Tag: telemedicine

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GoodRx is coming for subscription prescription services with the launch of GoodRx Care

Several months after discreetly acquiring the online prescription service HeyDoctor, GoodRx is launching a new service based on the acquisition, GoodRx Care and offering a direct challenge to online prescription services like Hims, Hers, Nurx, Ro and others.

Already a billion-dollar giant in the world of prescription fulfillment through its cost-comparison and discount medication fulfillment business, more than 10 million consumers use the company’s services already.

With GoodRx Care, customers can use the online medical service to get a consultation, treatment, prescriptions and lab tests from doctors. The array of services on offer, which covers conditions and ailments from urinary tract infection treatments and birth control pills to erectile dysfunction medication and hair replacement supplements, mirror those pitched by white-glove online prescription services like Ro, Hims, Hers, and Nurx .

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GoodRx Care services

“Over the years, we’ve helped millions of Americans find affordable solutions for their prescription medications, but have also learned that many people struggle to get to the doctor,” said Doug Hirsch, co-CEO and co-founder of GoodRx. “By introducing GoodRx Care, we aim to help fill in the gaps in care to improve access, adherence, and affordability of medical care for all Americans.”

For Hirsch and GoodRx, the expansion into these kinds of online consultations was a natural extension of the company’s services. “One third of people who come to GoodRx . are coming to GoodRx and they may not have the prescription that they don’t think they need,” he says. “For a long time now we’ve been  telling people you may need a prescription for the service and telemedicine options are available.” 

Now the company can keep those customers in-house by offering their own telemedicine consults.

Other technology companies are also pushing deeper into the healthcare industry with Amazon making a big splash with the launch of its employee-only healthcare service offering telemedicine and on-site consultations with staff doctors. Apple, too, has its own healthcare service for employees.

Even BestBuy is seeing big dollars in the healthcare industry. It expects healthcare services to become an increasingly important component to its bottom line as more technology hardware and software is developed to cater to both the aging population, remote health solutions, and infant and childcare.

Demand for more healthcare alternatives is only increasing even as the cost of care rises and the value of healthcare services declines.

As GoodRx notes, access to primary care physicians is hard for most Americans. Some patients can wait up to three weeks to see a doctor and there’s the potential that the country could see a shortfall of up to 120,000 doctors coming within the next 15 years. Add that to the fact that over 27.5 million Americans don’t even have health insurance and the demand for low cost access to care seems obvious.

What’s less obvious is that the care Americans need is access to physicians which will prescribe hair-loss or erectile dysfunction treatments, acne treatments, eyelash growth, or metabolic assessments.

Hirsch says more services will be coming in later months. “We’re at the very early stages of telemedicine,” he says. “We want to continue to expand into more primary services as is safe and affordable and as we can.”

For now, the focus was on bringing the price point down and having more control over where to refer customers. “A lot of these services are tied to mail-order clinics and that could be hundreds of dollars [for a consultation or prescription],” Hirsch says. “We’re going to say it’s $20 for a visit. You can do it today… and you can have a pricing options… we’re saying you’ve had your doctor visit… here’s a list of prices and coupons if you want them.”

Since its launch in 2017, HeyDoctor has had over 100,000 consultations and had already been working with GoodRx, according to Hirsch. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

The acquisition of HeyDoctor is the first big strategic gambit from the company in the year since it raised money from the private equity firm, Silverlake, in a transaction which valued the discount pharmaceutical provider at roughly $2.8 billion, according to a CNBC report.

“In an increasingly fragmented and confusing healthcare system, our goal is to provide a one-stop shop for services that address most basic healthcare needs,” said Hirsch.

 

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Amazon launches Amazon Care, a virtual and in-person healthcare offering for employees

Amazon has gone live with Amazon Care, a new pilot healthcare service offering that is initially available to its employees in and around the Seattle area. The Amazon Care offering includes both virtual and in-person care, with telemedicine via app, chat and remote video, as well as follow-up visits and prescription drug delivery in person directly at an employee’s home or office.

