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Exciting news from Monica Chopra, Jeffrey De Flavio, MD, Samantha Adelberg, and the rest of the Auxa Health team as they officially announce their $5.2M Seed round. The team's deep industry expertise and drive for change have led them to solve critical infrastructural friction to providing quality healthcare and adoption of value-based care. Auxa's AI benefit navigation platform is simplifying the complexities of healthcare by streamlining all of the fragmented and siloed data and information to make it actionable in real-time for healthcare organizations. For the 70% of Americans who aren't getting access to the health and social care benefits they deserve, Auxa's solution will be pivotal in enabling equitable care. We're thrilled to partner with co-investors Zeal Capital Partners, AlleyCorp, Laconia, and Chaac Ventures on this journey and look to share many more milestones ahead. Cc K50 Ventures, Ryan Bloomer, Daniel Vásquez, Nick Talwar, Stefanie Ng https://lnkd.in/dPDY7-Db

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AI has made good design more important than ever in healthcare. Why? Model performance alone doesn't guarantee clinical or financial value. A model can deliver a robust insight/output (accurate, reliable, complete, etc.), but clinician-users may struggle to use or integrate it in a real-world setting. As healthcare AI systems become compound machines, these design challenges amplify. Here are two simple examples: • AI systems that do not integrate seamlessly into EHRs, PACS, or pathology viewers may drive differential rates of utilization/adoption across sites, privileging some patients to a given algorithm without an underlying clinical rationale. • Imagine a model recommending a "next best step in care" that is not provided at a given hospital (e.g., due to lacking resources or infrastructure). Contextual and human factors can have a greater influence on whether the value of an AI intervention is realized, even when in silico model performance is compelling. There are two near-term opportunities here: 1) Healthcare AI model benchmarking should encompass "end-to-end systems," capturing nuances around system design, user experience, workflow integration, and ease of adoption. 2) It's time for AI-first design in healthcare – made possible by revisiting the unique capabilities of AI systems and their emergent behaviors to interrogate what new user experiences are possible. What are your favorite examples of AI-first design? #healthcare #ai #artificialintelligence #generativeai

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Big congrats to our outstanding rising clinical research stars and global health practitioners at IGHS, UCSF! After months of dedicated hard work, we've all completed our qualifying oral exams. I believe these projects hold the potential to lead to the development of new healthcare technologies, services, or interventions that address pressing global health issues and aid underserved populations. The breadth of our research is evident in the diverse range of global health issues we explored, including but not limited to: 1. Women's empowerment and reintegration programs. 2. Telehealth systems for Native American children with complex medical needs. 3. Performance of COVID-19 exposure notification systems. 4. Mental health interventions during natural disasters in low- and middle-income countries. 5. Cancer screening and treatment access in underserved communities. 6. HIV care and support services. 7. Predictors of disease severity in pediatric febrile illnesses. 8. Cost-effectiveness analyses of various interventions (malaria detection, CAR T-cell therapy, cervical cancer screening). 9. Social media analysis of tobacco product marketing strategies. 10. Pediatric emergency triage tools for resource-limited settings. 11. The impact of food insecurity on mental health. 12. Acculturation, diet quality, and their connection to childhood obesity. 13. Nursing perspectives on COVID-19 pandemic interventions. This wide range of topics underscores the multifaceted nature of global health challenges and the critical need for innovative, interdisciplinary solutions. Furthermore, cost-effectiveness analyses, cost-of-illness studies, and implementation studies can inform strategies for sustainable and scalable solutions.

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This is sub-optimal. https://lnkd.in/gu_WVfct

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2 announcements in a week! Big tech companies look to partner with LionBird portfolio company Rhino Health led by Ittai Dayan MD and Yuval Baror to bring federated computing abilities to healthcare organizations at scale. Excited to see this new partnership announced which will enable better collaborations between different stakeholders in the healthcare ecosystem. Go Rhino!

