healthcare

Southeast Asia health tech platform Speedoc raises $28M • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 8, 2022Posted in Asia, Biotech & Health, health care, Health tech, healthcare, malaysia, Singapore, Southeast Asia, Speedoc, Startups, telemedicineNo Comments

Speedoc, a health tech platform that brings hospital care to homes, has raised $28 million in pre-Series B funding. The round included Bertelsmann Investments, Shinhan Venture Investment and Mars Growth. Returning investor Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India, which led Speedoc’s $5 million Series A in 2020, also participated. Based in Singapore, Speedoc was founded in 2017 by Dr. Shravan Verma and Serene Cai. Its services include telemedicine consultations, on-site doctor and nurse visits, virtual hospital wards and ambulance hailing. Speedoc is available in a total of nine cities, including eight in Malaysia. Dr. Verma told ZebethMedia that he became interested in creating an app for on-demand medical services while he was a doctor in an emergency department, and saw how many patients had to wait hours for minor conditions. Cai, meanwhile, wanted to create an easier way for people to get medical help, especially in underserved communities, while her family was caring for her grandmother, who had severe dementia. Speedoc is currently participating in the Ministry of Health Office for Healthcare Transformation’s Mobile Inpatient Care@Home initiative, and its hospital partners include National University Health System (NUHS), the Singapore General Hospital (SGH) and Khoo Teck Puat Hospital. As part of the program, Speedoc plans to expand its virtual hospital program, which includes a 24/7 patient care team. H-Ward is one of the main ways Speedoc differentiates from other telemedicine platforms, Dr. Verma said, because it standardizes services like telemedicine, remote monitoring and home-based doctors and nurses for continuous care. Patients are able to receive frequent medical reviews, 24/7 nursing, intravenous therapies, blood tests and in-person visits. “Research and survey findings have shown that given the same medical care and treatment, patients could recover faster at home,” Dr. Sherma said. “We have also been encouraged by our patients advocating for home-based care, and preferences to be admitted at home. Most importantly, on the impact on the healthcare landscape, the thrust towards virtual hospitals will ensure more optimal utilization rates, and more capacity for medical personnel to attend to life-threatening conditions.” Speedoc will use its new funding to expand in Southeast Asia, especially in cities where there is a shortage of healthcare professionals. In a statement about the funding, Shinhan Venture Investment (Global Investment) director Jinsoo Lee said, “Healthcare provision and delivery in Southeast Asia is poised for tremendous change in the next decade. We believe the healthcare model Speedoc champions will see greater adoption in meeting the healthcare gap in the region.”

AstraZeneca password lapse exposed patient data • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in astrazeneca, cybersecurity, data security, healthcare, SecurityNo Comments

Pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca has blamed “user error” for leaving a list of credentials online for more than a year that exposed access to sensitive patient data. Mossab Hussein, chief security officer at cybersecurity startup SpiderSilk, told ZebethMedia that a developer left the credentials for an AstraZeneca internal server on code sharing site GitHub in 2021. The credentials allowed access to a test Salesforce cloud environment, often used by businesses to manage their customers, but the test environment contained some patient data, Hussein said. Some of the data related to AZ&ME applications, which offers discounts to patients who need medications. ZebethMedia provided details of the exposed credentials to AstraZeneca, and the GitHub repository containing the credentials was inaccessible hours later. In a statement, AstraZeneca spokesperson Patrick Barth told ZebethMedia: “The protection of personal data is extremely important to us and we strive for the highest standards and compliance with all applicable rules and laws. Due to an [sic] user error, some data records were temporarily available on a developer platform. We stopped access to this data immediately after we have been [sic] informed. We are investigating the root cause as well as assessing our regulatory obligations.” Barth declined to say for what reason patient data was stored on a test environment, and if AstraZeneca has the technical means, such as logs, to determine if anyone accessed the data and what, if any, data was exfiltrated. Credentials, like usernames and passwords, that are exposed or inadvertently published to sites like GitHub are an increasingly common discovery for security researchers like SpiderSilk’s Hussein. In the past few years, the startup has discovered exposed data belonging to Samsung, the controversial facial recognition startup Clearview AI; and the since-rebooted movie subscription MoviePass. In August, Hussein discovered credentials belonging to Microsoft employees that had been posted inadvertently to GitHub, which Microsoft owns. “This isn’t the first time we’ve come across leaked credentials put on Github by engineers due to human error, and it just keeps happening across the board,” Hussein told ZebethMedia. “The risk in these accidental leaks is that they occur randomly, and the exploitation path is often straightforward (i.e. making threat actors’ jobs easier).”

