Year: 2022

As another year shaken by the lingering COVID-19 pandemic ends, stakeholders are still exploring how virtual care trends that accelerated in 2020 will affect the healthcare industry long term.

Though telehealth use spiked out of necessity during the early months and remains higher than pre-pandemic levels, utilization has slowed over the past two years. Meanwhile, big retail companies and pharmacies are offering more care options to patients.

Sanjula Jain, senior vice president of market strategy and chief research officer at Trilliant Health, sat down with MobiHealthNews to discuss the future of virtual care, how big retail entrants will affect the industry, and the importance of care coordination between traditional health systems and emerging retail players.

MobiHealthNews: What are some of your big takeaways from 2022 when you’re thinking about telehealth, digital health and other tech-enabled care?

Sanjula Jain: A big thing that I’m thinking a lot about is that patients

Texas-based MedCognetics received FDA 510(k) clearance for its AI-powered breast cancer screening software QmTRIAGE.

QmTRIAGE uses AI to analyze 2D full-field digital mammography screenings and flags those suggestive of abnormalities for radiologists’ review.

MedCognetics’ software uses datasets gathered from deidentified clinical data from UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and intellectual property from UT Dallas’ Quality of Life Technology Laboratory to improve early breast cancer detection.

UT Southwestern Medical Center and UT Dallas hold equity in the company. 

“MedCognetics is committed to leveraging our technology to help improve outcomes across a diverse group of patients and to do so, partnered with both University of Texas at Dallas and University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (UTSW) to address these disparities. In addition to this, our software’s high detection accuracy enables reduced time for review by radiologists, another key component to improved outcomes. The FDA’s clearance is a very important first step

Headspace Health confirmed it has laid off 50 workers, or about 4% of its workforce.

First reported by Bloomberg, the cuts at the meditation and mental health company are the latest in a spate of layoffs at digital health and health tech companies this year. 

Calm, another meditation app that has been expanding with clinical mental health offerings,  laid off 20% of its staff in August. 

Click Therapeutics announced Friday it had received FDA Breakthrough Device Designation for a prescription digital therapeutic for episodic migraine.

CT-132 is under development as an adjunctive preventive treatment for episodic migraine in adult patients. The Breakthrough Device Designation isn’t a marketing approval from the FDA, but it aims to accelerate review of products that could help treat debilitating or life-threatening conditions.

Click said it has completed or started three clinical studies on the migraine therapeutic. It will use the data from those trials

Memora Health, a virtual care delivery and management platform, announced its partnership with perinatal and prenatal health AI company, PeriGen, to provide coordinated women’s healthcare from childbirth to postpartum. 

Founded in 2000, PeriGen makes software products focused on childbirth. Its Early Warning System and Clinical Decision Support tool use AI to monitor patients in labor and find potential issues that need to be addressed.

Memora Heath is an AI-enabled ​platform for managing complex care needs, including messaging, automated reminders, metrics and scheduling. 

The collaboration will allow health systems nationally to perform continued care during labor and delivery to post-discharge monitoring for the same patient.

“Health systems offering robust maternal and fetal monitoring that supports new families during labor and throughout their transition home can gain tremendous lifetime loyalty from these investments,” Manav Sevak, cofounder and CEO of Memora Health, said in a statement. “We’re excited to partner with PeriGen to

Health data startup Komodo Health has laid off 9% of its staff as part of a larger restructuring of its business.

The COVID-19 pandemic created opportunities for the analytics company, Komodo’s cofounders Arif Nathoo and Web Sun wrote in a message to employees that was also posted on LinkedIn. But the current economic environment is forcing its customers to seriously consider their purchasing decisions. 

“As a business, we continue to be well positioned to weather these changes — we provide critical visibility into the healthcare system to support the strategic decisions enterprise healthcare leaders need to make,” they wrote. “That said, we have a responsibility to all of you — our team and shareholders — to invest responsibly in that growth. We have always prided ourselves on running a capital efficient business, and today we’re taking steps to ensure that we are well positioned for the current world around

Virtual and in-office healthcare provider Juno Medical raised $12 million in Series A funding round co-led by tennis star Serena Williams, managing partner at Serena Ventures, and Julian Eison, managing partner at NEXT VENTURES.

