Tag: EC Healthtech

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Why focusing on holistic care helped Kindbody triple its revenue in 2021

One story from The Verge referred to Kindbody as the “SoulCycle” of fertility, pointing out that it sells fertility services and “empowerment” to 25-year-olds. It’s kind of a stretch, but I can see how the company could be compared to the aesthetic-driven facade of The Wing.

Kindbody isn’t solely selling a dream of belonging, however — there is a large focus on the consumerism of patient care. By concentrating on helping its patients feel like they have agency over their fertility journeys, Kindbody is trying to fit into the lives of those wanting to get pregnant.

“When you build businesses you have to think about how consumers behave today and what’s changed in the last five years or 10 years or 15 years,” Kindbody founder and chairwoman Gina Bartasi said. “And consumers crave and receive content.”

She recognizes how different the space is now compared to when she went through her own fertility journey.

“I think the hardest part is adapting, whether it’s adapting the media or adapting to healthcare,” she said. “You constantly have to have this circle and loop back with your customer and customer behavior and how that’s changed. And in healthcare, of course, your customer is the patient.”

Over the last decade, our lives have changed exponentially due to the easy access to information via social media platforms, and the COVID-19 pandemic only added a feeling of perpetual uncertainty. Businesses shut down for months at the top of 2020, schools have oscillated between mandating physical attendance and holding virtual classes nationwide, and offices that once forbade remote work have been introduced to hybrid setups like “hoteling.”

“The majority of patients need flexibility in their calendars,” Bartasi said. “I think, historically speaking, in health care, the patient did whatever the doctor did, whatever the doctor told them to do, and at Kindbody the patient is in charge, not necessarily the doctor.”

You can see this approach in nearly all of Kindbody’s services. Not only does Kindbody want to cater to how its potential patients carry on their lives, it wants them to have a familiar experience as well. Open Kindbody’s website, and you’ll find a templatized, user-friendly landing page with photos of well-designed offices and links to its social media. It’s a familiar look for the 2020s at this point, and that’s intentional.

At the end of the day, you can have the best technology and the best data, but [patients] are still at home crying; it sucks and [they] can’t get out of bed in the morning. Barbara Collura, president of Resolve

With both B2B and B2C income streams, this company is trying to significantly disrupt the women’s healthcare space by focusing on educating, helping patients feel cared for and offering solutions to major pain points through employer-provided benefits.

As Bartasi mentioned in part 1 of this TC-1, she felt like she was treated as the subordinate to the doctor throughout her fertility journey, and her team at Kindbody has put in a lot of work to avoid that.

“It’s really a broken system”

Thanks to the nature of their relationships with the space, both Bartasi and Dr. Fahimeh Sasan, Kindbody’s current chief innovation officer and an experienced board-certified OBGYN, are familiar with the challenges of the fertility journey from two different perspectives — the patient and the provider. They found that the overarching challenge, which ultimately makes every step of this process more difficult, is the fragmentation of care.

Dr. Fahimeh Sasan, Kindbody’s current chief innovation officer

Dr. Fahimeh Sasan, Kindbody’s chief innovation officer. Image Credits: Kindbody

“It’s really a broken system, and it’s a system that in no way, shape or form is based on proven human health nor on being proactive,” said Dr. Sasan. “It’s a 100% reactionary system. I was taught that you wait for a woman to prove that she’s not fertile and she has to prove her infertility diagnosis before you start doing testing and see if that’s what the problem may be.”

This reactionary approach is something she’s always felt needed to be corrected. She offers examples of how other ailments or potential health problems are addressed with the aim to prevent rather than cure.

“You do stress tests so that someone doesn’t have a heart attack. We do mammograms to detect breast changes before someone has breast cancer.” But when it comes to infertility, patients have to prove they are experiencing it before it can be addressed. She believes that the teaching and, subsequently, the care, have not caught up with the technology available for patients.

