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. 

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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