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Allara Snags $10M to Scale Its Platform for Women’s Chronic Hormonal Conditions
Allara raised $10 million in a Series A funding round led by GV. The startup offers membership-based virtual services to treat women’s chronic hormonal conditions, such as PCOS and endometriosis. CEO Rachel Blank — former executive at Ro and investor at General Catalyst — founded the company partly due to the difficulty she experienced arriving at her own PCOS diagnosis.
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How Mass General Brigham Is Integrating Behavioral Care Into Its Primary Care Model
Mass General Brigham launched a program this month in collaboration with behavioral health medical group Concert Health. Under the program, more than 400 Mass General primary care providers can refer their patients to Concert. The health system’s goal is to increase patients’ access to diagnoses and treatment for mild to moderate behavioral health issues — particularly for Medicaid patients, who are the most underserved.
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Jorie Healthcare CEO Shares Why Automation is Critical to Revenue Cycle Management
The revenue cycle management business is using AI tools to automate cumbersome tasks to help hospitals operate more efficiently. It’s beginning to attract the attention of major healthcare organizations.
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Cedars-Sinai’s CMIO Has A Piece of Advice for AI Startups
At HLTH, Shaun Miller — Cedars-Sinai’s chief medical information officer — pointed out one thing he thinks healthcare AI companies haven’t quite gotten right yet. He said he would “really like there to be a lot more recognition around the personalization of AI and the ability for technology to understand that not every clinician is the same.”
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What Will Rite Aid Need to Do to Recover from Bankruptcy?
Rite Aid filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Sunday amid decreasing sales, billions of dollars in debt and more than a thousand lawsuits claiming the chain filled illegal prescriptions for opioids. In order for the company to get back on its feet, experts say it will have to start acting more like its competitors, such as Walgreens and CVS, by leaning more into care delivery, forging strong payer partnerships, and improving its digital offerings.
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How Mayo Clinic Is Approaching Generative AI Risk Mitigation
At HLTH, Mayo Clinic Platform President John Halamka gave a window into how his health system is mitigating generative AI risks. Some of the measures Mayo is taking include running analyses on how well algorithms perform across various subgroups and training models only on internal de-identified data.
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Financial Pressures Drove Nearly 40% of Hospitals M&A Deals in Q3
Hospital M&A activity has been returning to pre-pandemic levels this year, according to a new report. There were 18 M&A transactions in Q3, compared to seven in Q3 2021 and 10 in Q3 of last year. The reason why M&A activity is regaining its momentum is because hospitals are seeking partnerships to grow and protect their long-term financial sustainability — the report found financial distress was the driving factor behind nearly 40% of deals announced during Q3.
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Artificial Intelligence, Consumer / Employer, Health Tech, Payers, Startups
11 HLTH Announcements You Don’t Want to Miss
This year’s HLTH conference brought a bevy of news announcements — from partnerships to new product features to acquisitions and more. In this list, MedCity News compiled short summaries for 11 of the conference’s most notable announcements.
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How Nemours Children’s Is Working to Solve the ‘Horrendous’ Youth Mental Health Crisis
If you could only do one thing to improve the health of children in the U.S., it would have to be in the behavioral health sphere, Nemours Children’s Health CEO Lawrence Moss declared at HLTH. The state of youth mental health has reached a crisis point in the U.S., and Moss’ health system is working hard to address this. Some of its efforts include embedding behavioral health into primary care and deploying behavioral health workers in schools.
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Artificial Intelligence, Consumer / Employer, Health Tech, Hospitals, Patient Engagement, Startups
7 Hot Takes I Heard at HLTH
At HLTH 2023, I had dozens of conversations with providers, digital health investors, startup CEOs and other players in the healthcare industry. When I got home, I compiled seven refreshingly honest takes I heard from them while at the conference.
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Navigating Healthcare’s Data Revolution: Priorities, Opportunities, and Challenges for Health Systems
Arcadia recently partnered with HIMSS Market Insights to survey executives, IT, technology, and clinical leaders. Here’s what we found.
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4 Ways Investors Think the Health Tech World Will Change in 2024
At HLTH, Bessemer investors Sofia Guerra and Steve Kraus detailed four predictions about where they think the digital health world is headed in 2024. One of these was that “services-as-software” will emerge as a new category of healthcare AI. Another was that some healthcare technology vendors will have to rethink their distribution models and rely on indirect monetization strategies.
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3 Questions This Healthcare Investor Finds Herself Asking Startups All The Time
At HLTH, General Catalyst Principal Candace Richardson discussed some of the questions she frequently asks startups during investment meetings. Some of these include “Do you stratify your outcomes data by different populations to ensure your model works well for everyone?” and “Is serving Medicaid populations on your roadmap?”
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Health Tech, Hospitals, Physicians
Why the AMA President Thinks Scope of Practice Expansions Are a ‘Terrible Idea’
To address the growing physician shortage, some people argue that the scope of practice should be expanded for skilled healthcare professionals like nurse practitioners and pharmacists. American Medical Association President Dr. Jesse Ehrenfeld said this is a “terrible idea.” He argued that throwing other professionals into physicians’ roles will have poor ramifications of patient safety. In his view, the industry should focus on uplifting strong interprofessional care teams.
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Main Street Health Rakes In $315M to Scale Value-Based Care in Rural America
Main Street Health announced the close of a $315 funding round at HLTH — some of the investors included UnitedHealthcare, Humana, Elevance, Centene and CVS. The startup, which scales value-based care in rural areas for both Medicare Advantage and original Medicare patients, also announced that it is expanding to 26 states.
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Why One Expert Thinks the Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Program Is Here to Stay
Merith Basey, executive director of Patients For Affordable Drugs, believes the Medicare price negotiation program is here to stay, no matter who is president and no matter how many Big Pharma players file lawsuits. Her reasoning? Every other high income nation has been negotiating prices with drugmakers for years, and the program is widely popular in the U.S. among pretty much everyone who isn’t a pharma company, she said during a session at Engage at HLTH.
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How Can LLMs Be Deployed Safely in Healthcare?
Healthcare technology experts have confidence that the industry will put the right guardrails up around LLMs as it continues to develop and deploy these AI tools, they said Sunday during a panel discussion at Engage at HLTH.