Mental health insurance platform ifeel raises a $20 million Series B | TechCrunch
Ifeel is being offered as part of an employer’s or insurance provider’s healthcare coverage.
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Ifeel is being offered as part of an employer’s or insurance provider’s healthcare coverage.
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
About half a million patients have been notified so far, but the number of affected individuals is likely far higher.
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Smart ring maker Oura is launching two new features focused on heart health, the company announced on Friday. The first claims to help users get an idea of their cardiovascular age, while the second feature aims to estimate their cardio capacity. Depending on a person’s results, Oura will offer strategies on how to sleep, move, […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
When Sonia García and Stas Sokolin decided to launch Amae Health to solve the broken care system for people with severe mental illness, they were already intimately familiar with the industry’s issues.
“I started thinking about this problem a very long time ago,” said Sokolin, Amae’s CEO. “I grew up with a sister who had bipolar disorder for many, many years, and as a family we always struggled to find her care. It seemed like everything was so piecemeal, and it broke our family apart.”
Garcia had her own experiences with the mental healthcare system, too. She lost her father to suicide when she was 16 years old, and then she and her family spent years as caregivers for her brother with schizoaffective and bipolar disorder. Sokolin and García were introduced by mutual friends at Stanford because they were both passionate about this area. The pair knew the system could be better.
They launched Amae Health in 2022 to be a new approach to helping patients with severe mental illness. Amae brings resources — including family and individual therapy, social workers, psychiatric care and medicine management — all under one roof. One physical roof, that is, as Amae is focused on an in-person approach. The startup hired Dr. Scott Fears, who had experience with this all-encompassing care approach through his work with the Los Angeles Veterans Affair Hospital, so they could iterate on and improve an existing model as opposed to starting a new one from scratch.
Amae Health just raised a $15 million Series A round led by Quiet Capital with participation from Healthier Capital, former One Medical CEO Amir Dan Rubin’s firm; Baszucki Group and Index Ventures partner Mike Volpi, in addition to all of the company’s seed investors. The startup currently has one clinic in Los Angeles and plans to use the capital to expand. Its next center will be in Raleigh, North Carolina, with locations in Houston, Ohio and New York to follow shortly after.
The funds will also be used to continue building out the company’s data platform. Sokolin said the company is using AI to go through the troves of data it collects at its clinic to find ways they can continue to improve care.
Over the past few years, many startups have launched to improve the mental healthcare system, but Amae Health’s focus area and approach stand out. Most of the mental health startups that launched in the pandemic are digital first and focused on anxiety and depression. Amae looks very different.
There’s nothing wrong, of course, with having a slate of companies focused on anxiety and depression, and it’s good to see founders focused on helping people with severe mental illness, too. Severe mental health problems affect 14.1 million people in the U.S., according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. But there’s a lot less innovation in the sector.
That’s not too surprising: Solutions for people with severe mental illness don’t perfectly fit a traditional venture model in the way many telemedicine and digital solutions do. People with severe mental illness need care that is in person, making solutions more costly and slower to scale.
“When we first went out to raise money, a lot of venture investors were asking, why are you doing this in person? Why is this not virtual?” Sokolin said. “The fact of the matter is you can’t treat someone who is having delusions or auditory hallucinations virtually. The same way you can’t treat cancer virtually, you can’t treat this virtually.”
The nature of the business also means that they aren’t expanding to all 50 states right away as some digital health startups have been able to. García said the company is fine with that because it’s more focused on the outcomes than the scaling.
“That is about intentional growth and scale, not the winner-take-all market, but really being considerate and conscious about how we do grow and ensuring we are generating lasting change and recovery in these individuals’ lives,” Garcia said.
Trying to scale too fast has hurt some mental health startups. Therapy telemedicine platform Cerebral has come under fire for how it advertises to potential customers and how it handles patient data in its pursuit of scale.
This slower growth approach can and has worked in venture before, said Sokolin, a former VC at both the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Health2047. One Medical, a full-service healthcare system, including in-person care, is a prime example. The company raised more than $500 million before getting scooped up by Amazon for $3.9 billion. It’s not surprising the former CEO is a current investor in Amae.
