Big pharma leans into telehealth prescribing

MIKE REDDY FOR STAT

With the rising popularity of telehealth services that make it easy to get prescriptions, it was only a matter of time before the drug makers themselves took advantage of the opportunity. Most recently, Eli Lilly, maker of the hot obesity drug Zepbound launched an offering that allows people to get the popular treatments without seeing a doctor in person.

LillyDirect connects people to outside companies that provide medical consultation and prescribe drugs. The service also allows Lilly to connect patients with discount coupons and assist them with prior-authorizations and other hurdles that prevent people from accessing treatments. The company can also help people who have a prescription get the often hard-to-find drug. And of course, it's collecting data along the way that can help with its future marketing efforts.

As STAT's Katie Palmer reports, critics argue that the arrangements essentially turn telehealth providers into implements of pharma's marketing engine. There are concerns that it may create a bias toward prescribing the desired treatment versus trying non-pharmaceutical options. There's also an open question as to whether a telehealth provider can really take a patient's full medical history into consideration and communicate with a patient's primary care team.

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Venture Capital

General Catalyst to acquire Ohio safety net health system

Venture capital firm General Catalyst made a splash in the fall when it announced a plan to acquire a health system as a proving ground for the technology developed by its portfolio companies. On Wednesday, the firm announced the target: Akron, Ohio-based Summa Health, which employs 8,000 people including 1,000 doctors. The deal will turn Summa into a for-profit system. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

As my Health Tech co-author Mohana Ravindranath reports, it's still fuzzy how elements of the ambitious vision will come together. For example, Marc Harrison, the former Intermountain Healthcare CEO that General Catalyst put in charge of the effort told her that it's unclear what financial arrangements between Summa and the startups would look like.

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Artificial intelligence

AI hype on overdrive at JPM

Best known as the event that investors attend to get the skinny on what biotech bets to make, the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference last week also offered dazed attendees a steady dousing of hype about every health care company's artificial intelligence efforts. Huge drug companies like Novartis and Sanofi touted their AI bonafides as did many prominent health systems, including Mayo Clinic.

Read the STAT staff's whole report on AI at JPM here

Lizzy's Device Digest

FDA clears AI skin cancer detection device

The Food and Drug Administration cleared an AI-powered device for detecting skin cancer on Wednesday, giving primary care physicians a new way to evaluate troubling skin spots, STAT's Lizzy Lawrence reports.

The device, developed by a small company called DermaSensor, is handheld and uses light to examine suspicious moles on a cellular level. It will be marketed specifically for primary care physicians to use in routine check-ups in patients aged 40 and above. After scanning a mole and running the image through its algorithm, the device presents the doctor with a score between zero and 10: zero means "monitor," and any number between 1 and 10 means "investigate further." The higher the number, the greater the chance that the mole is malignant.

Though the device searches for melanoma, basal cell carcinoma, and squamous cell carcinoma, it does not give a black-and-white diagnosis. DermaSensor will not specify the cancer, or help determine treatment. But it might help primary doctors catch more cancers earlier. The goal is to help doctors decide whether to order more invasive tests.

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digital therapeutics

DTx companies try new business models

Over the last year, the business challenges facing digital therapeutics companies have become absolutely clear. Software-based medicines might one day be mainstream, but the health care system isn't going to move quickly to embrace — or pay for — the novel products right now.

Faced with roadblocks, many companies have made strategic pivots designed to help them build sustainable business models that will work in the short term, whether or not the insurance industry writ large decides to play ball. In my new story, I unpack the details and thinking behind how three companies changed direction.

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