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Operational Health Tech: A New Billion Dollar Market

by Sponsored Content

The following content is sponsored by Bloom Health Partners

Operational Health Tech: A New Billion Dollar Market

Many lessons were learned throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, but what has become most apparent is the need to invest in healthcare on all fronts. In fact in just a few short years, businesses, governments, and consumers have had to entirely reassess healthcare in ways not quite seen before.

What’s more, this elevated importance placed on health could be here to stay, and one area in particular is poised for significant growth: operational health tech.

The graphic above from our sponsor Bloom Health Partners dives into the burgeoning market that is operational health tech, and reveals the key driving forces behind it.

What is Operational Health?

To start, operational health is an industry that provides health services to employees to help keep companies running smoothly.

A critical piece of operational health is workplace health, which is expected to soar in value. From 2021 to 2025, the market for workplace health is expected to grow 200% from $6.5 billion to $19.5 billion.

The industry is undergoing a tremendous amount of innovation, specifically in relation to technological advances.

Operational Health Tech: Disrupting Healthcare

The operational health tech industry is disrupting traditional healthcare by providing direct services to employees in the workplace.

For decades now, the U.S. has increasingly become a statistical outlier for healthcare spending relative to health outcomes. For instance, the average American incurs $9,000 in healthcare spending per year, nearly twice that of (Read more...)

The Inside Scoop on the US Healthcare System with Chas Sanders of MARGIN

by MPD
This post is by MPD from @MPD - Medium

On this week’s episode I chat with the Founder and CEO of MARGIN, Chas Sanders. MARGIN is a tech-enabled procurement solution that helps Ambulatory Medical Centers purchase the equipment they need to operate. Apparently, before MARGIN supplies were purchased via phone calls and fax machines. MARGIN has not only put that process on the Internet, but they have also helped doctors to reduce their spend by 15–20%. That’s big bucks — in many cases that’s hundreds of thousands of dollars per office.

Chas is a veteran of the healthcare industry. He’s been an executive at Zimmer Biomet, DaVita and others. After that he stepped out of the industry to launch MARGIN.

In addition to hearing about his company and lessons learned as a founder, what’s great about this conversation is hearing a sophisticated business person provide insights into why the healthcare industry is dysfunctional. And low and behold, one of the reasons is that it’s managed in a similar way to the government of communist Russia. Enjoy.

Listen via your preferred platform here.

The Inside Scoop on the US Healthcare System with Chas Sanders of MARGIN was originally published in @MPD on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Using Tech to Cure the Opioid Epidemic with Zack Gray of Ophelia

by MPD
This post is by MPD from @MPD - Medium

This week I chat with Zack Gray, Co-Founder and CEO of Ophelia. Ophelia is helping to combat the opioid crisis by revamping the drug rehab model. As they put it, their mission is to “replace folklore with science, drug dealers with doctors, and stigma with privacy, convenience, and choice.”

Covered by either health insurance or a monthly subscription of $195, Ophelia helps people struggling with addiction by plugging them into their platform that connects them with clinicians that use modern, science based treatments.

We chat all about the company and the general opioid epidemic, including its history and the failed government response. Zack breaks it all down for us. He also shares why he started the company in the first place, which has a touching personal story about the loss of a loved one to opioids. Ophelia and Zack are on a mission and Interplay is proud to be an investor.

As usual, the conversation goes beyond just the formal topics. Zach studied astrophysics and philosophy at Columbia and it’s safe to say he’s a deep thinker. We talk about whether for-profit companies are good or evil, a new concept for taxation based on social utility and much more. Enjoy.

Show Links:

Using Tech to Cure the Opioid Epidemic with Zack Gray of Ophelia was originally published in @MPD on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Future of Healthcare, and the Tech Companies Out to Improve It

by The Seedcamp Team
This post is by The Seedcamp Team from Seedcamp

What HealthTech pioneers can learn from FinTech

In any industry, when a gap between supply and demand is prevalent and existing regulation fails to step in, the role of innovation for the public good is often taken up by startups. Nowhere is this more evident than in the healthcare space. Large delays in innovation linked to complex and widely different healthcare systems around the world, as well as outdated legacy software all provide the perfect foundation for wide-scale disruption. The sudden shifts in what we considered to be “normal” life through the COVID-19 pandemic shed light on the tremendous speed at which HealthTech startups are able to deploy lasting positive changes in our daily lives when given the right catalyst. 

Crises as a catalyst

There are certain parallels that can be drawn between the speed at which HealthTech solutions have been deployed to meet pressing needs and the FinTech boom over the last decade. We believe that the broader healthcare industry will follow FinTech’s trajectory.The 2008 financial crisis served as an inflection point; people lost trust in banking systems, which resulted in increased awareness in taking ownership over personal finances. Customers started looking for alternative, personalised and more engaging services as a consequence, coupled with the growing regulatory openings such as PSD2 on Open Banking.

For Healthtech, the COVID-19 pandemic proved to be the inflection point. As healthcare took centre stage in global discussions, individual awareness grew dramatically and an urgent need for personalised and alternative care solutions has arisen. (Read more...)

