Rock Health

Rock Health Summit will be here before we know it! In advance, we are excited to share the first installment of this year’s Rock Health Summit Virtual Series, highlighting the caliber of thought-provoking conversation you can expect when you join us on September 10. This discussion, 𝐴𝑔𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑊𝑒𝑙𝑙 𝑖𝑛 𝑎 𝐷𝑖𝑔𝑖𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝑊𝑜𝑟𝑙𝑑: 𝑇𝑒𝑐ℎ𝑛𝑜𝑙𝑜𝑔𝑦 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝐸𝑞𝑢𝑖𝑡𝑦 𝑖𝑛 𝑆𝑒𝑛𝑖𝑜𝑟 𝐼𝑛𝑛𝑜𝑣𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛, features expert perspectives on opportunities for aging innovation and the tools needed to support senior communities in today’s society: https://lnkd.in/gHsZw3GS Hear from: - Cameron Carter, Co-Founder + CEO @ Rosarium Health - Abby Levy, Founder + Managing Partner @ Primetime Partners - Rigo Saborio, VP of Programs, Equity + Community Impact @ The SCAN Foundation - our very own Adriana Krasniansky, Head of Research @ Rock Health Advisory Interested in more content like this? Join us at Rock Health Summit on September 10: https://lnkd.in/gkKPrwy

Weight care innovation has been a major topic over the past few years, as GLP-1s continue to be one of the buzziest areas in healthcare. However, many of the conversations and media coverage focus on pharma, payers, provider, and employer perspectives. How are consumers themselves actually considering and experiencing weight care solutions? We wanted to find out, so we engaged Evidation to conduct a series of surveys on the weight care experiences and preferences of U.S. adults who have been overweight or obese. Key insights from the surveys include: • People use multiple methods to try and lose weight: Weight loss is challenging, and many people employ multiple approaches. 64% reported tying two or more weight loss approaches simultaneously; 66% of respondents reported losing less weight than they wanted to in their last attempt. • Consumers who want to try GLP-1s face barriers: Consumers who are interested in trying GLP-1s reported barriers to doing so—nearly half citing medication cost as the top deterrent; 41% were denied coverage by their health plans. • Clinician relationships are important: Respondents were most open to receiving weight care in person with a clinician they knew (58%). Only 15% who had tried GLP-1s did so through virtual channels. • There’s a market for long-term support: 48% of respondents using GLP-1s expected to use them long-term, which to us signals an opportunity to complement obesity medications with wraparound care programs and solutions. Our findings from these surveys highlight the importance of delivering personalized tools and programs for weight loss—virtually and in-person. Weight care isn’t one-size-fits-all, and consumers are looking for weight care partners to tailor approaches to their preferences, needs, barriers, and lived experiences. Read the piece by Madelyn Knowles, Julia A. Croxen, and Sari Kaganoff for more: https://lnkd.in/ej23yeKA + Want more detailed consumer insights to support your healthcare innovations? Rock Health Advisory can help you explore consumer preferences and experiences with weight care. Reach out to us: advisory@rockhealth.com

Rock Health Summit ticket prices go up this Friday at midnight! Register today and join us on September 10 for an energizing day of conversation and connection with the healthcare innovation community. You won’t want to miss it—and here’s why: - Hear from leading experts as they share their perspectives on the latest innovation trends. - Network with leaders from the startup world, investors and funders, health system leaders, tech players, and more! - Learn more about the 2024-2025 cohort of RockHealth.org Innovation Fellows, a group of visionary leaders who are centering lived experience in digital health innovation. - Meet the Top 50 in Digital Health, exceptional digital health leaders making healthcare massively better for all. Register before July 13 when ticket prices increase: https://lnkd.in/gyWwwPcr

H1 2024 digital health venture funding numbers are in—and with $5.7B deployed across 266 digital health startup raises in the first half of the year, 2024 could potentially outperform 2023 if investment pace holds. In our H1 2024 funding recap, market and funding trends identified by Rock Health Advisory’s Adriana Krasniansky, Mihir Somaiya, and Sari Kaganoff include:  • Early-stage deals accounted for 84% of labeled raises  • The prevalence of unlabeled fundraises started to taper  • Startups leveraging AI received 34% of total sector funding  • The digital health IPO market is showing early signs of life Read on to digest the past six months of digital health investments, public exits, acquisitions, and more: https://lnkd.in/gQw6Xqzq #digitalhealth #venturefunding #healthcareinnovation #markettrends

We look forward to convening the healthcare innovation community on September 10 for the 13th annual Rock Health Summit. Our speaker lineup is taking shape and we’re excited to share a sneak peek of who you’ll see—you don’t want to miss their fresh perspectives on stage. If you haven’t already, register today: https://lnkd.in/gyWwwPcr Ashley Edwards, Blake Madden, Mohana Ravindranath, Joanna Strober, Sara Vaezy, Monique Woodard

Community Health Workers (CHWs) play an increasingly critical role in the U.S. healthcare delivery system, and there is growing momentum for CHW interventions to drive even more impact on health outcomes and costs. Significant investments in workforce development and rapidly increasing Medicaid coverage for CHW services mean there is a growing CHW workforce with access to reimbursement dollars. Yet most CHWs and the community-based organizations (CBOs) that employ them have no experience submitting healthcare claims. This is where Pear Suite comes in. Pear Suite’s SaaS platform enables the rapidly growing CHW workforce to standardize the data they collect, improve care navigation, and access reimbursement. The company partners with payers and CBOs to address the social drivers of health in a scalable, cost-effective, and person-centered way. Today Rock Health Capital is announcing our most recent investment in Pear Suite, alongside Flare Capital Partners, AARP, and California Health Care Foundation. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/gerrfR2u

