Jack Jeng, MD, MBA

Here’s your recap of last week’s health IT news 🗞️ Notable partnerships 🤝 • Kaiser Permanente is partnering with Innovaccer to incorporate their population health and AI platform        • MUSC Health adopted Andor Health’s ThinkAndor in its ED to reduce wait times and “leaving without being seen” rates.      • Upperline Health is partnering with Navina to improve clinical workflows and improve the accuracy of patient histories.      • Intermountain Health deployed Nuance Communications DAX Copilot, an AI ambient scribe solution.      • PA Clinical Network is partnering with Guidehealth  to improve outcomes and care quality while improving physician efficiency. Product updates 👩🏼‍💻 • Klara released a new patient intake product for athenahealth users.    • Baton Health released Universal Primary Source, giving users access to hundreds of primary source databases for credentialing.    • InsightRX released InsightRX Apollo, an analytics platform that provides insights on clinical performance.    • Trovo Health launched with a $15 million seed round, offering specialty-specific AI combined with clinical experts to help practices add to their capabilities.    • Quest Diagnostics acquired PathAI’s diagnostic laboratory business (PathAI Diagnostics) to improve Quest’s oncology services.    • GenHealth.ai launched its Automated Prior Authorization platform.    • Veradigm® is partnering with MedEvolve, Inc. to make its suite of products available to Veradigm users.    • CLEW announced availability of a newly FDA-approved patient surveillance platform. Posts we enjoyed 👏 • Eric Topol, MD shared a compelling piece reviewing the state of research on AI in medicine. In short, we’re seeing our first early evidence that AI can reduce mortality as a research endpoint, but large language models are not yet the panacea we’ve been promised. (https://lnkd.in/e6hK-4mr)    • Nikhil Krishnan of Out-Of-Pocket shared a deep dive on Stedi, which converts X12 EDI into JSON-based APIs for healthcare tech developers. (https://lnkd.in/eqS9V5zW) --- Want to stay in the loop? Sign up for the Elion Briefing to get all of the latest healthcare tech news delivered to your inbox 📬 👉 https://bit.ly/49z6AUW

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I just read an article put out by TechCrunch on the most exciting digital health startups of 2024 and not surprisingly, over half of them were AI companies. Also not surprising, all of the AI companies were focused on reducing administrative friction (automating prior auth, medical coding automation and review, etc). This isn’t surprising because these tasks play to AI’s current strengths, there are lower regulatory barriers, decent data standardization, etc. Most of us working in this space have predicted that AI for healthcare administration is where we’ll see earliest adoption. I’m grappling with something on the back-end of this though. We point to the high administrative costs of healthcare (up to 30% of total industry spend) time and time again as a reason why healthcare (usually via premiums) is so expensive for patients/consumers. The promise of all of these AI-for-healthcare-administration start-ups is that they will reduce these costs. But who will they reduce costs for? The value props always end at the health systems and the carriers — helping them generate more revenue and avoid inappropriate spend through automated, high-accuracy processes. We wave our hands and say that this will somehow flow down to consumers, but how? Someone needs to govern these applications of AI in healthcare and how they will ultimately change affordability for consumers. One hot take is that it’s time to reconsider the Medical Loss Ratio. If AI is going to chip away at the 20% of premiums that carriers are allowed to spend on administrative costs, maybe we should tighten the limit on premium allocation to these types of costs. AI is exploding in healthcare right now and without some governance over who is paying for it and who is benefitting, we run the risk of actually continuing to drive up healthcare costs for consumers despite increasing systemic efficiencies. Nikhil Krishnan's recent post on AI in healthcare enlightened me about how this is happening in AI for clinical applications already — somehow the CPT code price tag for an AI read of a medical image is more expensive than a human radiologist reading the same image. We don’t yet live in a world where AI replaces radiologists, so I can only imagine that not only is a more expensive CPT code being applied when an AI read is performed, but that it is applied in addition to the human read. The potential here is tremendous — for good — but let’s make sure we’re using AI to do what we say we’re doing. #healthcareAI #healthcareaffordability

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I’ve been given advice that the fastest way to monetize HER Heard without charging the end user (woman) is trackers and selling data. Instead, I’d like to build something more trustworthy. I don’t want to be in a headline like this. If you are not paying, then you are the product (you/your data are being sold). There are newer ways to deindentify data or even to aggregate things women search for that can be of interest to various stakeholders. In theory that could be okay to sell, but in a post-Roe world with laws encouraging bounty hunting, I am vetting the choices ahead. I am all for moving fast, without breaking things.

