Health Startup Digest - 4/29/30

Startup Highlight: OurHealthMateOurHealthMate is reinventing a $10B industry: every year, 22 million   April 29 - Issue #11 Health Startup Digest Curated by R. Scott Munro, the latest news and information about startups and innovations in healthcare. Startup Highlight: OurHealthMateOurHealthMate is reinventing a $10B industry: every year, 22 million expats remit $10B back home to India for the healthcare expenses of loved ones. But those funds often fail to benefit the recipients; because the recipients fail to make and keep medical appointments for themselves and in most cases the money is used for other purposes! OurHealthMate restructures those remittances so that funds go directly to the doctor on behalf of the beneficiary, and gives the individual payer feedback and reassurance. With coverage across 400+ cities in India and partnerships with 15000+ doctors, expats can be assured of a seamless experience of booking and paying for healthcare for their family and receiving direct feedback from the doctor. 1,900 paying customers generating $200,000 worth of transactions is the early indication of something big to come. While they have started with the Indian market, this is clearly something that can be transferable to expats in any country.As always, if you come across news, announcements, videos, or podcasts that you think the other 4,800+ subscribers would benefit from, e-mail me at scott.munro@startupdigestmail.com or tweet @R_Scott_Munro and subscribe to the digest, here. If you have feedback/suggestions, please let me know, here. Articles: Pharma's virtual conferencing roadmap www.pharmaphorum.com I may be biased, but the digitization of pharma/med tech is an incredibly important (and under-penetrated) sub-area within digital health (I tend to think of digital health as technologies that impact patients, providers, payors, and industry). Lan Starnes has a great overview on how pharma (and by extension med tech) companies should start thinking about digitizing, specifically around their education and conference spend.I couldn’t dig in deep enough, but the article also mentioned this study on pharma digitization from Accenture that looks pretty great. Putting Doctors and Patients on the Same Page medium.com Many clinicians are split as to whether they would think that sharing their notes with patients is a good thing: will what they write be misunderstood? Will they stop writing clinically relevant things because they think the patient will take it the wrong way? Etc. This is a great Commonwealth Fund piece on the subject that has some positive reactions. In fact, the OpenNotes movement may encourage more dialogue between physicians and patients. Instead of simply writing “continued alcoholism, counseled patient”, a physician may instead ask the patient about their troubles and let them know they were thinking about writing “alcohol abuse” down. This can lead to much better care, and is in line with the thoughts Dr. Bob Wacther outlined in his chapter on OpenNotes in his book, Digital Doctor (highly recommend reading this if you haven’t already). Congratulations Stemcentrx medium.com The Stemcentrx deal was huge by just about any account. You likely read a quick update on the deal on twitter, but definitely check out this post by one of the investors, Stuart Patterson, to get a more in depth understanding on why the deal is so important, and some history on the company itself. It’s hard for me to believe this is the second largest venture backed acquisition after WhatsApp (in fact, this article from WSJ cites an 11B deal of Continental Cablevision in 1996, but whether it is number 2 or 3, it is a historically large deal).Still an interesting read as you see the M&A activity in pharma pick up again after the failed Pfizer deal.  Don't Blame Silicon Valley for Theranos www.nytimes.com I tend to think of the downfall of Theranos as being a tech company parading like a health care company. You can over exaggerate in tech (and many often do), but you can’t do that in health care. This article talks a little more about the lack of health care-savvy oversight from the board, and investors that Theranos had, which is also a bit of an overlooked issue with the eventual downfall of the company.I sincerely hope they can take a 23-and-me route and come back from all of this, only time will tell though. The striking variation of commercial healthcare prices www.modernhealthcare.com Transparency in care costs is no new issue in the US Health Care system. This article from Modern Healthcare goes through a study published recently that shows state-by-state cost variation across 242 different procedures. While the study did not go into detail about the root causes, it did say geography is an important indicator of cost (i.e. remote care is more expensive). I try not to post articles that point out obvious trends (i.e. cost discrepancy is a silly and consumers should be able to shop for cheaper care, so long as that care is equivalent), but I thought the state-by-state angle was interesting enough to include. Quote of the Week: “In fact, however, Silicon Valley's most experienced investors in start-ups saw red flags at Theranos before anyone else. The Theranos saga shows just how well Silicon Valley does its homework, especially when considering medical technology, in which the risks of doing real harm to people are higher than those posed by the next photo-sharing app.”- Randall Stross, NYT This Digest is curated by: Health Startup Digest www.startupdigest.com I am a classical languages nerd turned digital health geek. I spend my days researching medical device, pharmaceutical, and biotech companies + helping clinicians efficiently collaborate.I have a passion for the intersection of health and technology, and wholeheartedly believe we are at the beginning of the most exciting eras of health care. Do you enjoy receiving this? Please share it:     Tweet     Share   Carefully curated by Health Startup Digest with Revue If you were forwarded this newsletter and you like it, you can subscribe here. If you don't want these updates anymore, please unsubscribe here.