closer look
Health tech VCs foresee slow growth, consolidation
Adobe
Investors backing health tech ventures tell STAT's Mohana Ravindranath they're cautiously optimistic for 2024, despite a steep drop-off in deals compared to 2021. Startups selling hospital IT, digital therapeutics, and other health-related services shouldn't abandon hope, they say — but they should expect fewer checks and possible market consolidation. It's a stark change from the industry's investment peak in 2021, when backers wrote checks to U.S. health tech startups for almost $30 billion dollars over several hundred deals, according to Rock Health data. Enthusiasm for virtual care, deep into the pandemic, fueled that hype.
But now they've had a few years to observe those startups' performance, and as investment dollars shrink, they're increasingly savvy about the types of metrics they demand. As competition for funding heats up, winners will demonstrate higher margins and potential to scale their businesses, instead of financial growth, said Andreessen Horowitz health team general partner Julie Yoo. Still, she said, it'll be "harder to distinguish the best tech-enabled services companies from software companies just by looking at their financials." Read more.
health
Hep C treatment at the time of diagnosis worked in street outreach, study says
If you are experiencing homelessness while injecting drugs, being tested or treated for hepatitis C may be hard to achieve. The No One Waits study in JAMA Network Open asked if there's a better way to bring not just diagnosis but also curative treatment to people at the same time. In the non-randomized trial from July 2020 through October 2021, street-outreach providers offered people a test and, if needed, they followed up right away with a simpler treatment plan than typically used: a two-week supply of medications when they got their test results, followed by a 12-week treatment plan.
Among the 87 out of 111 eligible people who chose to start treatment when diagnosed, 69 finished treatment and 58 appeared to be cured after 12 weeks. "The NOW model of care shortened the steps between testing and treatment initiation," the researchers conclude.
opinion
At its best, AI could enlighten patients about their care
Well, this is discouraging: "There's far more information available today to guide you in betting a few dollars on the performance of your local sports team than in betting your life on the performance of your local hospital," Michael Millenson and Jennifer Goldsack write in a STAT First Opinion. Enter ChatGPT and Bard, its generative AI cousin from Google. Both can pinpoint individual doctors, survival rates at certain cancer centers, or hospital infection rates. But how reliable are they, coming from a tool that sometimes hallucinates?
For now, what if patients could ask their doctors about what AI has told them, as a starting point for a thoughtful discussion? "AI is set to act as a transparency-forcing function, stripping away information control," the authors write. "It shines a spotlight on the tantalizing possibility of using AI to give patients immense new informational power precisely at a time when AI regulation and legislation have become a policy priority." Read more.
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