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Part 1 of 2... Great article by Duke Rohlen Regina Herzlinger and Will Kynes Ajax Health on their named Growth Driver Model. I would highly recommend reading. I have been calling the same concept the "build to buy" model for years, #buildtobuy. Others like myself at Front Foot Ventures, Rick Anderson Todd M. Pope (Revival Healthcare Capital), Pat Donnelly (Veranex) and David Hochman (Orchestra BioMed) have been working this model as well. And we have seen it in action with Medtronic with their Blackstone structured deal and Medtronic with their structured deal with Ramin Mousavi (CathWorks) Peter Fitzgerald (Triventures) with Andrew ElBardissi, MD (Deerfield Management). And I was CEO at Verb Surgical which was a structured deal with Johnson & Johnson MedTech and Google where Johnson & Johnson bought Verb Surgical after 4 years of development. I wholeheartedly agree with the assessment and issue in #medtech innovation. Strategics like Medtronic, Stryker, Abbott and Boston Scientific do product extensions very well, they also acquisitions and integrations very well. It is not them specifically on innovation, large companies in general don't have the cultures, people, comp plans, income statement budget availability, and timelines to do game changing innovation. But the strategics do have balance sheet capacity, they have cash and they have need for innovation to fuel growth. They also have global distribution, manufacturing and other key operational areas to leverage early stage medtech to faster clinical benefits for patients and commercial success. The other issue is a shrinking pot of capital for #medtech versus other verticals like #biotech and other areas of technology. Medtech investing has gotten harder in the last 10 years given higher barriers to technical development, clinical requirements, regulatory approvals and heightened commercialization/reimbursement hurdles in the U.S., Europe and China. The technology is there (Ai, robotics, sensors, material sciences, computing power, connectivity), the patient needs are there, but we need better financing solutions that work for investors, strategics, and management teams/employees. Patient benefits are suffering. We need to solve this. I believe "build to buy" is that solution in many circumstances. Continued in part 2/2 #medtech #hbr Harvard Business School Joe Mullings The Mullings Group #srs2024

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Part 2 of 2 Historically, the strategics have used their balance sheet capacity, global distribution, and operations excellence in acquisitions. Examples? Medtronic a leader in valve surgery and interventional cardiology but has to buy CORVALVE EUROPE BV versus develop internally. They now are a strong 2nd to Edwards Lifesciences in one of the fastest growing and biggest value areas in #cardiology. In the same space Edwards Lifesciences bought PVT and developed the first percutaneous valves and their market cap is now over $50B. Mike Mahoney (Boston Scientific) and Kevin Lobo (Stryker) have done a great job of acquiring multiple companies over the last 10+ years to increase their weighted average market growth rates. This results in them increasing their growth rates through market leading positions in the fastest growing market segments. How do they get more of these benefits beyond acquisitions? I recommend "build to buys" to augment acquisitions. Why not just invest in these companies? This can work and should also be done, but at Volcano Corporation where I was CEO we did this by creating our own venture arm, we invested in 4 companies VENITI, Inc., CV Ingenuity, Aptus, and Vessix which we eventually tried to buy but got outbid by the likes of Medtronic and Boston Scientific. We made 5x our invested capital in 5-6 years, a great return, but did nothing to add to our growth portfolio. Build to buys you lock in a purchase price option you can exercise given a set of negotiated items and cannot be outbid. The authors layout 3 key stages for the growth driver model - 1) identifying the opportunities, 2) creating an innovation accelerator, and 3) developing the innovations. Agree on all, but I would add 4) developing an integration muscle and capability. As the build to buy option is exercised, integration becomes key to retain people, transition compensation plans, on board culture, agree on systems and processes (regulatory, quality, etc), and maintain the innovation focus. This is hard work and we all have seen numerous examples where this fails catastrophically and destroys shareholder value. So if I am a strategic I would be looking to add this strategy to my portfolio to add to my growth and value creation. If I am an entrepreneur or CEO I would be looking to this as a financing option versus standard VC round, that is do a structured deal with a VC and a strategic. If I am a VC I would be looking for start ups and strategics to put a deal together. Go, go, go!!! Harvard Business School Harvard Business Review #hbr #medtech Ajax Health Duke Rohlen #buildtobuy Joe Mullings The Mullings Group #srs2024