“If you think about the advancements that have been in this field, whether it’s the first egg-freezing or hormone-testing, like for the Anti-Müllerian hormone, and even the capabilities of ultrasound and sonogram, the teachings haven’t changed.”

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6 questions investors should ask when evaluating psychedelic biotech companies

Matias Serebrinsky Contributor
Matias Serebrinsky is a partner at PsyMed Ventures, a venture fund expanding access to psychedelic medicine and mental health tech. He co-hosts Business Trip, a podcast about psychedelic entrepreneurship.
Greg Kubin Contributor
Greg Kubin is a partner at PsyMed Ventures and co-host of Business Trip.

As a venture firm that invests in psychedelics, we receive hundreds of pitches every month from founders developing psychedelic therapeutics.

Startups are developing treatments for depression by combining psilocybin with psychotherapy, creating new delivery methods, like dissolving strips and patches, and even formulating compounds that rewire neural circuits without hallucinogenic effects.

Once fringe, underground, illegal or just limited to ceremonial use by Indigenous cultures, psychedelics are going mainstream in medicinal form. Psychedelic medicine is spawning new companies in every part of the healthcare and life sciences ecosystem, including areas within drug discovery, manufacturing, clinics and retreats, telemedicine and other digital therapeutics, as well as consumer packaged goods.

Our fund has invested more than $15 million in companies developing psychedelic therapeutics. We believe psychedelic medicine and progress in digital therapeutics, precision psychiatry and neurotechnology will revolutionize how mental health is treated. Unlike traditional antidepressants and pharmaceuticals, psychedelic medicine has the potential to help people address the root causes of their mental health concerns rather than just symptoms.

A landmark study by Johns Hopkins found that psilocybin treatment for major depression is four times more effective than traditional antidepressants. Other benefits include their ability to promote the development of new neural pathways and increase empathy and openness, which can be beneficial states to facilitate healing.

We believe in a future where psychedelic therapy will be as common as going to the dentist, but the path won’t be easy.

We believe in a future where psychedelic therapy will be as common as going to the dentist. But the path won’t be easy: Many biotech companies working with psychedelic compounds must complete multiyear clinical trials that can cost over $100 million before winning FDA approval, similar to any other biotech company.

So how do we pick which companies to invest in? Here are six key questions we ask when evaluating psychedelic biotech companies:

Does the team have the skills, experience and values to bring a product to market?

The most important factor that can make or break a psychedelic biotech company is its team. Psychedelic medicine is a multidisciplinary domain, so it’s important that the team has a strong foundation in psychedelics, biotechnology, neuropharmacology and/or psychiatry.

That means in biotech, unlike traditional tech companies, it’s rare for a wunderkind first-time founder to start a successful company given the scientific expertise and network required, which may need decades of experience.

It’s also important that the team shares our values when it comes to safety and patient well-being. We especially like teams that have psychedelic experience and are grounded in psychedelic history through academic research, field work or personal exploration. These companies will have a leg up on the competition in areas like product development, culture and recruitment.

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Leverage early investors when raising a Series A, says DeepScribe’s Akilesh Bapu

Raising a Series A is a different ball game from raising a seed round, and for Akilesh Bapu, CEO and co-founder of AI-powered medical transcription platform DeepScribe, giving prospective investors a hard deadline while leaning on early investors for support and guidance made all the difference.

“We were at this trajectory as a company where we had a semblance of product-market fit,” said Bapu, reflecting on the summer of 2021. “We had proven our product. We had about 200 live customers on the platform… We were excited about bringing DeepScribe to more customers and looking for the best partners to us there — not just in the short term but also in the long term. We had a long-term vision… and wanted a partner that bought into that vision.”

Eventually, the company closed a $30 million Series A round led by Index Venture partner Nina Achadjian, as the duo discussed on the latest episode of TechCrunch Live, our weekly program featuring entrepreneurs, developers and investors. The entire episode is available below, along with a portion of DeepScribe’s Series A pitch deck.