First reported by CNBC, Amazon Care grew out of an initiative announced in 2018 with J.P. Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway to make a big change in how they all collectively handle their employee healthcare needs. The companies announced at the time that they were eager to put together a solution that was “free from profit-making incentives and constraints,” which are of course at the heart of private insurance companies that serve corporate clients currently.

Other large companies, like Apple, offer their own on-premise and remotely accessible healthcare services as part of their employee compensation and benefits packages, so Amazon is hardly unique in seeking to scratch this itch. The difference, however, is that Amazon Care is much more external-facing than those offered by its peers in Silicon Valley, with a brand identity and presentation that strongly suggests the company is thinking about more than its own workforce when it comes to a future potential addressable market for Care.

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The Amazon Care logo.

Care’s website also provides a look at the app that Amazon developed for the telemedicine component, which shows the flow for choosing between text chat and video, as well as a summary of care provided through the service, with invoices, diagnosis and treatment plans all available for patient review.

Amazon lists Care as an option for a “first stop,” with the ability to handle things like colds, infections, minor injuries, preventative consultations, lab work, vaccinations, contraceptives and STI testing and general questions. Basically, it sounds like they cover off a lot of what you’d handle at your general practitioner, before being recommended on for any more specialist or advanced medical treatment or expertise.

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Rendered screenshots of the Amazon Care app for Amazon employees.

Current eligibility is limited to Amazon’s employees, who are enrolled in the company’s health insurance plan, and who are located in the pilot service geographical area. The service is currently available between 8 AM and 9 PM local time from Monday through Friday, and between 8 AM and 6 PM Saturday through Sunday.

Amazon acquired PillPack last year, an online pharmacy startup, for around $753 million, and that appears to be part of their core value proposition with Amazon Care, too, which features couriered prescribed medications and remotely communicated treatment plans.

Amazon may be limiting this pilot to employees at launch, but the highly-publicized nature of their approach, and the amount of product development that clearly went into developing the initial app, user experience and brand all indicate that it has the broader U.S. market in mind as a potential expansion opportunity down the line. Recent reports also suggest that it’s going to make a play in consumer health with new wearable fitness tracking devices, which could very nicely complement insurance and health care services offered at the enterprise and individual level. Perhaps not coincidentally, Walgreens, CVS and McKesson stock were all trading down today.

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In healthcare these days, ‘There’s an app for that’… unless you really need it

Sarah Lisker Contributor
Sarah Lisker is a Program Manager at the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations and a collaborator in The OpEd Project. She manages SOLVE Health Tech, which bridges private sector innovation with public health expertise to make digital health accessible.

When a digital health company announces a new app, everyone seems to think it’s going to improve health. Not me.

Where I work, in San Francisco’s public health system, in a hospital named after the founder of Facebook, digital solutions promising to improve health feel far away.

The patients and providers in our public delivery system are deeply familiar with the real-world barriers to leveraging technology to improve health. Our patients are low-income (nearly all of them receive public insurance) and diverse (more than 140 languages are spoken). Many of them manage multiple chronic conditions. The providers that care for them struggle with fragmented health records and outdated methods of communication, like faxes and pagers.

So when companies tell us they will cure diseases, drive down costs, and save lives with state-of-the-art technology, I am often hesitant. 

More than thirty billion dollars have been invested in digital health since 2011. The resulting technological innovations, such as mobile applications, telemedicine, and wearables, promise to help patients fight diabetes, treat chronic disease, or lose weight, for example.

However, we have yet to see digital health drive meaningful improvements in health outcomes and reductions in health expenditures. This lack of impact is because digital health companies build products that often don’t reach beyond the “worried well” – primarily healthy people who make up a small proportion of health expenditures and are already engaged in the healthcare system.

If we’re designing health apps for those who already have access to healthcare, nutritious food, clean air to breathe, and stable housing, we’re missing the point.