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As I said right at the start of this week's The Heart of Healthcare Podcast, Shivdev Rao is one of the most exceptional founders I have ever worked with. He is also a great human being. In this week's episode he shares what is it like leading the 🚀 that is Abridge and some awesome life lessons. IMHO this is a great listen for founders building in both the AI and healthcare fields!

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Today, I was reminded of two remarkably prescient 1997 ACM, Association for Computing Machinery presentations: the first by Nathan Myhrvold and the second by Bran Ferran. If you are not a member of the ACM - I highly recommend joining. Nathan Myhrvold The future of software, the software industry, and Windows '47 https://lnkd.in/egMwYty Bran Ferran How IT will transform the experience of telling and listening to stories https://lnkd.in/gqF7C7TK

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Article in today’s WSJ highlights the skyrocketing cost of healthcare bills for payors and patients. 4L FWA Prevention powered by Integr8 AI can detect these schemes to incrementally ratchet up claims cost in mear real-time. Stop abusive billing schemes when thet start. Find, Fight and Prevent FWA Fast!

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#hiring If anyone knows an awesome engineer that would be interested in joining an emerging #AI company doing important work in #healthcare, please drop me a line! Andy AI is backed by General Catalyst, YCombinator, Greater Ventures, and others, and they’re looking to hire a full stack engineer (US based) who's excited about using AI to improve healthcare and reduce nurse burnout. Andy is AI software that automates clinical documentation for nurses who do home visits. A nurse makes an audio recording of the visit and Andy automatically generates a form that usually takes nurses 90 minutes to complete. Nurses love the product because it potentially saves them 15 hours of charting a week! The founders previously built healthcare AI at Google Health and Apple, and are now building their vision to transform home health. More about Andy AI: https://with-andy.com/ Nurses love it: https://lnkd.in/g9XqZrUq #GenAI #digitalhealth #hiring #engineers #healthtech

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Thoughts on AI automating healthcare jobs— Most industries have come around to looking at technology first to solve problems, then to people. Healthcare isn’t there yet. Clinics are really good at staffing—many hire thousands of employees every year—so hiring to solve problems is natural. We think AI accelerates the “normalization” of healthcare towards other industries. But as an assistant, rather than automation. Early signs are there. For example, every clinic has a vendor management team in charge of reconciling invoices and remitting payments. Tech companies mostly centralize that to 1 person who uses automated bill pay tools like Ramp and Rippling to leverage themselves. The 1 person is still needed for one-off issues & sanity checks. But most of the time consuming work is offloaded to tech. So—will providers, QA staff, billing teammates, and coders all lose their jobs to AI in the next 5 years? Unlikely. But will there be less manual work to go around, meaning less people needed at each company? Yes. The good news—tech makes it much easier & cheaper to start new businesses. Instead of an entrepreneur needing to put together $250k to start a new clinic, technology lets them now use cheaper leasing, legal, practice management, and billing tools to start for significantly less. So, while a medium-size clinic might not need 10 employees in their billing department anymore, we think 10 startup clinics each needing 1 billing person will pop up in their place. That person will do more interesting, higher-leverage, and higher-paid work. With tech & AI as their assistant.