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One key reason why healthcare technologies like AI, telemedicine, and software haven't structurally lowered costs or broadened access for the entire system after decades of experimentation (excluding pure financial engineering of payer contracts) is the limited reimagining of care delivery itself, with asynchronous telemedicine as a notable exception. In the same way that digitizing physical paper failed to exploit the capabilities of a new computing medium for word processing, hosting physician-patient conversations over video does not transform the actual delivery of care. In telemedicine, many of the inputs (e.g., clinician time) and therefore cost structures of in-person care persist, which is why we often see fee-for-service telemedicine companies struggle to achieve economies of scale (i.e., growing revenues non-linearly while growing costs linearly). Until we deconstruct the components of a medical appointment – from intake and triage, to chart review, history gathering, physical examination, diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up – we will continue to be underwhelmed by the disconnect between the transformative potential of these technologies and real-world patient/system impact. I’m optimistic that the emergence of reliable and performant medical AI agents will urge us to perform this deconstruction and redesign the fundamental building blocks of a “medical appointment.”

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I always read Rock Health's digital health reports as they give a nice pulse feel for what is happening in the digital health funding space. Good to see funds raised in H1 2024 suggest funding in the sector seems to have stabilized at 2023 levels. Its no surprise the report emphasis the buzz around AI and healthcare. There have been clear winners in the AI healthcare space in the area of process and cost optimization and the R&D space. The impact of AI in care and treatment delivery is so far much more muted. One area I never though to look at AI was in its ability to bring together multiple healthcare pathways and digital point solutions into a more holistic seamless experience for the patient. There is a clear trend away from using stand alone digital health point solutions, and could AI address this challenge by facilitating the efficient integration of disparate processes and technology into unified care programs. I can see this happening with digital health products but this will be more tricky to do with physical care programs involving clinicians and HCPs. “AI is helping us combine multiple parts of the care journey, across all care experiences. In the future, benefits navigation, clinical guidance, and care delivery won’t be delivered by separate companies or point solutions within the healthcare ecosystem. They’ll be features that work in concert within products, and they’ll happen in under 90 seconds for a seamless patient experience.” – Glen Tullman, CEO, Transcarent and Managing Partner, 7wireVentures

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Interesting to see that digital health funding is relatively stable. Only a couple of exits. I think we'll see more deals like DarioHealth's acquisition of Twill, since from a sales perspective, the narrower the solution, the more difficult it is to acquire customers. This difficulty has nothing to do with the quality of offerings, but with the data management and administrative complexity on the customer side.

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I’m excited to share what we've been obsessing over for the last six months! Introducing Threshold Health, a unique patient engagement platform that puts healthcare operators in the driver's seat of modern care gap closure campaigns. Shockingly, only 1 in 20 US adults is up to date on their recommended preventive care, such as cancer screenings or blood pressure testing. This statistic is paradoxically low, especially given the increasingly direct financial incentives tied to increasing population-level care quality. When my longtime friend and now cofounder, Dr. Doug Murad, and I started exploring why patient engagement is so low, we quickly discovered a recurring pattern. Time and again, we heard from passionate operators across diverse healthcare organizations who struggled to mount effective patient engagement campaigns, often waiting until the last few months of the contract year to close important care gaps in their patient populations. In almost every case, these operators seemed to be building campaigns from scratch, deploying blunt tools like bulk SMS, physical gift cards, and manual call centers, and relying on lagging indicators of success. Unsurprisingly, these efforts were operationally expensive and often fell short of their targets. Dr. Doug and I aim to empower healthcare operators level up their patient engagement with campaigns that are cheaper, better, and faster than building something themselves. To do this, we’re building a self-serve platform that makes it easy for operators to rapidly launch and iterate on modern campaigns that integrate well with their existing care coordination workflows. If we’re successful in this first step, we will have a vehicle to deliver an increasingly sophisticated library of campaign templates and next-generation patient engagement technology. So far, we’ve developed a prototype that allows operators to go from zero integration to a modern deployed campaign in fewer than 10 clicks. We’re excited to run our first pilot in mid-July and continue developing the product with 2-3 launch partners through the rest of this year. There's a lot left to learn -- I plan to post regular updates and lessons here. Reaching this level of conviction took a lot of time—not just from me and Dr. Doug, but from numerous experts across various fields who have been extremely generous in sharing their expertise and feedback. I especially want to thank our network of advisors: Daniel Croymans, MD, MBA, Benjamin (Benny) Axt, Indira Gowda, Ivo Vlaev, Suruchi Kothari, MD, Melissa G., Christian Spier and many others; our investors Jane Wang and Saumitra Thakur at MedMountain Ventures; and our first full-time employee Joe Bonneau. Also, shout-out to Shirley Mao and rvnway for designing and building our new website: https://threshold.health With all that said, we’re open for business! Let’s chat :)