It’s no surprise that health apps are incongruous with the needs of low-income, diverse, and vulnerable patients when these populations are unlikely to be a part of user testing. In addition, the science that technology developers draw from is generated by clinical trials conducted on participants who often do not reflect the diversity of the United States.

Over 80% of clinical trial participants are white, and many are young and male. Women, racial and ethnic minorities, as well as older adults must be included in clinical trials to ensure the results — drawn on not only for product development but also for clinical care and policy — are relevant for diverse populations. 

Research conducted by my colleagues at the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations demonstrates that patients who are low-income are unable to access many digital health apps. One of our patients testing a popular depression-management app said, “I’d get really impatient with this” and expressed concern that “Somebody that’s not too educated would be like, ‘now, what do I do here?’” A caregiver testing a different app also voiced frustration, saying “Yeah, it’s an app that makes you feel like an idiot.” Yet, despite these barriers, the majority of our study participants (most of whom have smart phones) also express a high interest in using technology to manage their health.

 While the private sector is great for innovation, it will fail to improve health in a meaningful way without real-world evidence generated in partnership with diverse patients. In addition, these for-profit companies face long odds to benefit their shareholders in a substantial way without learning how to reach the 75 million patients on Medicaid (including 1 in 3 Californians) who stand to benefit from digital health solutions.

 There’s an answer, though, and it’s within reach. To truly improve health outcomes, digital health companies must partner with public health experts and patients to not only ground themselves in evidence-based research, but also build products that meet the needs of all patients. 

Along with the compelling business potential of innovating for Medicaid, infrastructure to support this work is growing. For example, organizations like HealthTech4Medicaid are bending the arc of innovation towards the patients who need it most through advocacy and key partnerships with payers, policy makers, care providers, and technology developers.

To truly revolutionize health, let’s demand that technology creators and scalers include diverse end users early and often. Otherwise, the app “for that” will be for them, not for all of us.

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Digital health investments slide in the first quarter to $2 billion, according to Mercom Capital

Venture investors, private equity, and corporations funneled $2 billion into digital health startups in the first quarter of 2019, down 19% from the nearly $2.5 billion invested a year ago.

There were also 38 fewer deals done in the first quarter this year than last year, when investors backed 187 early stage digital health companies, according to data from Mercom Capital Group.

While private investments declined, public equities soared in the first quarter — with 66% of the digital health companies that Mercom tracks beating the S&P 500, compared to the previous quarter when nearly the same amount of public companies were underwater compared to the S&P. 

Among startups, data analytics and mobile health apps, drew the most capital, with analytics focused companies raising $557 million for the quarter. Mobile health apps raked in $392 million while telemedicine-focused startups claimed another $220 million — making up the ublk of the funding in the digital healthcare space.

 

 

The top investments went to Doctolib, the European back-office support software developer, which raised $170 million; Health Catalyst, which pulled in $100 million; and Calm, which grabbed another $88 million from investors, according to Mercom. 

 

 

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Birth control delivery startup Nurx taps Clover Health’s Varsha Rao as CEO

Varsha Rao, Airbnb’s former head of global operations and, most recently, the chief operating officer at Clover Health, has joined Nurx as its chief executive officer.

Rao replaces Hans Gangeskar, Nurx’s co-founder and CEO since 2014, who will stay on as a board member.

Nurx, which sells birth control, PrEP, the once-daily pill that reduces the risk of getting HIV, and an HPV testing kit direct to consumer, has grown 250 percent in the last year, doubled its employee headcount and attracted 200,000 customers. Rao tells TechCrunch the startup realized they needed talent in the C-suite that had experienced this kind of growth.

“The company has made some really great progress in bringing on strong leaders and that’s one of the things that got me excited about joining,” Rao told TechCrunch. Nurx recently hired Jonathan Czaja, Stitch Fix’s former vice president of operations, as COO, and Dave Fond, who previously oversaw corporate pharmacy services at Safeway, as vice president of pharmacy.