If not for the fact that Bapu and his team had set deadlines for the funding round, he said DeepScribe might have not partnered with Index — Achadjian was on vacation when she read their pitch and tried to push the meeting to the following week, but Bapu said the process was moving fast. They met the following day.

Afterwards, Achadjian was sold. “When I walked out of the meeting, I went immediately to one of my partners, and was like, ‘Finally, I found the company that is following the right approach,” she said.

When I walked out of the meeting, I went immediately to one of my partners, and was like, ‘Finally, I found the company that is following the right approach.’ Nina Achadjian

She added that this was a critical win for DeepScribe, as it’s essential to leave potential investors fired up and armed with a few bullet points, including on the team and market.

Prepare for due diligence

Since Index was interested in DeepScribe, the firm started conducting due diligence.

Achadjian said founders can expedite the process by anticipating questions, especially on market size and competitive landscape. Companies can also provide investment firms with summaries of customer call notes.

“Then we come up with a list of key questions we want to go deep on,” Achadjian said. “What’s the business model? How do you scale? References. I actually called one of Akilesh’s Berkeley professors. We do a lot of customer calls and check references on the entrepreneurs. Then, honestly, we like to spend time with the team and see them in different environments.”

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The growing power of digital healthcare: 6 trends to watch in 2022

BIll Taranto Contributor
GHI Fund President Bill Taranto has spent more than two decades in the healthcare industry and has 15 years of experience in healthcare investing. In addition to his venture investing knowledge, Bill has decades of management operations experience.
More posts by this contributor

The digital healthcare revolution has already begun, and it will gain further momentum in 2022 as providers and patients look for new and better ways to improve care. Companies with strong offerings, management teams and balance sheets are poised to capture tremendous value.

Healthcare deals were hot in the first nine months in 2021. They brought in a total of $21.3 billion in venture funding across 541 deals, dwarfing the previous record of $14.6 billion set in 2020, according to Rock Health.

But startups will continue to lead the way in innovation with the use of AI, IoT and data analytics, especially with data becoming the central currency of healthcare.

Given this environment, here are six emerging trends that we’re watching closely in 2022.

Telemedicine will change how chronic conditions are treated

The pandemic showed how telemedicine could change how we think about care interactions, with virtual visits increasing almost 40 times, according to data from McKinsey. Most of these interactions were centered around acute care. But for telemedicine to achieve its full potential, it will need to engage patients more frequently, especially for certain chronic conditions.

The companies that succeed will be the ones that change the way patients interact with the healthcare system by building their entire operation around the patient experience.

Costs around chronic care are poised to rise as baby boomers age and put greater strain on the healthcare system. One chronic condition where telemedicine will play a larger role is diabetes. That’s why Teladoc Health, a leader in the space, acquired Livongo last year for $18.5 billion.

In 2022, entrepreneurs and investors are likely to expand telemedicine into more chronic care spaces like cardiology. Today, someone in the U.S. suffers a heart attack every 40 seconds, and heart disease costs the country about $219 billion a year. Telehealth offers a convenient, cost-effective way to diagnose and treat cardiovascular disease. For instance, with telehealth, even patients in remote or rural areas can gain access to cardiologists to get treatment without traveling far.

Overall, expect telehealth players to build their offerings across the chronic care landscape in a meaningful way in 2022.

Digital therapeutics will rewrite the future of healthcare

Digital therapeutics is perhaps the most innovative development in healthcare today and has the potential to dramatically change how care is delivered. More than any other area, this is the space where I believe we’ll see the most entrepreneurial and investment activity in the coming year.

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Can the path to equitable healthcare avoid insurers?

There are few challenges messier and more fraught than the U.S. healthcare system, but a growing number of startups are looking at ways to address shortcomings in standards of care through tech. We had three such companies share our virtual stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 this year, including Cityblock Health president and co-founder Toyin Ajayi, Forward CEO and founder Adrian Aoun, and Carbon Health‘s Eren Bali.