Sokolin and García are fine with the fact that their approach has turned off some potential investors. They are focused more on building a system for quality care, not just how many patients they can see.
“There are way more individuals than anyone could ever treat,” Sokolin said about the scope of individuals with severe mental illness. “We are never going to treat anything more than a small fraction, but we want to be the best-in-class provider for those members.”
When Joanna Strober was around 47 she stopped sleeping. While losing sleep is a common symptom of perimenopause, she first had to go to multiple providers, including driving 45 minutes out of San Francisco to pay $750 out of pocket, to get that diagnosis and proper treatment.
“That feeling of wow, I’ve really been suffering unnecessarily for the past year really stuck with me,” Strober said on a recent episode of TechCrunch’s Found podcast. “I started talking to all my friends and trying to understand what’s going on with them and what became clear is that perimenopause and menopause is this big thing. It kind of hits women like it’s pile of bricks. There’s lots of different symptoms to it and they’re very few providers who are trained to take care of this population.”
That realization is what inspired Strober to launch Midi Health, a telehealth platform designed to serve women in midlife by connecting them with providers that are trained in perimenopause and menopause symptoms and treatments.
Despite her “aha” moment, Strober explained why she couldn’t launch the startup right away. She said that Midi couldn’t have existed had the U.S. government not have changed its rules surrounding telehealth and where people could access care during the pandemic. Because of the changes surrounding digital health, Strober said the company was able to launch its platform that brought care to women as opposed to women having to find in-person care.
“Understanding that this problem that had been around for a long time and could finally be addressed using telehealth was a very exciting revelation,” Strober said. “And that’s why I wanted to start this company.”
Midi operates a little bit differently than many of the other digital health companies started in the post-pandemic wave, Strober said. She said Midi isn’t set up to be a digital avenue for users to get one-off care or treatment as fast as possible like many other companies of the same era, but rather to be a platform where women build long-term relationships with providers that make them feel seen.
This approach is also why Strober thinks Midi has been able to keep growing and raising VC funds as VCs have become less interested in the category. The company recently raised a $60 million Series B round led by Emerson Collective with participation from Google Ventures, SteelSky Ventures, and Muse Capital, among others. This round brings the company’s total funding to $99 million.
Digital health startup raised $13.2 billion globally in 2023, according to CB Insights data. This marks a decrease of 48% from 2022, $25.5 billion, and a decrease of 75% from 2021 when a record $52.7 billion was invested.
“I think too few telehealth companies didn’t think about that long-term customer relationship,” Strober said. “We view ourselves as building a healthcare trusted brand. So our brand is expert care for women. We need to give you that amazing care so you come back to us over and over and over again. That is what women are doing.”
Midi isn’t Strober’s first digital health startup and she talked about how her past experience building Kurbo Health, a startup focused on child obesity before digital health was even a thing, influenced her choices in building Midi. She also talked about how her past life as a venture capitalist also played a role in how she approached the business.
With this latest round of funding, Midi looks forward to expanding care in areas that fall under perimenopause and menopause including things like sexual wellness, hair and skin care and access to testosterone.
“People keep on asking, you know, when are you leaving perimenopause, and menopause?” Strober said. “But perimenopause and menopause is a big market. So we are working a lot on understanding what are the health needs of women during this period of their life and how do we appropriately rise to meet those concerns.”
U.S. health conglomerate Kaiser is notifying millions of its members of a data breach earlier this month.
In a legally required notice filed with the U.S. government on April 12 but made public on Thursday, the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan confirmed that 13.4 million residents had information taken in a data breach.
The notice did not share the specific nature of the data breach, describing the incident only as “unauthorized access/disclosure” involving a network server.
U.S. organizations covered under the health privacy law known as HIPAA are required to notify the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services of data breaches involving protected health information, such as medical data and patient records. Kaiser also notified California’s attorney general of the data breach, but did not provide any further details.
