became a lightning rod during election season. Fauci said that outcome was inevitable once he started pushing back against misinformation shared by officials: “I didn’t like the idea, but I had to, to preserve my own scientific and personal integrity and to fulfill my obligation, which is not to any president, which is not to any party, it’s to the American public.” | | | What to read around the web today | | | Thanks for reading! More next week,  | |
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