Let’s just say this conversation got heated — fast.

The main point of contention arose around defining what constitutes customer-centric healthcare and Aoun’s stance that, regardless of what else is involved in a company’s approach, starting from a point of working with insurers disqualifies a company from making any consumer-centricity claims.

“We keep saying that these companies are kind of consumer-centric,” Aoun said, referring to the panelists. “But in many ways I think one of the things that you realize is that when you get in bed with the insurance companies, which, whether it’s a Carbon or a Cityblock, at the end of the day, [if] you get in bed with the insurance companies, unfortunately, your incentive is basically not to go build a good consumer product.”

“Your incentives are actually not the right thing — they’re not what the consumer needs,” he added. “So at the end of the day, you’re [referring to Eren and Carbon] launching a scheduling feature. We’re launching a heart health program that eliminates high blood pressure for 40% of our members. You’re launching a new way to bill; I’m launching cancer prevention.”

Ajayi took issue with the binary Aoun was trying to establish and explained why it’s actually not such a clear-cut division between working with insurers and having a real and meaningful focus on patient outcomes.

“Adrian has said, either you get reimbursed by insurance, or you build a consumer or patient-centered company. And you know, in parentheses, that only very wealthy people can afford. What we found is actually that’s not binary; there is another path, which is partner with insurers, but take risk on the total cost of care and outcomes. So we do not bill for a community health worker coming to your home, holding your hand, telling you that you matter and helping understand what goes on in your life. But we absolutely are incentivized to do that and to innovate in that space, because that allows us to earn the right to provide healthcare to people that make them healthier.”

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Craft your pitch deck around ‘that one thing that can really hook an investor’

Michelle Davey’s pitch to Jordan Nof of Tusk Ventures about Wheel, a startup focused on providing a full suite of virtual care solutions to clinicians, was front-loaded with early metrics. It may not be standard practice to start with the numbers, especially early on, but she explained to us why she chose that strategy — and Nof told us why it worked.

Davey and Nof joined us on a recent episode of Extra Crunch Live and went into detail on why Tusk was eager to finance Wheel, walking us through the startup’s Series A pitch deck and sharing which slides and bits clinched the deal.

Extra Crunch Live is a weekly virtual event series meant to help founders build better venture-backed businesses. We sit down with investors and the founders they finance to hear what brought them together, what they saw in each other and how they work together moving forward. We also host the Extra Crunch Live Pitch-Off, where founders in the audience can pitch their startups to our outstanding speakers.

Extra Crunch Live is accessible to everyone live on Wednesdays at noon PDT, but the on-demand content is reserved exclusively for Extra Crunch members. You can check out the full ECL library here.

When to lead with traction

Davey emphasized the importance of not sticking to a rigid format for building a pitch deck. She said it’s important to instead focus on crafting your pitch around what makes you appealing and unique. That should be on the foreground and featured prominently.

For Wheel, that meant leading with traction, since the company had impressive uptake even early on. That remained true for their recent Series B raise, too.

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Health clouds are set to play a key role in healthcare innovation

Abhinav Shashank Contributor
Innovaccer founder and CEO Abhinav Shashank has written more than 300 articles for various international media outlets and has also been listed in Forbes’ “30 Under 30 Asia 2017: Enterprise Tech” and among the "Top 60 rising leaders in U.S. healthcare under 40” in the 2019 Becker's Hospital Review.
Mike Sutten Contributor
Mike Sutten, CTO at Innovaccer, has over two decades of prior IT leadership experience with Fortune 500 organizations, including Kaiser Permanente, Royal Caribbean Cruises, and General Electric, and has also served as the CTO and Deputy CIO at the CIA.