Kaiser spokesperson Catherine Hernandez did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.
The Kaiser Foundation Health Plan is the parent organization of several entities that make up Kaiser Permanente, one of the largest healthcare organizations in the United States. The Kaiser Foundation Health Plan provides health insurance plans to employers and reported 12.5 million members as of the end of 2023.
The breach at Kaiser is listed on the Department of Health and Human Services’ website as the largest confirmed health-related data breach of 2024 so far.
It’s unclear if the breach at Kaiser is related to the ongoing recovery at U.S. health tech giant Change Healthcare, which was hit by ransomware in February. Earlier this week, Change Healthcare’s parent company UnitedHealth Group said that the criminal hackers stole sensitive health information on a “substantial proportion of people in America,” but fell short of providing a clear figure.
Do you know more about the data breach at Kaiser? To contact this reporter, get in touch on Signal and WhatsApp at +1 646-755-8849, or by email. You can also send files and documents via SecureDrop.
Health insurance giant UnitedHealth Group has confirmed that a ransomware attack on its health tech subsidiary Change Healthcare earlier this year resulted in a huge theft of Americans’ private healthcare data.
UnitedHealth said in a statement on Monday that a ransomware gang took files containing personal data and protected health information that it says may “cover a substantial proportion of people in America.”
The health insurance giant did not say how many Americans are affected but said the data review was “likely to take several months” before the company would begin notifying individuals that their information was stolen in the cyberattack.
Change Healthcare processes insurance and billing for hundreds of thousands of hospitals, pharmacies and medical practices across the U.S. healthcare sector; it has access to massive amounts of health information on about half of all Americans.
UnitedHealth said it had not yet seen evidence that doctors’ charts or full medical histories were exfiltrated from its systems.
The admission that hackers stole Americans’ health data comes a week after a new hacking group began publishing portions of the stolen data in an effort to extort a second ransom demand from the company.
The gang, which calls itself RansomHub, published several files on its dark web leak site containing personal information about patients across an array of documents, some of which included internal files related to Change Healthcare. RansomHub said it would sell the stolen data unless Change Healthcare pays a ransom.
RansomHub is the second gang to demand a ransom from Change Healthcare. The health tech giant reportedly paid $22 million to a Russia-based criminal gang called ALPHV in March, which then disappeared, stiffing the affiliate that carried out the data theft out of their portion of the ransom.
RansomHub claimed in its post alongside the published stolen data that “we have the data and not ALPHV.”
In its statement Monday, UnitedHealth acknowledged the publication of some of the files but stopped short of claiming ownership of the documents. “This is not an official breach notification,” UnitedHealth said.
The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that the criminal hacking affiliate of ALPHV broke into Change Healthcare’s network using stolen credentials for a system that allows remote access to its network. The hackers were in Change Healthcare’s network for more than a week before deploying ransomware, allowing the hackers to steal significant amounts of data from the company’s systems.
The cyberattack at Change Healthcare began on February 21 and resulted in ongoing widespread outages at pharmacies and hospitals across the United States. For weeks, physicians, pharmacies and hospitals could not verify patient benefits for dispensing medications, organizing inpatient care, or processing prior authorizations necessary for surgeries.
Much of the U.S. healthcare system ground to a halt, with healthcare providers facing financial pressure as backlogs grow and outages linger.
UnitedHealth reported last week that the ransomware attack has cost it more than $870 million in losses. The company reported it made $99.8 billion in revenue during the first three months of the year, faring better than what Wall Street analysts had expected.
UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty, who received close to $21 million in total compensation the full year of 2022, is set to testify to House lawmakers on May 1.
Generative AI models are increasingly being brought to healthcare settings — in some cases prematurely, perhaps. Early adopters believe that they’ll unlock increased efficiency while revealing insights that’d otherwise be missed. Critics, meanwhile, point out that these models have flaws and biases that could contribute to worse health outcomes.
But is there a quantitative way to know how helpful, or harmful, a model might be when tasked with things like summarizing patient records or answering health-related questions?