HealthJoy raises $60M to make benefits easier to navigate • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in Biotech & Health, health benefits, health care, healthcare, HealthJoy, StartupsNo Comments

Healthcare benefits are great, but navigating them often isn’t. HealthJoy wants to make the experience more seamless for employees, while helping HR departments reduce the number of underutilized benefits. The Chicago-based company announced today it has raised $60 million in Series D funding, led by Valspring Capital with participation from Endeavor Vision and CIBC Innovation Banking. Returning investors U.S. Venture Partners, GoHealth founders Brandon Cruz and Clint Jones, Health Velocity Capital, Nueterra Capital and Epic also joined the round. ZebethMedia last covered HealthJoy when it raised its Series C. The latest funding brings its total raised to $108 million. Founder Justin Holland told ZebethMedia that HealthJoy’s client base has doubled to more than 1,000 employers, covering more than 500,000 employees and dependents, since its Series C funding. It integrates with every benefit in an employer’s package (including medical, dental, vision, savings accounts, clinics and wellness initiatives) and has a live 24/7 concierge. The platform expanded its virtual care suite to be more comprehensive, including a partnership with telemedicine provider Teladoc, which Holland says is an example of how HealthJoy is helping HR and brokers deal with additional major claim categories like cancer and cardiometabolic disease by making it easier for people to get preventative care. “Our belief is access has to be simple and seamless for employees to drive engagement,” he said. HealthJoy also introduced a new feature called “automated steerage” that guides members to lower cost and more efficient solutions in the app. In addition to Teladoc, it also has partnerships with services for medical and prescription claims, utilization management data and virtual care resolutions. “As we continue to invest in data partnerships, we’re building out a comprehensive member profile and engagement engine. That will enable us to engage members earlier and more often in the course of their healthcare journey,” Holland said. “Ideally, we are able to be more proactive than reactive to their personal needs.” HealthJoy sees a 60% activation rate after 30 days and 25% of its employee base logs into its app every month. “When we have the engagement, we use technology to drive utilization across all benefits. We know that members have healthcare needs, but they don’t always think about how their benefits programs can support these needs,” Holland says. An examplee of how HealthJoy helps them find these benefits include virtual assistant tech that automatically guides members to online options when they’re looking for the doctor. It also helps them compare costs for treatments and procedures when recommending providers and facilities, which Holland says saves members on average $2,000 in out-of-pocket costs. In a statement, Aneesha Mehta, co-founder of Valspring and a former partner at Bain Capital Ventures, said, “As users of healthcare technology ourselves, we genuinely identified with a core issue that HealthJoy fights: a serious lack of benefits awareness that leads to under-utilization by employees. Offering a solution that simplifies benefits is a key differentiator in the talent war the market currently finds itself in. We look forward to amplifying HealthJoy’s solutions as we’ve seen the value they bring firsthand.”

Cityblock Health CEO Toyin Ajayi on how to scale human-centered care models • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Biotech & Health, Cityblock Health, Disrupt, healthcare, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, Toyin AjayiNo Comments