Rao, for her part, joined Clover Health, a Medicare Advantage startup backed by Alphabet, in late 2017 after three years at Airbnb.

“After being at Airbnb, a really mission-driven company, I couldn’t go back to something that wasn’t equally or more so and healthcare really inspired me,” Rao said. “In terms of accessibility, I feel like [Nurx] is super important. We are really fortunate to live in a place where can access birth control and it can be more easily found but there are lots of parts of the country where physical access is challenging and costs can be a factor. To be able to break down barriers of access both physically and from an economic standpoint is hugely meaningful to me.”

Nurx, a graduate of Y Combinator, has raised about $42 million in venture capital funding from Kleiner Perkins, Union Square Ventures, Lowercase Capital and others. It launched in 2015 to facilitate women’s access to birth control across the U.S. with a HIPAA-compliant web platform and mobile application that delivers contraceptives directly to customers’ doorsteps.

Today, the telehealth startup is available to customers in 24 states and counts Chelsea Clinton as a board member.

Birth control delivery startup Nurx now offers an at-home HPV testing kit

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Ro, a direct-to-consumer online pharmacy, reaches $500M valuation

Venture capitalists have valued direct-to-consumer telehealth business Ro at $500 million with an $85 million Series B financing, sources confirm to TechCrunch.

The fresh round of funding comes seven months after Ro — widely known for its men’s health brand Roman, a cloud pharmacy for erectile dysfunction — made headlines with an $88 million Series A. 

Ro didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The company’s outsized Series A, led by FirstMark Capital, was used to launch and scale its second digital health brand, “Zero,” a treatment plan meant to help men and women quit smoking. Zero sells a $129 kit complete with a month’s worth of prescription cessation medication Bupropion, nicotine gum and access to an app used to track progress.

Its latest infusion of capital will likely be used in part to support its third personalized health brand, Rory, a purveyor of women’s health products the business unveiled last month. Targeting menopausal women, Rory offers six products treating four conditions — including prescription medication and supplements for hot flashes, over-the-counter treatments for insomnia, prescription vaginal estrogen cream and an all-natural water-based lubricant for vaginal dryness and Latisse, which helps grow eyelashes — which are available for purchase and direct-to-consumer delivery.

“Right now, we have [millions] of women experiencing menopause,” Rory co-founder Rachel Blank told TechCrunch last month. “They are walking around and frankly, their vagina hurts and they are uncomfortable. Really, what we are building at Rory is a lot of the educational content around this to let women know they have choices and they can take control during this phase of life where they feel like their bodies are rebelling against them.”

When asked whether Ro was fundraising to bolster the new effort, Blank, a former investor at Ro-backer General Catalyst, declined to comment. Curiously, a source with knowledge of Ro’s fundraising said there was no mention of the imminent launch of its women’s brand, Rory, in its pitch to VCs earlier this year.

Ro was started by a trio of entrepreneurs: Rob Schutz, Saman Rahmanian and chief executive officer Zachariah Reitano in 2017. Reitano had previously co-founded a Y Combinator -backed startup called Shout, Rahmanian is a co-founder of the WeWork-acquired business Managed by Q, and Schutz worked as the vice president of growth for Bark&Co before building Ro.

The startup initially launched under the name Roman, which became its flagship brand when the business adopted the umbrella name Ro last year. Roman offers men a $15 online doctor’s consultation, which, if they are an appropriate candidate, gives them access to an instant prescription for Viagra, Cialis or generic drugs that can be filled at Roman’s in-house cloud pharmacy.

In a 2017 interview with TechCrunch’s Josh Constine, Reitano said he began experiencing ED at 17-years-old: “I think in a good way I’ve become numb to the embarrassment,” he said. “I remember the embarrassment of having the condition with no solution, and that’s much worse than sharing the fact that I had it and was able to fix it myself.”

