Weekly Health Tech Reads | 7/19/20

News:

• UnitedHealth Group was in the news a few times this week:

  • It posted Q2 earnings and not surprisingly had an excellent quarter financially, bringing in $6.6 billion of profit as its MLR fell to ~70%. UHG chose not to adjust earnings guidance for the year, however, sharing that they expect medical costs to increase in the second half of the year. The earnings call is worth perusing for comments around the acquisitions of naviHealth / AbleTo, how OptumCare expects the pipeline of employed or affiliated physicians to ‘grow robustly’, UHG’s perspective on a public option approach, and more. Link (Earnings transcript). Link (Earnings summary).

  • Another hospital, Boulder Community Health, signed with Optum to be the hospital’s back office partner. As part of the deal, 280 rev cycle employees are moving from the hospital over to Optum. I love this strategy for Optum as a way to acquire more and more business from hospitals without actually needing to acquire the headache of the hospital. If I’m Cedar or one of the other rev cycle startups with easy access to capital I am going straight after this approach as well. Will be curious to watch whether we see this sort of activity accelerate going forward given the financial challenges COVID-19 has presented. Link.

  • UHG is launching a type 2 diabetes management company, Level2, that’ll be selling to employers. Color me a bit confused by this one. UHG friends, y’all know you are sitting on enough cash to just go buy Livongo (or Omada, or Virta, or heck just buy them all!) if you really want to get into this space right? Link.

• Amazon partnered with Crossover to open a primary care clinic near one of Amazon’s sites in Texas for warehouse workers there, as part of a planned rollout of 20 clinics in five cities. This seems like a huge win for the Crossover team, particularly given the timing here with the relatively recent launch of Amazon Care, Amazon’s internally developed digital care model. The partnership also highlights the advantages of Crossover’s integrated digital and physical approach in meeting the needs of employees, as opposed to the digital-only approaches that have been gaining popularity lately. Link.

• Multiplan, the insurance provider network company behind many large insurers, is going public through a SPAC after being owned by four different private equity owners for the past decade. Multiplan is a really interesting business. It is used by all 10 of the top 10 payers in the US - and has been pretty consistently for the last two decades - and by 700 payers in total. It’s doing over $1 billion of revenue a year and valued at $11 billion. Worth checking out the investor presentation here. Link.

• There’s a relatively new Medicare Advantage insurance startup out of Chicago called Zing Health, which has received a capital commitment for up to $150 million. It’s received around $8.6 million of that capital to date. They’re aiming to serve minorities in the Chicago market, currently serving 350 members. Sounds like a very cool take on the various MA models cropping up. Link.

• Cityblock, one of my favorite startups working on a new care delivery model for Medicaid and dual eligible populations, raised $53 million. Their blog post sharing the news (linked below) is worth checking out as it addresses Cityblock’s views on number of topics including how COVID-19 has impacted vulnerable communities and their views on future changes to healthcare such as value-based care. Link.

• GoHealth, the online health insurance brokerage, raised $914 million in its IPO. It’s valued at just under $7 billion. Link.

• BCBS MA launched a new value-based payment model for primary care. Link.

• Preventice, a Minneapolis-based(!!!) cardiac monitoring startup, raised $137 million. Link.

• Medly, a tech-enabled pharmacy, raised $100 million. Link.

• Caption Health, an AI startup that helps interpret heart ultrasounds, raised $53 million. Link.

• Paige AI, a AI startup in the cancer space, added an additional $20 million to a previous round. Link.

• Gyant, a digital health startup building a digital front door platform for health systems, raised $13.6 million. Link.

• Cohere Health raised $10 million and launched its platform to help payors and providers reduce administrative friction. Link.

• AristaMD, a specialty e-consult platform, added $6 million to a previous round. Link.

• Real, a teletherapy startup, raised $6 million. Link.

Opinion:

• This is an awesome report on primary care for women led by a group of folks over at The Commonwealth Fund. The first section provides a really helpful framework for mapping out the health needs of women and looking at where there are gaps in care today. The second section of the paper then looks at the roles various key constituents can play in improving upon the current state. It also includes a nice market map of all of the various startups working on primary care for women. The market map is an interesting combo of companies specifically targeting women (i.e. Tia) and companies working on new care models more generally (i.e. One Medical). Link (part 1). Link (part 2).

• This article provides a nice look at the likely rationale behind why retailers are getting into primary care - people are spending more dollars on healthcare needs and they’e going into retail stores less, leading retailers to think about how to get people to stores more frequently. Quite interesting conversation over on Slack this week regarding retailers ambitions in healthcare. Link.

• The former Head of Product at Cedar, Alex Zhang, penned an interesting series of blog posts this week on building product teams. I found part 2 to be particularly interesting, where he talks about the differences between an operational product leader and product strategy. Lots of good learnings shared in here for those in, or interested in, product roles. Link.

• Here’s a quick but interesting perspective on the four vulnerabilities incumbent care providers have, which outsiders to healthcare delivery are likely to pounce on moving forward. Link.

Data:

• Seema Verma wrote a piece in Health Affairs on telehealth use in the Medicare population. It’s another piece confirming the rapid rise in telehealth adoption - growing from 13,000 beneficiaries a week using telehealth pre-COVID-19 to 1.7 million beneficiaries using telehealth per week toward the end of April. Link.

• KFF looked at MLR ratios on the individual exchanges over the past decade. After a few rough years around 2014 - 2016, MLRs have been consistently better the past few years - ranging from 68% - 73% in Q1 from 2018 - 2020. Gross profit also looks significantly better the past couple of years. Link.

• McKinsey conducted a survey on consumers interest in information transparency when it comes to healthcare. Lots of interesting data in here on how people generally want access to more information when they’re seeking care. Link.

• RWJF estimates that 10 million people will lose employer coverage between April - December 2020 due to COVID-19. Of those 10 million people, they expect 3.3 million to enroll in new employer insurance, 2.8 million people to enroll in Medicaid, 600k to enroll in the individual market, and 3.5 million to become uninsured. Link.

• This is an interesting quick read from HealthXL on digital maturity of payers, looking at their adoption of digital health solutions over time. The number of investments and partnerships the big insurers have entered into have increased pretty quickly over the past few years. Link.

• Fair Health data from commercial claims suggests the median charged amount for a COVID-19 related hospitalization is around $45,000. Yowza. Link.