| | | |   | Good morning, health tech readers! I’ve got an eye-popping exclusive from my colleague Katie Palmer and our partners at the Markup on the many ways direct-to-consumer telehealth companies share sensitive patient data with companies like Google and Meta. News tips, thoughts, reactions go to mohana.ravindranath@statnews.com. | | | ‘Out of control’: Telehealth startups share sensitive health information with big tech companies  Companies claiming to offer private, on-demand virtual care for conditions like substance use disorder are actually sharing some of the sensitive information gathered during the intake and checkout process with big tech companies, a new investigation from STAT and The Markup finds. After analyzing the data-sharing of 50 direct-to-consumer telehealth sites, they found that 13 had at least one tracker from companies like Meta, Google, TikTok, Bing, Snap, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Pinterest that collected answers to medical intake questions. And 25 telehealth sites — including Ro, Hims & Hers, and Thirty Madison — shared with a big tech company when users had items like prescription medications in their virtual shopping carts or when they had subscribed to a treatment plan. Health privacy experts and former regulators said these data sharing practices threaten patient privacy, and emphasized that HIPAA — which has long been the industry standard for data protection — wasn’t written for today’s telehealth era. “I thought I was at this point hard to shock,” said Ari Friedman, an emergency medicine physician at the University of Pennsylvania who researches digital health privacy. “And I find this particularly shocking.” Eric Perakslis, chief science and digital officer at the Duke Clinical Research Institute, said the findings underscore how “the health data market just continues to kind of spiral out of control.”
Read the full investigation from STAT's Katie Palmer and The Markup’s Todd Feathers and Simon Fondrie-Teitler. | How to make health tech companies more equitable If you frequent health care industry conferences, you’ve likely noticed a marked increase in prominent discussions on equity, especially since the pandemic has exacerbated troubling health disparities. Despite all the attention to equity, these discussions are only recently delving into the nuts and bolts of how to actually achieve it. But at the Milken Institute’s recent Future of Health forum, a handful of health leaders shared some concrete tips for companies serious about shrinking disparities. “We’ve not been really engaging communities when we’re developing these tools,” said Irene Dankwa-Mullan, chief health equity officer at Merative. For instance: Hiring a diverse workforce will ensure that developers anticipate the technological of underserved populations — like a preference for texting, or limited data plans. “Most engineers have college educations,” said Lucia Savage, chief privacy and regulatory officer at Omada Health. ”They’re going to go ‘why are we doing this?’ or my favorite, ‘they’re really wedded to the iPhone iOS platform,’ which of course is the expensive platform.” And while many health tech companies I talk to tout partnerships with influential community members — like church leaders or local organizers — to build trust in their products, they’re not always clear on the nature of their relationships with those leaders and how they’re compensated. “I think it’s actually really, really important that we think through the full scope of the implications of these sorts of strategies,” said Jennifer Goldsack, chief executive of the Digital Medicine Society, an industry organization. Read more here. | VR makes a stronger bet on health care Despite its promise, virtual reality remains largely on the fringes of health care. But the merger of VR startups BehaVR and OxfordVR puts more weight behind their prospects for meaningfully changing anxiety and chronic pain treatments, my colleague Mario Aguilar writes. The companies also raised $13 million in Series B funding led by Optum Ventures and Oxford Science Enterprises. But virtual reality companies face other hurdles including the high costs of headsets needed for care. After working at insurer Humana, BehaVR CEO Aaron Gani said he suspects “payers are not looking for new stuff to pay for.” Read more from Mario here. | Savings and quality matter Gone are the days of optimizing your margin and clinical outcomes separately. With improved data and analytics, healthcare systems can boost patient outcomes while simultaneously delivering quality care at a lower cost. Learn how. | Lawmakers call for telehealth payment flexibility A bipartisan group of 30 lawmakers led by Reps. Bradley Schneider (D-Ill.), Michelle Steel (R-Calif.) and Susie Lee (D-Nev.) are urging House leadership to prioritize legislation that would extend flexibilities for telehealth coverage under high deductible plans. Padenmic-era flexibilities allowed employers and payers to pay for telehealth services pre-deductible, they noted in their later. “[T]hose with a high deductible may decide to skip critical preventative services – including primary care and behavioral health services – if the deductible is not waived, often leading to poor health outcomes and more costly care down the line,” they wrote. | Whoop faces scrutiny for fitness tracker claims Our Boston Globe colleagues have been following Whoop, a Boston fitness tracker company that has said its wristbands can detect heartbeat changes in pregnant patients seven weeks before labor begins. Critics — including a former employee — are now giving those claims and the evidence behind them so far a closer look. “I was surprised to see how deceptive Whoop’s Instagram and direct-e-mail marketing on the pregnancy coaching feature is,” said Keely Byron, a former product manager for the company. “A layperson would very reasonably look at these ads, and their takeaway would be that Whoop can help them identify if they are at risk for a premature delivery, which is not what the product does at all.” | Industry news -
Brightside Health is launching a new telehealth program for patients with heightened suicide risk called Crisis Care, the company announced Monday. -
Musculoskeletal digital health company IncludeHealth is partnering with Yale New Haven Health System to offer virtual physical therapy to patients. -
Amazon is sunsetting support for HIPAA-protected Alexa skills. -
Epic will take down its app market on Jan. 9 and will reopen on an undetermined date. | | | | | Thanks for reading! More on Thursday,  | |
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