What do Vesta Healthcare, Thatch, and Viome Life Sciences have in common?
Well, besides each raising over $25,000,000 from investors in September of 2024, they’re all building a new reality of healthcare: a decentralized, digitized, and personalized system.
Vesta Healthcare ($65,000,000 Series C)
is a virtual care provider group that coordinates with home-based services, advanced practice providers, physicians, DME suppliers, and more to bridge the gap between healthcare and homecare.
As stated on their website, their mission is: “to ensure that people stay in the comfort of their homes as long as possible.”
Thatch ($38,000,000 Series A)
is a fintech company enabling employers to offer easy, personalized healthcare benefits to their teams.
Their software allows employees to choose how to spend the budget allocated by their employers, making it a very flexible way to use benefits.
Viome Life Sciences ($25,000,000 Series D)
is an at-home diagnostics company focused on providing personalized, preventive therapeutics to consumers.
The funds are being used for their recently launched diagnostics division, and to improve their existing offerings surrounding the gut microbiome.
A New System
We all know that healthcare has traditionally lagged behind other industries in terms of technological adoption.
So it’s great to see companies like Vesta, Thatch, and Viome leading the way to a better system.
The solutions that each of these companies offer, in some capacity:
- transcend location-dependence
- eliminate a one-size-fits-all approach
- encourage people to take ownership of their health
Why Should You Care?
For Smaller Groups (<30 Providers)
Given your size you might not think that this new system is something to worry about right now.
Here’s an argument for why you should think otherwise:
Remember the age-old tale of healthcare being slow to adopt new technologies?
Well, you being small allows for both agility and adaptability in a way that larger groups can’t replicate.
For starters, not having a well-established brand yet is an asset in disguise because it allows for experimentation.
You can try and fail, and chances are no one’s going to notice.
Additionally, your smaller size means less bureaucracy getting in the way of making decisions.
But wait, what about regulation?
Well, personalization isn’t exclusive to clinical intervention.
At your stage, you can focus on personalizing the patient experience as opposed to offering something like Viome’s remote diagnostics.
In fact, besides actually providing outstanding patient-care, this may just be your most important lever.
Ensuring a great patient experience translates to improved clinical outcomes, lower malpractice risk, better profit margins, and increased patient loyalty.
Here are some relevant sources for your perusal:
- Demonstrating a positive correlation between patient satisfaction and successful treatment of heart attacks: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIRCOUTCOMES.109.900597
- Patient satisfaction as a useful metric in assessing medical malpractice risk: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19365294/
- Patient satisfaction and loyalty to PCPs: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11219560/
For Medium-Sized Groups (30-100 Providers)
A practice of your size should probably begin moving beyond personalizing the patient experience, and start focusing on the next pillar of this new system: digitization and automation.
More specifically, investing in tools and staff that will yield incremental improvements across all of your departments.
Why?
Because at your size, those incremental improvements can yield significant bumps in your bottom-line.
It wouldn’t have made sense to invest $24,000 annually in a better EHR system when you only had 5 providers. But now, depending on which end of the spectrum (30-100 providers) you’re at, it likely does.
For example, say this new EHR system saves each provider 2 hours a week. Let’s assume an hourly wage of $44 (which is the national average for registered nurses in the United States).
So doing the math:
$44 p/h x 2 hours per week x 4 weeks in a month x 12 months in a year x 30 providers = $126,720
Subtracting the presumed cost of the EHR system reveals the profit: $126,720 – $24,000 = $102,720
So you’re spending $24,000 to get $102,720 back.
That’s more than a 400% ROI (return on investment) after the first year (when accounting for the initial implementation cost).
This is just one example.
As you surely know, there are plenty of inefficiencies that exist across medical organizations:
- Revenue Cycle Management
- Delegation
- Medication Refills
- Managing Test Results
- Scheduling
- Marketing
And many more.
The point is that investing in these seemingly small improvements now makes more sense given your size.
The more of them you improve, the greater the ROI, and that’s only going to increase over time.
Here are some relevant sources for your perusal:
- Waste in the US healthcare system – estimated costs and potential for savings: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31589283/
- Waste in the US healthcare system – a conceptual framework: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2690367/
- The healthcare imperative – inefficiently delivered services: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK53938/
For Large Groups (>100 Providers)
Whether you’re at 101 providers or 1001 providers, you can now create waves that reach more people than you can imagine.
Seriously.
In the context of this new system, it makes the most sense for you to focus on decentralization because only organizations of your size have the resources to do this at scale.
But what exactly is decentralization?
Empowering patient autonomy and ownership of their health.
An example of how you might do this is by partnering with healthcare technology companies like Vesta, Thatch and Viome.
As you know, we’re currently in the AI “revolution”, which is really just one way of saying that the public is now recognizing AI’s true potential.
In reality, machine learning has been around since the 1960’s.
And of course, it’s extremely relevant to healthcare.
But what do all forms of artificial intelligence require to be built?
A whole bunch of data!
An organization of your size, unless you’ve hired one or more health informaticist(s), probably generates more data than you know what to do with.
So depending on whether the company is a for- or non-profit organization, you can give them access to your data (maintaining HIPAA-compliance of course).
By doing so, you would be supporting the development of technologies that have the potential to save millions of lives. That could be directly through clinical intervention, indirectly by eliminating inefficiencies that put patients at risk, or preventative altogether.
Here are some relevant sources for your perusal:
- Labcorp partners with major academic health system: https://www.labcorp.com/organizations/resources/partnership-labcorp-helps-major-academic-health-system-thrive
- Long Island network for clinical and translational science: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/lab/labs-partner-for-new-york-biomedical-research-network.html
That’s A Wrap!
That’s all for this week.
See you next Saturday 🙂
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Featured Image Source: The Mount Sinai Medical Center