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“I went to medical school wanting to make a difference,” says Anterior (formerly Co:Helm) co-founder and CEO Abdel Mahmoud, MD. “But I quickly realized that how good you are as a clinician is less about your individual skill set and more about the ecosystem and tools you have, and the environments you’re in.” Powered by LLMs, Anterior was built to manage all the work that comes before clinical decision-making, as well as take on the administrative overhead plaguing the healthcare industry. In the U.S. alone, these costs represent billions of dollars a year — not to mention the time taken away from potentially lifesaving research. Hear more about how Anterior is reshaping healthcare with AI in our latest Founder Forward interview featuring Abdel Mahmoud and NEA Co-CEO Mohamad Makhzoumi: https://lnkd.in/gttThK7M #healthcare #ai #llm

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Women's health isn't "niche" -- and it costs commercial health plans a LOT of money. "Women's health" has been an exploding category the last few years, with new startups targeting conditions that uniquely, differently, or disproportionately impact women coming to the forefront. We desperately need these solutions. Women's health has been historically understudied and underfunded, and many women are left to suffer as a result. It also makes business sense for employers & plans to invest in women's health. Underserved areas of women's health like gynecology, women-specific preventive care, & more surprisingly drive higher costs than maternity. It's just more difficult to spot in claims. As plans & employers start to learn about these costs (and, of course, how these conditions impact their employees/members), we'll see a continued upward trend in investment in women's health. #womenshealth #virtualcare #digitalhealth #healthtech

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Investing in companies that fill needs for health systems is a growth opportunity for both delivery organizations and start ups. Some systems are jumping in on their own, while others are partnering with like minded systems or with established VC firms. While this is a relatively new trend for systems, health plans have been making similar bets for many years. The benefits of becoming a health system portfolio company can be significant. Data, access to beta populations and real world coaching can be extremely beneficial. Start ups get mentoring and systems have to ability to leverage outside resources to solve relevant business problems. I predict a booming business!

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It’s been an eventful start for healthtech in 2024, so we wanted to reflect on our learnings from our Q1 conversations with founders, investors, and other stakeholders in the healthcare ecosystem. From our interactions at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in SF to #ViVE in Los Angeles, and even #SXSW in Austin, it’s clear that #healthequity is gaining a seat at the healthcare innovation table. Panels on expanding care access, addressing language barriers, and strengthening community partnerships through culturally-relevant solutions were front and center at all of these conferences. Nonetheless, its obvious we're just beginning to move from ornate mission statements to making health equity a true strategic priority. See our newsletter below to learn what we're seeing in the market, as well as what kept us busy during Q1 at Sequential Ventures. https://lnkd.in/guMRVYbE