The U.S. healthcare industry is amidst one of the biggest transformations any industry has seen since the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. This massive change is being stimulated by federal mandates, technological innovation, and the need to improve clinical outcomes and communication between providers, patients, and payers.

An aging population, increase in chronic diseases, lower reimbursement rates, and a shift to value-based payments—plus the COVID-19 pandemic—have added pressure and highlighted the need for new technology to enhance virtual and value-based care.

Improving medical outcomes now requires processing massive amounts of healthcare data, and the cloud plays a pivotal role in meeting the current needs of healthcare organizations.

Challenges in healthcare

Most of today’s healthcare challenges fall into two broad categories: rapidly rising costs, and an increased burden on resources. Rising costs — and the resulting inadequacy of healthcare resources — can stem from:

An aging population: As people age and live longer, healthcare gets more expensive. As medicine improves, people aged 65 and above are expected to account for 20% of the U.S. population by 2030, per the U.S. Census Bureau. And as older people spend more on healthcare, an aging population is expected to contribute to increasing healthcare costs over time.

Prevalence of chronic illnesses: According to a National Center for Biotechnology Information report, chronic disease treatment makes up 85% of healthcare costs, and more than half of all Americans have a chronic illness (diabetes, high blood pressure, depression, lower back and neck pain, etc.)

Higher ambulatory costs: The cost of ambulatory care, including outpatient hospital services and emergency room care, increased the most of all treatment categories covered in a 2017 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Rising healthcare premiums, out-of-pocket costs, and Medicare and Medicaid: Healthcare premiums rose by an estimated 54% between 2009 and 2019. The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred enrollment into government programs like Medicaid and Medicare, which has increased the overall demand for medical services, contributing to rising costs. A 2021 IRS report highlighted that a shift to high-deductible health plans — with out-of-pocket costs of up to $14,000 per family — has also increased the cost of healthcare.

Delayed care and surgeries due to COVID-19: A poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) in May 2020 indicated that up to 48% people have avoided or postponed medical care due to concerns about the COVID-19 pandemic. About 11% of those people reported that their medical condition worsened after skipping or postponing care. Non-emergency surgeries were frequently postponed, as resources were set aside for COVID-19 patients. These delays make treatable conditions more costly and increase overall costs.

A lack of pricing transparency: Without transparency, it’s difficult to know the actual cost of healthcare. The fragmented data landscape fails to capture complete details and complex medical bills, and does not give patients a complete view of payments.

The need to modernize

To mitigate the impact of increased costs and inadequate resources, healthcare organizations need to replace legacy IT programs and adopt modern systems designed to support rapid innovation for site-agnostic, collaborative, whole-person care — all while being affordable and accessible.

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Telemedicine startups are positioning themselves for a post-pandemic world

Telemedicine, in its original form of the phone call, has been around for decades. For people in remote or rural areas without easy access to in-person care, consulting a doctor over the phone has often been the go-to approach. But for a large swath of the world used to taking half a day off work just for a 15-30 minute doctor’s appointment, it may seem like telemedicine was invented only last year. That’s mostly because it wasn’t until 2020 that telemedicine, in its myriad forms, debuted into the mainstream consciousness.

It’s impossible to predict how healthcare institutions will operate post-pandemic, but with so many people now accustomed to telemedicine, startups that provide services around virtual care continue to be poised for success.

Telemedicine has faced an uphill battle to become more relevant in the U.S., with challenges such as meeting HIPPA compliance requirements and insurance companies unwilling to pay for virtual visits. But when COVID-19 began raging across the globe and people had to stay home, both the insurance and healthcare industries were forced to adapt.

“It’s been said that there are decades where nothing happens, and then there are weeks when decades happen,” said StartUp Health co-founders Steven Krein and Unity Stoakes in the company’s 2020 year-end report. That statement couldn’t be truer for telemedicine: Around $3.1 billion in funding flowed into the sector in 2020 — about three times what we saw in 2019, according to the report. A health tech fund and insights company, StartUp Health counts Alphabet, Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz as some of its co-investors.