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Writing for the Forbes Technology Council has been fun, and I've made my topics constructive and positive whenever possible. But this one is intended to be a bit sobering... change isn't easy. Despite the ubiquity of titles like Chief Transformation, Chief Innovation, Chief Consumer, Chief Experience, etc., there needs to be more material change for consumers in healthcare. I write about the fading "Chief Digital Officer" era. Still, all these titles and positions are at risk of the same fate if we don't DO SOMETHING to materially improve the experience of patients, consumers, and their families at a meaningful scale. You know me, I'm never short on thoughts on this topic. Read for a few lessons that I think often get overlooked while we clamor to pat ourselves on the back for launching a new chatbot or speaking at the latest "AI in healthcare" conference. #DigitalHealth #Innovation #Consumerism #ConsumerExperience #PatientExperience #Healthcare #Leadership #Executives

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🌟 Exciting News! 🌟 We are integrating Digbi Health's precision biology-based programs into Solera's HALO™ platform to holistically tackle cardiometabolic conditions such as obesity, Type 2 Diabetes (T2D), and gastrointestinal (GI) health. Joining Solera Health's elite network of digital solutions enables us to bridge access gaps and transform the lives of even more people. We are proud to be the first company to offer multi-condition support for #obesity, #T2D, and #digestivehealth. Due to GI-based side effects of #GLP1 medications, this capability has become increasingly relevant for payers, employers, and individuals. Our integrated approach ensures personalized care that effectively addresses these interconnected health issues. Digbi Health's precision biology-based care platform goes beyond traditional behavior change programs by addressing the root causes at the biological level. This leads to more sustainable and impactful health outcomes. The partnership makes it easier for employers and health plans to offer this significant innovation in care as part of comprehensive and flexible health solutions. Together, we are pioneering a future where personalized, biology-driven care empowers individuals to achieve their best health. Working with the fantastic Solera team that made this possible was a pleasure. Ed Liebowitz Byron Crowe, Tom Kostecke, Blake Wetherbee WTW Aon Aetna, a CVS Health Company Dexcom Labcorp LG NOVA #genetics #gutmicorbiome Abbott

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Hey everyone! I’m excited to share our latest HIT Perspectives article, AI in Healthcare: Understanding Its Position on the Gartner Hype Cycle. We dive deep into how AI is transforming the healthcare industry and its place on the Gartner Hype Cycle. Right now, AI is making a difference in reducing administrative burdens, especially in clinical documentation. In many ways, this has been a game-changer in alleviating clinician burnout. However, while these advancements are promising, broader clinical applications of AI still face significant technical and ethical challenges, which means widespread adoption is on a slower track. Here are a few key takeaways: - What's Working Well: AI is making a big impact in administrative tasks, easing the load on healthcare providers. - Areas of Caution: Clinical decision-making applications still face hurdles. - Ethical Considerations: Issues like data privacy and AI bias need careful attention. At POCP, we’re doing more to help our clients understand how AI can fit into their technology roadmaps. We’re also focused on navigating the risks and current policy requirements related to AI. There are no silver bullets, but AI has a lot of potential to help reduce burdens in healthcare. If your organization is struggling with where to use AI and perhaps where to hold off, reach out to me. I'd love to set up time with one of subject matter experts to see if we can help. #HealthcareAI #GartnerHypeCycle #AIinHealthcare #TechInMedicine #ClinicalAI #EthicalAI https://hubs.li/Q02Gb82N0

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Had the pleasure of attending Aquillius Ventures Demo Day recently where I met two inspiring high school students who pitched their mobile app, Medzo. This healthcare review platform provides personalized insights on medications and supplements, empowering users with tailored health information. The goal of Medzo is to democratize post-market surveillance data for post-clinical trial products. The more reviews, ratings, and reports we contribute, the more valuable this app becomes. It's amazing to see such phenomenal entrepreneurial mindset in young students. We can support them by adding reviews to the app as well! Medzo is currently at its MVP stage, so some medication products might not yet be available. These students are fundraising to cover the costs of expensive APIs, development, and outreach. I believe Medzo has the potential to transform the way we manage our health, and I'm excited to support their journey. Keep an eye on this promising app! Remember, every review counts. Disclaimer: I have no financial involvement whatsoever with Medzo, just supporting the founders as I see they bring value to our community. #HealthTech #Innovation #Startups #Medzo #AquilliusVentures #Symposium