Ro has previously raised $91.1 million in venture capital funding, hitting a valuation of $154 million with its Series A, according to PitchBook. Its investors include Initialized Capital, Box Group and Slow Ventures, as well as angels like Y Combinator partner Aaron Harris, Benchmark’s Scott Belsky and the chief executives of Casper, Code Academy and Pill Pack.

Founded just two years ago, Ro was amongst the first of a new cohort of men’s health businesses supported by VCs. Hims, one of the leading brands in the space, has similarly landed big rounds of capital from top-tier investors. Most recently, Hims brought in $100 million at a $1 billion valuation from an undisclosed growth-stage fund.

Several other companies, including Numan, Manual and Thirty Madison, have raised capital to support men with hair loss treatments and ED medications delivered to discreetly their doorsteps, among other products.

Erectile pharmacy app Ro launches telehealth service for women

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Startups Weekly: Lessons from a failed founder

I sat down with Menlo Ventures partner Shawn Carolan this week to talk about his early investment in Uber. Menlo, if you remember, led Uber’s Series B and has made a hefty sum over the year selling shares in the ride-hailing company. I’ll have more on that later; for now, I want to share some of the insights Carolan had on his experience ditching venture capital to become a founder.

Around when Menlo made its first investment in Uber, Carolan began taking a step back from the firm and building Handle, a startup that built tools to help people be more productive. Despite years of hard work, Handle was ultimately a failure. Carolan said he shed a lot of tears over its demise, but used the experience to connect more intimately with founders and to offer them more candid, authentic advice.

“People in the valley are always achievement-oriented; it’s always about the next thing and crushing it and whatever,” Carolan told TechCrunch. “When [Handle] shut down, I had this spreadsheet of all the people who I felt like I disappointed: Seed investors who invested in me, all the people at Menlo and my friends who had tweeted out early stuff. It was a long spreadsheet of like 60 people. And when I started a sabbatical, what I said was I’m going to go connect with everyone and apologize.”

Today, Carolan encourages founders to own their vulnerabilities.

“It’s OK to admit when you’re wrong,” he said. “Now I can see it on [founders’] faces, I can see when they’re scared. And they’re not going to say they’re scared but I know it’s tough. This is one of the toughest things that you’re going to go through. Now I can be there emotionally for these founders and I can say ‘here’s how you do it, here’s how you talk to your team and here’s what you share.’ A lot of founders feel like they have to do this alone and that’s why you have to get comfortable with your vulnerability.”

After Handle shuttered, Carolan returned to Menlo full time and made the firm a boatload of money from Roku’s IPO and now Uber’s. Anyway, thought those were some nice anecdotes that should be shared since most of our feeds are dominated by Silicon Valley hustle porn.

Want more TechCrunch newsletters? Sign up here. Ok, on to other news…

IPO corner

Funds on funds on funds

There were so many fund announcements this week; here’s a quick list.

Extra Crunch

Lots of great new exclusive content for our Extra Crunch subscribers is on the site, including this deep dive into the challenges of transportation startup profits. Plus: When to ditch a nightmare customer, before they kill your startup; The right way to do AI in security; and The definitive Niantic reading guide.

Lawsuits

Sinema, that one MoviePass competitor, has run into its fair share of bumps in the road. TechCrunch’s Brian Heater hopped on the phone with the startup’s CEO this week to learn more about those bumps, why its terminating accounts en masse, a class-action lawsuit its battling and more.

Photo by Stephen McCarthy / RISE via Sportsfile

Startup capital

Battlefield!

TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield brings the world’s top early-stage startups together on one stage to compete for non-dilutive prize money, and the attention of media and investors worldwide. Here’s a quick update on some of our BF winners and finalists:

#Equitypod

If you enjoy this newsletter, be sure to check out TechCrunch’s venture-focused podcast, Equity. In this week’s episode, available here, Crunchbase News editor-in-chief Alex Wilhelm, myself and Phil Libin, the founder of Evernote and AllTurtles, chat about the importance of IPOs. Plus, in a special Equity Shot, Alex and I unpack the Uber S-1.

