| | | |   | Good morning, health tech readers! I'm back from the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday with an abbreviated but nonetheless newsy edition, including a look at patients left behind when online prescribing falters and a few more dispatches from JPM. If you were at (or around) the conference, send your juiciest gossip to mohana.ravindranath@statnews.com.
| | | Online patients scramble for backup prescriptions As online prescription channels for controlled substances close off, patients who relied on sites like Done and Cerebral for ADHD medication are scrambling for a plan B. And some are struggling to shift those prescriptions to in-person providers, my colleague Katie Palmer reports. “People during the crisis that accessed telehealth, now they're trying to plan for care, and there is a gap,” said Mark Stein, director of the ADHD clinic at Seattle Children’s.
During the pandemic, regulatory flexibilities made it possible for patients to access mental health care — and controlled substance prescriptions — more easily online. But as some major pharmacies refuse to fill telehealth prescriptions, and as stricter regulations loom, it may prove challenging for patients to find in-person providers who are comfortable treating ADHD and will fill their prescriptions. “Where telehealth could be a solution, in some ways it's making it worse when you're having fragmented or disconnected care.” Read more from Katie. | Health care's AI guardrails AI systems guiding clinical decisions might be helpful, but there's vast potential for abuse or misuse, warn two experts urging health tech industry leaders to more intentionally avoid those pitfalls. In an opinion for STAT, Christine Swisher and Gabriel Seidman suggest drawing on the White House's recent AI Bill of Rights blueprint and taking concrete steps to catch bias earlier, including monitoring AI outputs for different patient cohorts sorted by factors like age, sex, and race. Read more. | Tweet of the week  | Apply for STAT Madness! Has your institution innovated in ways worth celebrating? Submit your application to be considered for our bracket-style tournament to find the best innovations in science and medicine here. | Final dispatches from JPM After a waterlogged few days that felt like a lifetime, the annual health care meeting is finally over. Conference regulars told me turnout appeared lower this year, but attendees still squeezed in discussions and dealmaking, whether in the corner of a jam-packed hotel lobby or in front of a department store dressing room. Industry executives such as Carbon Health's Myoung Cha were unusually candid this year about economic headwinds and tough decisions.
“We’re really trying to coalesce our focus on primary care and urgent care,” Cha told me about the company's retreat from the chronic care business. “The prior concept, the more expansive concept, was ... ‘How can we sell these solutions to other medical groups to serve other patients, not Carbon patients.’ That concept is really what we decided to unwind, stop, and focus on our core." | Digital doors to nowhere A barrage of primary care acquisitions and cash infusions drew skepticism from some industry veterans. Following the conference, Owen Tripp warned companies competing for patients to rethink their recruitment tactics
" [T]oo many of those doors lead to tiny, dead-end foyers with no real connection to — or understanding of — their health histories, insurance benefits, unique needs, or preferences,” he wrote in an opinion piece for STAT. “This disconnect creates convenience without connectivity and more confusion, which is a frustratingly familiar scenario for people seeking care." | A CEO's take on post-hype health insurance My colleague Bob Herman sat down with Mario Schlosser of Oscar Health, the "insurtech" company with a penchant for burning cash and a refreshed roadmap toward profitability. Despite proclaiming itself an "ideal match" for Medicare Advantage a few years ago, the company has since exited that market. "Just between 2019 and this year, the number of plans available to the average Medicare Advantage beneficiary has doubled," Schlosser told Bob. "It was just hard to compete against the broker commission levels and the economics in these markets when you already had big players in them." | What we’re reading - How abstracts written by ChatGPT fool scientists, Nature
- The regulatory maze behind health tech vaporware, The Verge
- Invitae’s new CEO on why the genetic testing firm stopped chasing ‘volume at all costs’, STAT
- Behavioral telehealth loses momentum without a regulatory boost, Kaiser Health News
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