Vast Ventures, which led Juno’s seed round, also participated in the Series A funding alongside Empire State Development’s New York Ventures, Genius Guild, TXV Partners, Gaingels, and previous investors Humbition and Atento Capital.

The latest investment brings Juno Medical’s total raised to $28.4 million, according to Crunchbase.

WHAT IT DOES

Juno Medical is a healthcare service provider that offers on-site appointments with physicians at their two New York-based brick-and-mortar facilities and virtual services for patients in New York and Georgia. 

The company offers individual and family care, wellness, specialty care, and on-site labs and imaging services. 

The funds will be used to expand into new markets and hire new providers. The company plans to open

Remote patient monitoring company Alio scooped up $18 million in the first close of a Series C funding round.

The raise was led by the Widjaja Family Investment Office with participation from existing investors, including Chase Field LLC and Thomas Krebs, former treasurer of medical device company Penumbra.

Alio said the Series C brings its total amount the company has raised to more than $50 million. The startup last raised $20 million in Series B funds in 2021. 

WHAT THEY DO

Alio offers a remote monitoring system for chronic conditions, currently focused on patients undergoing dialysis.

Earlier this year, the company announced the system had received FDA 510(k) clearance to collect physiological data — like skin temperature; auscultation, or internal body sounds; and heart rate — in the home. 

According to the 510(k) summary, the system includes the SmartPatch wearable sensor, its Bedside Hub (which collects and uploads patch

AI-enabled voice technology platform Sonde Health announced it raised $19.25 million in a Series B funding round led by Partners Investment, bringing its total raise to $35.25 million.

KT Corporation, NEOM Company and existing investors also participated in the round, including cofounder PureTech Health and M Ventures.

WHAT IT DOES

Sonde Health uses patented voice technology to detect various health conditions from biomarkers in a person’s voice, including analyzing respiratory fitness and detecting depression and anxiety.

WHAT IT’S FOR

The funding will help build out the company’s technology to detect additional health conditions, expand its current respiratory and mental health-monitoring technologies, and drive global commercial growth.

“Digital biomarkers are becoming a mainstay in healthcare. Today’s healthcare companies are realizing how vocal biomarkers can engage people earlier in their health. The data and insights found in voice can power health monitoring and patient stratification so issues can become apparent well before

Amazon will no longer support Alexa third-party HIPAA-eligible Skills, which allows patients to share HIPAA-protected health information with hospitals and health insurers through its voice-based Alexa platform.

The company announced the HIPAA-compliant data transfer capability in 2019 alongside the launch of six Alexa Skills built by healthcare providers and other stakeholders, including My Children’s Enhanced Recovery After Surgery (ERAS), Livongo Blood Sugar Lookup, Swedish Health Connect, Cigna Health Today, Atrium Health and Express Scripts. 

Each Skill was designed to help members, patients and caretakers manage care at home with voice commands.

In an email to Skill users dated Dec. 5, Amazon said it would “suppress” Skills for users on Dec. 9, and delete any protected health information pertaining to their Skills per its Alexa deletion policies, according to Voicebot.ai, who initially broke the story. 

An Amazon spokesperson told MobiHealthNews in an email, “We regularly review our experiences to

Lokavant, which provides a data analytics platform for clinical trials, raised $21 million in a funding round led by Edison Partners.

Roivant Sciences, which builds health tech and biotech companies called “Vants,” participated in the raise. Lokavant was incubated at Roivant and piloted its platform with some of the company’s other biotech ventures. 

As part of the fundraise, Gregg Michaelson, general partner at Edison, will join Lokavant’s board of directors. 

WHAT THEY DO

Lokavant offers a centralized data repository for managing clinical trials. The platform allows users to input different data types and sources and view visualizations. 

They can also use apps that aim to anticipate future events and mitigate risk, provide insight into study performance and use third-party and Lokavant data to predict the clinical trial’s performance in advance. 

The startup said it will use the capital to build up its commercial teams and speed development on new features