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Truepill, the ‘AWS for pharmacies,’ gets $10M from Initialized Capital

Venture capitalists’ latest on-demand delivery bet is in the pharmaceutical space.

Truepill, an online pharmacy powering delivery for the likes of Hims, Nurx, LemonAID and other direct-to-consumer healthcare brands, has nabbed a $10 million Series A from early-stage VC fund Initialized Capital. The investment brings the Y Combinator graduate’s total raised to $13.4 million. Y Combinator, Sound Ventures, Tuesday Capital and others participated in the round.

Founded in 2016, the San Mateo-based startup employs 150 workers and plans to expand its team and fulfillment facilities into the U.K. with the fresh funding. Truepill is currently active in all 50 states and has delivered 1 million subscriptions for birth control, erectile dysfunction medication, hair loss treatment and more.

It is, as co-founders Sid Viswanathan and Umar Afridi explained, Amazon Web Services for pharmacies.

“We are really only scratching the surface of where this telemedicine landscape is going to go,” Viswanathan, who became a product manager at LinkedIn after the social network acquired his transcription service CardMunch, told TechCrunch. “We are catering to this first wave of those companies and we want to be that pharmacy fulfillment service powering that entire shift … We want to build the next generation of pharmacy infrastructure.”

Afridi, for his part, previously spent more than a decade as a pharmacist at retail chains like CVS and Fred Meyer.

In addition to operating a prescription delivery service, Truepill provides a set of APIs that give its customers programmatic access to its pharmacy and allows brands to fully customize packaging.

Foundation Capital, Index Ventures, Social Capital, Box Group and Joe Montana are also Truepill stakeholders.

Wellness startup Hims enters the unicorn club with $100M investment

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It’s a new era for fertility tech

Women’s health has long been devoid of technological innovation, but when it comes to fertility options, that’s starting to change. Startups in the space are securing hundreds of millions in venture capital investment, a significant increase to the dearth of funding collected in previous years.

Fertility entrepreneurs are focused on a growing market: couples are choosing to reproduce later in life, an increasing number of female breadwinners are able to make their own decisions about when and how to reproduce, and overall, around 10% of women in the US today have trouble conceiving, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Startups, as a result, are working to improve various pain points in a women’s fertility journey, whether that be with new-age brick-and-mortar clinics, information platforms, mobile applications, wearables, direct-to-consumer medical tests or otherwise.

Although the investment numbers are still relatively small (compared to, say, scooters), the trend is up — here’s the latest from founders and investors in the space.

VCs want to help you get pregnant

Clue, a period and ovulation-tracking app, co-founder and CEO Ida Tin talks at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin 2017 (Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images for TechCrunch)

This fall, TechCrunch received a tip that SoftBank, a prolific venture capital firm known for its nearly $100 billion Vision Fund, was investing in Glow, a period-tracking app meant to help women get pregnant. Max Levchin, Glow’s co-founder and a well-known member of the PayPal mafia, succinctly responded to a TechCrunch inquiry regarding the deal via e-mail: “Fairly sure you got this particular story wrong,” he wrote. Glow co-founder and chief executive officer Mike Huang did not respond to multiple requests for comment at the time.

Needless to say, some semblance of a SoftBank fertility deal got this reporter interested in a space that seldom populates tech blogs.

Femtech, a term coined by Ida Tin, the founder of another period and ovulation-tracking app Clue, is defined as any software, diagnostics, products and services that leverage technology to improve women’s health. Femtech, and more specifically the businesses in the fertility and contraception lanes, hasn’t made headlines as often as AI or blockchain technology has, for example. Probably because companies in the sector haven’t closed as many notable venture deals. That’s changing.

The global fertility services market is expected to exceed $21 billion by 2020, according to Technavio. Meanwhile, private investment in the femtech space surpassed $400 million in 2018 after reaching a high of $354 million the previous year, per data collected from PitchBook and Crunchbase. This year already several companies have inked venture deals, including men’s fertility business Dadi and Extend Fertility, which helps women freeze their eggs.