Yesterday, RockHealth.org CEO Katie Drasser led an insightful discussion at Aspen Ideas: Health. The panel "Making an Impact: Investing in Youth Mental Health Innovations" highlighted the urgent need for innovative, inclusive, and affordable youth mental health solutions. With nearly half of U.S. adolescents having experienced a mental health disorder, there’s huge opportunity for digital health innovation to play a role in improving youth mental health. Themes that emerged from the conversation: - Payers and investors are seeking help in navigating the vast digital youth mental health space. “It takes players and actors and really passionate people across all the sectors to create companies that are viable and meet the needs of young people, particularly those who are most often marginalized,” said Margaret Laws, President and CEO of Hopelab. - Supporting youth agency is key to earning trust. “As opposed to us moving to what we expect of the user,” said Ashley Edwards, CEO of MindRight Health, “we move to what the user expects of us.” - Partnerships are key to building sustainable youth mental health companies. Working with schools represents an exciting opportunity area for Solome Tibebu, Founder and CEO of Behavioral Health Tech. “Reaching and engaging youth is tough, “ she said, “Where else are they so many hours of the day?” Thank you to Margaret Laws (Hopelab), Solome Tibebu (Behavioral Health Tech), and Ashley Edwards (MindRight Health) for sharing their expertise. RockHealth.org—together with Pivotal Ventures, Fiore Ventures, Hopelab, and the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation—will continue to explore how and where best to support youth mental health innovation. Dive into more insights from our conversation here: https://lnkd.in/ggpMXURG #DigitalHealth #YouthMentalHealth #AspenIdeasHealth #RockHealth

Last week, Rock Health Advisory brought together the brilliant Junaid Bajwa (Microsoft), Ashita Batavia, MD, MS (Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine), and Lana Feng, Ph.D. (Huma.AI) to discuss opportunities for AI in pharma. A few takeaways from the conversation: • To implement AI successfully, you need four things: access to data, domain expertise, the right model for the task, and compute power. This probably means creating partnerships across several companies, bringing together specific expertise to assemble the right team for the job. • Right now it makes sense to get comfortable with AI’s capabilities by focusing on low-complexity, low-risk use cases. More complex, patient-facing use cases can be addressed once the technology, regulation, and familiarity with it advances. • Current risk mitigation tactics include running on-prem models to protect sensitive data, using small language models that are designed for the specific task, and keeping a human in the loop with a solid front end that supports their quality control efforts. • The pace of innovation is changing incredibly rapidly, so don’t fall in love with one particular algorithm or large language model. In the future, we might expect to see multimodality of AI (e.g. voice, data, video) and more interoperability, which will drive advanced use cases. It’s also entirely possible we’ll have semi-autonomous AI agents helping people to do their work more effectively—only time will tell! + To learn more, watch the webinar recording or view the slides we shared in the presentation: https://lnkd.in/gktvDJ6v + To dive deeper, check out our piece on constructing AI use cases for pharma: https://lnkd.in/gE-3RcCn + To discuss AI-driven opportunities at your organization, please get in touch with us at advisory@rockhealth.com

Thank you to Consumer Technology Association and the leadership of René Quashie and Ami Bhatt, MD for hosting the recent Health AI+ Symposium at Harvard Medical School. It mattered a lot that the room included so many people with very different expertise and experience—this kind of diversity will be key to using AI to actually build more equitable health innovations. Chris Gibbons, MD, MPH, René Quashie and I joined forces to share how AI matters to health equity and where it's making important advancements. Many folks shaped these insights from CTA's community including Lisa K. Fitzpatrick MD, MPH, MPA, Michael R. Crawford, Crystal Grant, Ph.D., Meg Barron, Gaurav Manchanda and many others! I walked away with three insights and questions. 1) AI is massively accelerating health innovation. According to Rock Health data, there are over 500 venture backed digital health startups in the US that have AI enabled solutions with $18B in venture funding from 2021-2023, and that number is growing. In that time, top therapeutic areas for AI startup investment were oncology ($1.9B), cardiovascular care ($1.8B), and mental health ($1.4B). How is all of this momentum around AI advancing health equity—and where could it? Thus is a huge opportunity space for health innovators. 2) In many ways, AI is like any innovation where we need to bring an equity lens and consider: Who is designing these AI innovations? Who is gaining access and who are these advancements benefiting? Who is getting funding to propel this technology? The people behind the technology matter and we can all be doing more to join forces, collaborate and bring more leaders together. 3) Anyone who cares to advance health equity needs proof points of where AI can be a force for good. To be sure, there is much to be cautious about and many examples of real harm that we should take seriously. Most examples will need feedback for improvement, but that’s true of most innovations regardless of AI. The important part is that we keep learning and collaborating to make the innovations work better for more people. One encouraging example that Casey Ross at STAT recently wrote about is the Health AI Partnership, which is leveraging AI to advance health equity for rural populations, at a time when rural hospitals are closing at alarming rates. To do so, this collaboration is offering rural hospitals the chance to integrate AI into administrative processes that will reduce costs and improve efficiencies. And that is just one of many encouraging examples surfaced in our conversation at the symposium. I am excited to learn and share more examples of where AI is showing promise and potential to advance health equity.