Cityblock Health is focused on providing affordable, human-centered healthcare in lower-income and marginalized communities, while also building sustainable business models. Founder and CEO Toyin Ajayi talked at Disrupt today about the challenges of tackling the healthcare system’s inequalities, while serving patients with personalized medical care, behavioral health care and social services. “Do I believe that healthcare is a right, that should be available to all people, irrespective of their ability to pay and then it should be distributed equitably? Yes. 100%. And there are a lot of ways of achieving that,” Ajayi said. “It’s unacceptable in 2022, that we’re looking at exactly the same data that we were looking at 15 years ago about health care disparities, health care outcomes, all exacerbated by COVID,” she added about the current health care system. “Everyone’s like, oh my god, black and brown people are dying more from COVID. Oh my god, poor people are dying more from COVID. Oh my god, essential workers who don’t have health insurance. We knew this stuff. Give me a break. So, yes, I would have designed it differently and I’m also not content to bitch and moan about it. We’ve got to do something.” Based in Brooklyn, New York and now live in seven markets, including Indiana and Ohio, Cityblock works with many people who lack access to basics like food, safe places to sleep and social support, which creates more risk factors for worsening chronic conditions. As a result, many rely on emergency rooms for crises, like running out of insulin or acute psychiatric care, because they didn’t received the kind of care that would have kept them at home. “I come to this work as a physician, I’m deeply passionate about caring for underserved communities. I come to this work from a place of real heart. This is my life’s work and my mission,” Ajayi said. “I’m also a deep pragmatist and I recognize that there are real economic forces that drive most of the decisions that people make in our healthcare system, certainly in the for profit space, but even as we learn and read more about it, even in the not-for-profit space.” Addressing systemic issues like health disparities is important on a moral level, but for payers there is also an opportunity to figure out how to create a more viable business by caring for people differently. When launching in a new market, like Indiana or Ohio, Cityblock looks for places where there are socioeconomic disparities and then looks for partners, payers and health insurers who they launch into markets with. “Pre-launch we spend the time figuring out where exactly in the neighborhood should we be,” Ajayi said. “Can we be near public transportation, near grocery stores, making sure that we’re really mapping the ecosystem and showing up in places that are accessible to our members and also positioning ourselves so we can go to the home and see people from there.” Part of this means working with community-based organizations, include shelters, housing agencies and food pantries. “We think of ourselves as part of the glue within an ecosystem that knits together existing providers, the specialty providers, the hospitals, the communities, organizations and creates a seamless experience for the people we serve,” Ajayi said. She noted that many of these organizations run on tenuous and vulnerable business models. For example, during the pandemic, many community-based organizations couldn’t get enough workers to continue coming in. Many run on tiny margins and are grant-funded. This means Cityblock has to be prepared to support community organizations in its ecosystem, including tasks like packaging and bring over groceries. Tech and data science can also support more individualized care. For example, data science can help Cityblock figure out who it needs to engage with first in patient populations that are often very diverse in terms of age and needs. “I have to engage all of them. Who do I go after first. Who do I call first? Who’s going to go to the emergency room tomorrow unless they get a phone call from us? Who’s not home today because they’re likely not working, or who’s likely to be engageable on the weekend,” Ajayi said. “Those are types of things we can use our data and our data products to help us better refine.” Better data science means people also have to repeat their story less as they seek care. “When we interview our members about what they dislike about the traditional health care system, it’s ‘I gotta tell my whole story over and over again.’ And then you add on layers of discrimination and stigma that many people face. More than half of our members are people of color, because that’s the best representation of Medicaid and dually-eligible populations.” “Telling your story over and over again seems benign, but the healthcare system makes people tell their story over and over again, it subjects them to friction, abrasion and sometimes even trauma, that is entirely counterproductive to a therapeutic relationship that’s going to result in better health outcomes. Even alleviating that is such a meaningful lever for us.”

FOLX powers LGBTQ+ telehealth support groups with $30M round • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 13, 2022Posted in 7wireVentures, Biotech & Health, Folx Health, healthcare, lgbtq, StartupsNo Comments

FOLX Health, a telehealth company catering to the LGBTQIA+ community, closed a fresh $30 million round of funding, which it will use to expand its new support groups feature. The company provides affirming and inclusive care through services such as hormone replacement therapy, PrEP prescriptions, general and sexual health services. FOLX also recently began offering support groups, led by either a clinician or expert over multiple weeks, followed by one-on-one consultations to create individualized programs for users. The new funding will be used to support existing programs, but also to launch and expand these expert-led groups. With the addition of the groups, “we’re able to really move folks from fear of accessing healthcare to a place where they are actively engaged in their wellness,” said Liana Douillet Guzmán, CEO of FOLX Health. “I would add that part of our model is really this idea of holistic care. So rather than being a point solution that’s focused on one niche area, we believe that we can provide this expert care across a full spectrum of needs.” Currently, the company is providing care to 10,000 individuals across 42 states, and is looking to expand to all 50 in the near future. Although FOLX has been pushing for affirmative care, Republican lawmakers have pushed for bills denying or limiting access to this and other LGBTQ+-centered services. Many bills have specifically targeted transgender individuals and youth. According to the ACLU, over 20 states have introduced bills that would deny care, and some go as far as making it a Class C felony to provide gender-affirming care. In a survey conducted by FOLX, 78% of its members did not have access to affirming care before finding FOLX, and 71% actively avoided seeking healthcare out of fear of discrimination. Though the company is pushing to provide all-inclusive care for LGBTQ+ individuals, Guzmán told ZebethMedia their biggest challenge is “in a sea of opportunity, how do we focus?” “We are still a lean team,” Guzmán said. “And so I think it’s the classic, making sure we don’t do the shiny toy thing that a lot of startups do, and really focus in on thoughtful product expansion.” Image of FOLX packaging for its HRT. FOLX raised the $30 million in a Series B round led by 7wireVentures, with participation from Foresite Capital as a new investor, as well as existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Define Ventures and Polaris Partners. The company has raised close to $60 million to date, including a $25 million Series A last year. Lee Shapiro, a managing partner of 7wireVentures, said in a news release: “Now more than ever, there is a clear need to expand access to inclusive health services for the millions of Americans who identify as LGBTQIA+. By combining a network of clinicians highly attuned to the needs of the LGBTQIA+ community with convenient access to affirming content and peer connections, FOLX Health has established a new standard of queer and trans care for its members” Shapiro will also be joining FOLX’s board of directors.