“In the last three to six months, it feels like investor interest has gone through the roof,” Jake Anderson-Bialis, co-founder of FertilityIQ and a former investor at Sequoia Capital, told TechCrunch. “It’s three to four emails a day; people are coming out of the woodwork. It feels like somebody shook the snow globe here and it just hasn’t stopped for months now.”

Dadi, Extend Fertility and FertilityIQ are among a growing list of startups in the fertility space to crop up in recent years. FertilityIQ, for its part, provides a digital platform for fertility patients to research and review doctors and clinics. The company also collects data and issues reports, like this one, which ranked businesses by fertility benefits. Anderson-Bialis launched the platform with his wife, co-founder Deborah Anderson-Bialis, in 2016 after the pair overcame their own set of infertility issues.

Anderson-Bialis said he has recently fielded requests from seed, Series A and growth-stage investors interested in exploring the growing fertility market. His company, however, has yet to raise any outside capital. Why? He doesn’t see FertilityIQ as a venture-scale business, but rather a passion project, and he’s skeptical of the true market opportunity for other businesses in the space.

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Healthcare by 2028 will be doctor-directed, patient-owned and powered by visual technologies

Evan Nisselson Contributor
Evan Nisselson is a partner at LDV Capital.
More posts by this contributor

Visual assessment is critical to healthcare – whether that is a doctor peering down your throat as you say “ahhh” or an MRI of your brain. Since the X-ray was invented in 1895, medical imaging has evolved into many modalities that empower clinicians to see into and assess the human body.  Recent advances in visual sensors, computer vision and compute power are currently powering a new wave of innovation in legacy visual technologies(like the X-Ray and MRI) and sparking entirely new realms of medical practice, such as genomics.

Over the next 10 years, healthcare workflows will become mostly digitized, with wide swaths of personal data captured and computer vision, along with artificial intelligence, automating the analysis of that data for precision care. Much of the digitized data across healthcare will be visual and the technologies that capture and analyze it are visual technologies.

These visual technologies traverse a patient’s journey from diagnosis, to treatment, to continuing care and prevention.They capture, analyze, process, filter and manage any visual data from images, videos, thermal, x-ray’s, ultrasound, MRI, CT scans, 3D, and more. Computer vision and artificial intelligence are core to the journey.

Three powerful trends — including miniaturization of diagnostic imaging devices, next generation imaging to for the earliest stages of disease detection and virtual medicine — are shaping the ways in which visual technologies are poised to improve healthcare over the next decade.

Miniaturization of Hardware Along with Computer Vision and AI will allow Diagnostic Imaging to be Mobile

Medical imaging is dominated by large incumbents that are slow to innovate. Most imaging devices (e.g. MRI machines) have not changed substantially since the 1980s and still have major limitations:

  • Complex workflows: large, expensive machines that require expert operators and have limited compatibility in hospitals.

  • Strict patient requirements: such as lying still or holding their breath (a problem for cases such as pediatrics or elderly patients).

  • Expensive solutions: limited to large hospitals and imaging facilities.

But thanks to innovations in visual sensors and AI algorithms, “modern medical imaging is in the midst of a paradigm shift, from large carefully-calibrated machines to flexible, self-correcting, multi-sensor devices” says Daniel K. Sodickson, MD, PhD, NYU School of Medicine, Department of Radiology.

MRI glove-shaped detector proved capable of capturing images of moving fingers.  ©NYU Langone Health

Visual data capture will be done with smaller, easier to use devices, allowing imaging to move out of the radiology department and into the operating room, the pharmacy and your living room.

Smaller sensors and computer vision-enabled image capture will lead to imaging devices that are being redesigned a fraction of the size with:

  • Simpler imaging process: with quicker workflows and lower costs.

  • Lower expertise requirements: less complexity will move imaging from the radiology department to anywhere the patient is.