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Today, clinicians spend up to 50% of their time on documentation and admin. That is a staggering amount they cannot dedicate to patients and it only increases the problem of an already constrained supply of healthcare providers. Enter Tandem Health: Building on top of the latest AI and LLM advancements, Tandem's clinician copilot solves that problem and allows clinician to focus on what matters, patients. With their AI scribing solution, clinicians automates medical note taking and transfers notes to any EHR with the respective codes, all with one click. And this is jut the beginning. I could not be more excited to partner up with the fantastic team around Lukas Saari, Oliver Åstrand, Oscar Boldt-Christmas as we are leading Tandem's $9.5 m round - with the participation of great investors such as Amino Collective and Manuel Grossmann, angel operators from OpenAI & Google DeepMind, the founder of Capio Sverige, Fredrik Hjelm, and many more. Welcome to the Northzone Family!! 🖤 Pär-Jörgen Pärson, Michelle Nacouzi

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good to see 'remote patient management' (I prefer this term to 'monitoring') gaining investment traction from big names. It is however worth mentioning that only a very small portion of home care patients truly require 'continuous monitoring'. Also here, the concept is evolving to near-time monitoring and proactive prevention. Next is to see payors supporting this new stream outside of the US with focus on wellbeing as opposed to on 'acvoiding readmissions'. The latter being just another pothole in the sick care process. BARMER in #Germany is leading in this context.

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I caught up with Nikhil Krishnan of Out-Of-Pocket fame to get his take on the current state of the healthcare technology landscape. Up first: his current thoughts on what's exciting and where there are opportunities for AI-driven solutions. First half of our Q&A below 👇 — 🟩 Q: When it comes to AI, what area are you most excited about? Patient-facing solutions. The AI admin and back-office space has quickly become saturated, and incumbents will always have a distribution advantage here. Which is why I’m actually surprised there aren’t more players entering the patient-facing side. I think the traditional healthcare companies are too nervous to actually go into that patient-facing area. And it's also a regulatory gray area, so if you actually get traction, you can probably help shape how this stuff ultimately gets regulated. So right now, I think the greatest opportunities are for patient-facing AI tools. 🟩 Q: Where specifically do you see whitespace to develop patient-facing solutions? I think there’s still a lot of opportunity on the patient-facing automation side. A great example actually is automated lab results. There has been an issue for the last 3 years that lab results automatically get released to patients, and they see something's abnormal. The patient is trying to figure out what’s going on and what they've read. Part of this is explaining the result, which is something Elaborate is working on, and in some cases, actually, it's really useful for the patient to get that notice immediately with follow up steps, like scheduling a diagnostic. Another area is AI that can autonomously make workflow changes within a local system. Viz.ai is working on this automated workflow piece in the context of situations like stroke care coordination and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. This requires not only automation in terms of being able to understand the context of multiple datasets, but also make the requisite workflow changes (e.g. escalating to the right specialist). These are particularly useful in time-sensitive areas. 🟩 Q: Any other AI whitespaces? Monitoring of AI models. It's one of the areas that's still unknown in terms of how do you give peace of mind to your buyer? It becomes really hard to actually evaluate and audit a lot of these AI algorithms without some form of data exhaust. I feel like one of the things that will happen is you'll see some form of certifying entity emerge that can give a gold standard to hospitals. 🟩 Q: What else are you thinking about as it pertains to AI? I do think that pricing is one of the more interesting components here. For example, in AI scribing, how you think about pricing changes a lot depending on if you’ve got a human in the loop or not. Because adding a human layer goes from near zero marginal cost to cost scaling linearly. One of the ways that companies will be able to differentiate themselves — especially from incumbents — is the pricing model.

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