Now that people see the benefits and conveniences of “dialing a doc” from the kitchen table, healthcare has changed forever. It’s impossible to predict how healthcare institutions will operate post-pandemic, but with so many people now accustomed to telemedicine, startups that provide services around virtual care continue to be poised for success.

The state of telemedicine

Major players in the field now look at the state of healthcare as, “before COVID and after COVID,” Stoakes told Extra Crunch. “In the post-pandemic world, there’s a significant transformation that’s occurred,” he said. “It’s all accelerated; the customers have shown up. There’s more capital than ever and consumers and physicians have adapted quickly,” he added.

In the U.S., healthcare is first and foremost a business, so while there are treatment approaches that have long been proven to improve patient outcomes, if they didn’t make sense financially, they weren’t instituted at scale. Telemedicine is a great example of this.

A 2017 study by the American Journal of Accountable Care showed that telemedicine can be quite useful for managing healthcare. “The use of telemedicine has been shown to allow for better long-term care management and patient satisfaction; it also offers a new means to locate health information and communicate with practitioners (e.g., via e-mail and interactive chats or video conferences), thereby increasing convenience for the patient and reducing the amount of potential travel required for both physician and patient,” the study reads.

But as we’ve seen, it took a global healthcare emergency to drive widespread adoption of virtual healthcare in the U.S. Now that investors recognize the potential, they are increasingly pouring money into startups that promise to take telemedicine to the next level. Some of the investors backing these newer companies include StartUp Health, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, Alphabet, Kaiser Permanente Ventures, U.S. Venture Partners, Maveron, First Round Capital, DreamIt Ventures, Human Ventures and Tusk Venture Partners.

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Should startups build or buy telehealth infrastructure?

Digital health in the U.S. got a huge boost from COVID-19 as more people started consulting physicians and urgent care providers remotely in the midst of lockdowns. So much so that McKinsey estimates that up to $250 billion of the current healthcare expenditure in the U.S. has the potential to be spent virtually. The prominence of digital health is undoubtedly here to stay, but how it looks and feels from provider to provider is still a debate among sector startups.

But for providers who want to deliver care virtually across the country, it’s not as simple as adding a Zoom invite to an annual check-up. The process requires intention every step of the way — right from the clinicians delivering remote care to the choice of payment processor.

Providers and healthcare startups can choose white-label solutions such as publicly-listed Teladoc and Truepill, which have been around for a long time, and have powered the operations of unicorns like Hims and Hers, Nurx, and GoodRx as they look to scale in a compliant but efficient manner.

Turnkey solutions might be tempting to companies looking to take advantage of this opportunity, but startups still have to decide what to outsource and what to build. Should you rely on others for staffing your practice? Do you build your own payment processing service in-house? Do you integrate with Zoom or build your own video-conferencing software? These questions are crucial to think about early on to prepare for future scale regardless of whether a startup is B2B or B2C.

More than just Zoom

SteadyMD, which in March raised a $25 million Series B led by Lux Capital, wants to be the infrastructure layer that makes it easier for other companies to offer telehealth services. It is hoping to address a pain point it ran into years earlier: The complexity of launching compliant telehealth services in all 50 states.

The company launched in 2016 with the intent to provide high-quality, virtual primary care for brick-and-mortar shops. Through that process, SteadyMD built a suite of tools to make it work with EMR integrations, doctor-patient communication channels, digital recruiting and forecasting software, and prescription referrals and operations. The burdensome process struck a chord with the co-founders and they pivoted the company to where it is today: an “AWS for healthcare”.

SteadyMD offers a suite of services to its customers, the least of which, says co-founder Guy Friedman, is its video-conferencing platform.

“It’s not about the technology capacities,” Friedman says. “The very large companies that have a lot of resources are using us to help them increase their capacity as workforce.”