  • Live imaging via ingestible cameras: innovation includes powering ingestibles via stomach acid, using bacteria for chemical detection and will be feasible in a wider range of cases.

“The use of synthetic neural network-based implementations of human perceptual learning enables an entire class of low-cost imaging hardware and can accelerate and improve existing technologies,” says Matthew Rosen, PhD, MGH/Martinos Center at Harvard Medical School.

©Matthew Rosen and his colleagues at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging in Boston want liberate the MRI.

Next Generation Sequencing, Phenotyping and Molecular Imaging Will Diagnose Disease Before Symptoms are Presented

Genomics, the sequencing of DNA, has grown at a 200% CAGR since 2015, propelled by Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) which uses optical signals to read DNA, like our LDV portfolio company Geniachip which was acquired by Roche. These techniques are helping genomics become a mainstream tool for practitioners, and will hopefully make carrier screening part of routine patient care by 2028.

Identifying the genetic makeup of a disease via liquid biopsies, where blood, urine or saliva is tested for tumor DNA or RNA, are poised to take a prime role in early cancer screening. The company GRAIL, for instance, raised $1B for a cancer blood test that uses NGS and deep learning to detect circulating tumor DNA before a lesion is identified.

Phenomics, the analysis of observable traits (phenotypes) that result from interactions between genes and their environment, will also contribute to earlier disease detection. Phenotypes are expressed physiologically and most will require imaging to be detected and analyzed.

Next Generation Phenotyping (NGP) uses computer vision and deep learning to analyze physiological data, understand particular phenotype patterns, then it correlates those patterns to genes. For example, FDNA’s Face2Gene technology can identify 300-400 disorders with 90%+ accuracy using images of a patient’s face. Additional data (images or videos of hands, feet, ears, eyes) can allow NGP to detect a wide range of disorders, earlier than ever before.

Molecular imaging uses DNA nanotech probes to quantitatively visualize chemicals inside of cells, thus measuring the chemical signature of diseases. This approach may enable early detection of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and dementia.

Telemedicine to Overtake Brick-and-Mortar Doctors Visits

By 2028 it will be more common to visit the doctor via video over your phone or computer than it will be to go to an office.

Telemedicine will make medical practitioners more accessible and easier to communicate with. It will create an all digitized health record of visits for a patient’s profile and it will reduce the costs of logistics and regional gaps in specific medical expertise. An example being the telemedicine services rendered for 1.9M injured in the war in Syria.4

The integration of telemedicine into ambulances has led to stroke patients being treated twice as fast.  Doctors will increasingly call in their colleagues and specialists in real time.

Screening technologies will be integrated into telemedicine so it won’t just be about video calling a doctor. Pre-screening your vitals via remote cameras will deliver extensive efficiencies and hopefully health benefits.

“The biggest opportunity in visual technology in telemedicine is in solving specific use cases. Whether it be detecting your pulse, blood pressure or eye problems, visual technology will be key to collecting data,” says Jeff Nadler, Teldoc health.

Remote patient monitoring (RPM) will be a major factor in the growth of telemedicine and the overall personalization of care. RPM devices, like we are seeing with the Apple Watch, will be a primary source of real-time patient data used to make medical decisions that take into account everyday health and lifestyle factors. This personal data will be collected and owned by patients themselves and provided to doctors.

Visual Tech Will Power the Transformation of Healthcare Over the Next Decade

Visual technologies have deep implications for the future of personalized healthcare and will hopefully improve the health of people worldwide. It represents unique investment opportunities and we at LDV Capital have reviewed over 100 research papers from BCC Research, CBInsights, Frost & Sullivan, McKinsey, Wired, IEEE Spectrum and many more to compile our 2018 LDV Capital Insights report. This report highlights the sectors that power to improve healthcare based on the transformative nature of the technology in the sector, projected growth and business opportunity.

There are tremendous investment opportunities in visual technologies across diagnosis, treatment and continuing care & prevention that will help make people healthier across the globe.