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My second post on AI for health equity. This time with tools and frameworks I think are helpful to address the challenges I shared. Also sharing information about coalitions, alliances and partnerships (some good once in a larger soup of coalitions). 1️⃣ First challenge I pointed out was the risk of bias. 🛠️ FRAMEWORKS and TOOLS Health equity across the AI lifecycle (HEAAL) - a framework to mitigate the risk of AI solutions worsening health inequities https://lnkd.in/gHKyD9Zr Considerations for addressing bias in artificial intelligence for health equity https://lnkd.in/gNReUH22 8 decision points to consider when implementing an AI solution by Health AI Partnership https://lnkd.in/gbUcczSm Toward Equitable Innovation in Health and Medicine: A Framework by The National Academies https://lnkd.in/gxWsbmhS 🤝COALITIONS and ALLIANCES Coalition to end racism in clinical algorithms https://lnkd.in/gZcW4GAK Coalition for Health AI: intends to develop a framework with Health Equity in mind, aiming to address algorithmic bias. https://lnkd.in/gKtiHfrh Women Defining AI: my main source of inspiration from fantastic women https://lnkd.in/gR4nm8Cc 2️⃣ The second challenge I pointed out was the urgent need to invest and build capacity among providers serving historically underinvested communities. here are some opportunities trying to do exactly that. Most deadlines are now in June/July‼️ Health AI Partnership is supporting healthcare delivery organizations in the US interested in implementing an AI solution. If you join the network, you get to work with an incredibly talented team https://lnkd.in/gaXSyPdV AIM-AHEAD Consortium Development Program (CDP) focuses on Innovation for Equity in Low-Resource Settings and provides funding to catalyze multi-disciplinary research projects to plan and pilot Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) algorithms or tools to address health disparities. https://lnkd.in/g4YAy3d2 LEAP: The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) has Interest in Projects to Develop Innovative Ways to Evaluate and Improve the Quality of Healthcare Data Used by Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools in Healthcare and Accelerate Adoption of Health Information Technology in Behavioral Health. https://lnkd.in/gZt4BBmC

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Last week, I had an eye-opening conversation with a major 500-provider+ healthcare system. What I discovered is nothing short of revolutionary. Here's how they're thinking about unleashing the power of AI: 1. Transforming Patient Care Delivery: AI-driven tools are creating personalized treatment plans for that are more effective and timely. 2. Supercharging Operational Efficiency: From predictive maintenance of medical equipment to smarter staff scheduling, AI is slashing their staffing inefficiencies. 3. Revolutionizing Clinical Documentation: Natural language processing and AI is automating documentation, letting healthcare professionals focus more on their patients and less on their paperwork. You can test our AI here for free here: 👇 https://lnkd.in/e_PxQ6bM 4. Slashing Administrative Overhead: Administrative tasks such as appeals management are now in the hands of companies like Crosby Health, freeing up valuable time for their overburdened healthcare staff. 5. Boosting Collaborative Intelligence: AI is enhancing collaboration among their healthcare teams, ensuring all healthcare staff is on the same page with the latest data and insights. AI is not only elevating the quality of care but also ensuring healthcare organizations operate like a well-oiled machine.

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90% of startups fail. So why do healthcare initiatives at large corporations fail at about the same rate? Many of these were launched with great fanfare but announced closures a few short years lateer. A few reasons might be: 1. Mission but no strategy: it's not enough to have a mission to treat a specific population or group of employees, you have to be in it for the long haul with a strategy that will evolve over time. 2. Misunderstanding of healthcare complexity: many executives believe they understand the problem and use tools from other industries to solve healthcare issues. You can't always bring things that work in banking, finance, retail for example. 3. Execution: rarely does leadership hire people who have a track record of execution in healthcare. I'm talking about people who have been able to gut through the losses. This is probably the biggest misstep. You agree with these reasons? What would you add to these? #healthcare #failures https://lnkd.in/etzZywnK

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We all have seen by now that AI holds the promise of reshaping healthcare delivery, and this goes particularly for marginalized communities. Its widespread adoption, however, necessitates careful navigation of potential biases and ethical concerns to ensure equitable outcomes for all! As we embrace AI's transformative potential, we must continue to actively address issues of access, transparency, and workforce readiness in order to promote a future where technology enhances, rather than hinders, health equity initiatives. #HealthEquity #Healthcare #AI