Cardiomatics bags $3.2M for its ECG-reading AI

by Natasha Lomas

Poland-based healthtech AI startup Cardiomatics has announced a $3.2M seed raise to expand use of its electrocardiogram (ECG) reading automation technology.

The round is led by Central and Eastern European VC Kaya, with Nina Capital, Nova Capital and Innovation Nest also participating.

The seed raise also includes a $1M non-equity grant from the Polish National Centre of Research and Development.

The 2017-founded startup sells a cloud tool to speed up diagnosis and drive efficiency for cardiologists, clinicians and other healthcare professionals to interpret ECGs — automating the detection and analyse of some 20 heart abnormalities and disorders with the software generating reports on scans in minutes, faster than a trained human specialist would be able to work.

Cardiomatics touts its tech as helping to democratize access to healthcare — saying the tool enables cardiologists to optimise their workflow so they can see and treat more patients. It also says it allows GPs and smaller practices to offer ECG analysis to patients without needing to refer them to specialist hospitals.

The AI tool has analyzed more than 3 million hours of ECG signals commercially to date, per the startup, which says its software is being used by more than 700 customers in 10+ countries, including Switzerland, Denmark, Germany and Poland.

The software is able to integrate with more than 25 ECG monitoring devices at this stage, and it touts offering a modern cloud software interface as a differentiator vs legacy medical software.

Asked how the accuracy of its AI’s ECG readings (Read more...)

Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital leads $20M investment in Brazilian healthcare startup Pipo Saude

by Mary Ann Azevedo

Pipo Saude, a startup that developed a platform that sells and manages healthcare benefits for Brazilian companies, has raised $20 million in a Series A round of funding.

Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital led the round, marking the first time the New York-based venture firm has led an investment in a Brazilian startup. (Although, notably, Thrive has also put money in Nubank and Loft.)

Atlantico participated in the financing as a new investor in addition to all existing backers including Monashees, Kaszek and OneVC. Nubank co-founder and CEO David Velez and Cedar co-founder and CEO Florian Otto (and former CEO of Groupon in Brazil) also joined in the round. Pipo Saude had raised $4.6 million in a seed round in June 2020 that was led by Monashees and Kaszek with the participation of OneVC and Nubank’s Velez.

Pipo Saude raises $4.6 million to bring healthcare benefits management services to Brazil

Manoela Mitchell (CEO), Thiago Torres (COO) and Vinicius Correa (CTO) founded Pipo Saude in July 2019 with the goal of “bringing an unparalleled experience” of buying and managing healthcare benefits for corporations in combination with providing a care navigation platform for employees. More simply, its mission is to “transform” the healthcare experience for companies and their employees.

Pipo Saude started selling its solution six months after its inception. Over the past year, it has grown its ARR by “around 5x,” and the number of lives managed by 7.2x, according to Mitchell. Pipo currently has 100 corporate clients and 15,000 lives (Read more...)

The huge TAM of fake breaded chicken bits

by Natasha Mascarenhas

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

We’re closing our survey soon, so this is your last chance (probably) to get your voice heard!

Despite it being a short week, as always, it was a busy, busy time. We had Grace on the dials today, and Danny, Natasha, and Alex making chit-chat about the tech world. As with every week this year, we had to cut and cut and cut to get the show down to size. Here’s what made it in in the end:

Indonesian healthcare startup Prixa raises $3M led by MDI and TPTF

by Catherine Shu

Indonesian healthcare startup Prixa has raised $3 million led by MDI Ventures and the Trans-Pacific Technology Fund (TPTF), with participation from returning investors including Siloam Hospitals Group.

This brings Prixa’s total raised to $4.5 million since it launched in 2019. Co-founder and chief executive officer James Roring M.D., told TechCrunch in an email that the new funding will enable Prixa to scale its platform and customer base. Prixa uses a B2B model, partnering with healthcare payers like insurance providers and corporations. Through its B2B customers, it currently serves about 10 million patients.

Prixa currently works with four major insurers and has six additional insurers in its short-term pipeline. It also works with Indonesia’s largest third-party administrators, Roring said, allowing it to reach more policyholders.

Prixa’s platform includes a digital health assistant to answer patients’ questions, telemedicine consultations, pharmacy deliveries and on-demand lab diagnostics. Usage increased during the COVID-19 pandemic as more patients sought online consultations for primary care.

Telemedicine startups are positioning themselves for a post-pandemic world

Other telehealth startups in Indonesia include Halodoc and Alodokter (which is also backed by MDI). Both connect patients directly with healthcare and insurance providers. Roring said Prixa differentiates by focusing on greater cost control for healthcare payers and positioning itself as a digital primary care platform.

“By symptomatically managing patients outside of tertiary care facilities and caring for chronic non-communicable diseases online, Prixa is able to effectively reduce the amount of outpatient claims and downstream inpatient cost incurred by healthcare payers,” Roring said. (Read more...)