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On May 2nd, we’re unveiling a workshop called 𝐒𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐬-𝐅𝐨𝐜𝐮𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐂𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐒𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐢𝐞𝐬, which will be taught by digital health luminary, 𝐁𝐞𝐧 𝐑𝐨𝐬𝐧𝐞𝐫, 𝐌𝐃, 𝐏𝐡𝐃.  ​ In addition to being the Manos Health Lead Medical Advisor, Dr. Rosner is also an Associate professor at UCSF, a veteran digital health researcher, and a practicing hospitalist physician. ​ Dr. Rosner has the perfect background for this topic, because he has expertise in running complex clinical studies at the large AMC level and has practically navigated generating evidence as part of previous digital health launch teams. ​ Basically, he knows the science and the business. ​ He will be walking you through the practical steps you need to take to run a validation study that will support your sales. This is not an academic class on how to run a randomized control trial solely for investigative academic journal publishing. Our process focuses on designing and executing studies that prove your solution works so that you can attract your dream customers. ​ This is the same method we have used with our multi-billion-dollar clients to build, prove, and launch profitable digital health products: ​ It is perfect for those who are investing heavily in building digital health products (or healthcare adjacent, even if it’s not tech) but aren't seeing the expected returns. Or if you are currently building out your product and want to ensure you are “sales-ready” down the road. ​ Why is this workshop a game-changer for you? Sales-focused clinical trials are the key to success in healthcare: learn how to change a cost driver into revenue generation. Knowing when you are ready is the first step: understand how to know and prepare for a study and figure out what type is best for you (and most cost effective). Executing a clinical trial doesn’t have to be overwhelming: walk step-by-step with us as we take you through 10 basic steps, from choosing where to start, to marketing your results. Converting our study to sales and marketing will get you to the next level: discover tactics for converting a scientific study to marketing materials to attract your dream buyers. ​ This workshop is not just about collecting evidence; it's about transforming that evidence into a strategic advantage and a clear path to sales. ​ Who Should Attend: Founders, Health-Tech Executives, Heads of Commercialization, Scientific Chairs and Product Leaders. ​ Are there any bonuses? You bet. We’re going to give away our: ​ 🧬 Study Type Diagnostic: A list of questions that will help you target what types of study might be right for you. 📈 Marketing Dissemination Templates: Documents that will help you promote your clinical study in marketing materials and on social media. ✅ Getting Started Checklist: Use this to make sure you are ready to engage in a study and avoid re-work and costly missteps down the road. ​ Get your spot here 👇

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Physicians and other health care professionals must be engaged about the use of AI. We can't have a "wait and see" approach. Please check out the recent position paper by American College of Physicians (ACP) on how we should use AI in clinical practice. Honored to be part of the committee putting out this report. https://lnkd.in/eUKWY6xm #artificalintelligence #aihealth #ai #augmentedintelligence

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Here's another fundraising roundup spotted in the healthcare wilds 👀 🍃 ✅ Sword Health raised $130M (new valuation: $3B). ✅ Better Health raised $14M to deploy expanded payer partnerships. ✅ Alzheon, Inc. | Preserving Future Memories raised $100M Series E to advance development & commercialization of its Alzheimer’s treatment. ✅ CinRx Pharma raised $73M to continue its ‘Hub and Spoke’ model of startup formation. ✅ Eko Health raised $41M to scale AI-driven heart and lung disease detection. ✅ Anterior (formerly Co:Helm) secured a $20M Series A to unlock admin efficiencies for healthcare payers. ✅ SamaCare raised a $17M Series B to scale specialty drug prior authorization platform. ✅ Plenful secured a $17M Series A to streamline pharmacy operations with AI-powered workflow automation. ✅ Grayce raised a $10.4M Series A led by Maveron amid a caregiving crisis. ✅ Stitch Employment Services Inc PEO raised $8.75M in seed to support independent medical practices. ✅ Posterity Health secured $6M to fund expansion and technology acceleration. ✅ Sware raised $6M to accelerate life sciences innovation by automating FDA-mandated software validation. ✅ Keragon raised $3M, as announced in @Conno Christou’s LinkedIn post. As always, if I missed you, let me know! Each week I'm spotlighting an innovative healthcare startup. I just ask for a bit more transparency. All submissions are confidential; submit yours here 👇 https://lnkd.in/gF4DrAvJ Looking for more fundraising roundups, alongside healthcare industry news and analysis? Subscribe to Hospitalogy, my 2x/week newsletter. Join 33K+ other investors, executives, and healthcare professionals: https://lnkd.in/g-nfRqW6

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