Hugging Face, the AI startup, proposes a solution in a newly released benchmark test called Open Medical-LLM. Created in partnership with researchers at the nonprofit Open Life Science AI and the University of Edinburgh’s Natural Language Processing Group, Open Medical-LLM aims to standardize evaluating the performance of generative AI models on a range of medical-related tasks.
Open Medical-LLM isn’t a from-scratch benchmark, per se, but rather a stitching-together of existing test sets — MedQA, PubMedQA, MedMCQA and so on — designed to probe models for general medical knowledge and related fields, such as anatomy, pharmacology, genetics and clinical practice. The benchmark contains multiple choice and open-ended questions that require medical reasoning and understanding, drawing from material including U.S. and Indian medical licensing exams and college biology test question banks.
“[Open Medical-LLM] enables researchers and practitioners to identify the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches, drive further advancements in the field and ultimately contribute to better patient care and outcome,” Hugging Face wrote in a blog post.
Image Credits: Hugging Face
Hugging Face is positioning the benchmark as a “robust assessment” of healthcare-bound generative AI models. But some medical experts on social media cautioned against putting too much stock into Open Medical-LLM, lest it lead to ill-informed deployments.
On X, Liam McCoy, a resident physician in neurology at the University of Alberta, pointed out that the gap between the “contrived environment” of medical question-answering and actual clinical practice can be quite large.
Hugging Face research scientist Clémentine Fourrier, who co-authored the blog post, agreed.
“These leaderboards should only be used as a first approximation of which [generative AI model] to explore for a given use case, but then a deeper phase of testing is always needed to examine the model’s limits and relevance in real conditions,” Fourrier replied on X. “Medical [models] should absolutely not be used on their own by patients, but instead should be trained to become support tools for MDs.”
It brings to mind Google’s experience when it tried to bring an AI screening tool for diabetic retinopathy to healthcare systems in Thailand.
Google created a deep learning system that scanned images of the eye, looking for evidence of retinopathy, a leading cause of vision loss. But despite high theoretical accuracy, the tool proved impractical in real-world testing, frustrating both patients and nurses with inconsistent results and a general lack of harmony with on-the-ground practices.
It’s telling that of the 139 AI-related medical devices the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved to date, none use generative AI. It’s exceptionally difficult to test how a generative AI tool’s performance in the lab will translate to hospitals and outpatient clinics, and, perhaps more importantly, how the outcomes might trend over time.
That’s not to suggest Open Medical-LLM isn’t useful or informative. The results leaderboard, if nothing else, serves as a reminder of just how poorly models answer basic health questions. But Open Medical-LLM, and no other benchmark for that matter, is a substitute for carefully thought-out real-world testing.
Artificial intelligence can find hidden signals in data across healthcare, and companies like Nvidia are leaning into what this can mean. For example, it announced two dozen new AI-powered tools last week for areas including biotechnology and drug discovery. And Nvidia is not alone.
Century Health is a new startup also getting in on the action. It’s applying AI to clinical data to uncover new applications for drugs. It’s working with pharmaceutical companies and researchers, initially at Yale and UC San Diego, to identify and commercialize the next breakthrough for diseases, like Alzheimer’s, that affect tens of millions of patients.
The mission is a personal one for Century Health’s co-founder and CEO, Vish Srivastava. He watched his grandfather’s Alzheimer’s get to the point where he didn’t recognize Srivastava anymore.
“That sent me down a rabbit hole,” said Srivastava, whose background is in healthcare product development and data. “One of the biggest issues around innovation for new treatments is efficient access to good patient data. This is now only possible because of generative AI. That data sat around for decades because it takes manual effort to normalize and extract insight from it.”
That’s when he teamed up with friend Sanjay Hariharan, a data scientist and applied AI engineer, to form Century Health. They built a platform to extract that hidden data and aggregate it. Researchers and pharma companies subscribe to the platform and can then use that data on approved drugs; to expand to new drugs; or to find insights to expand access to drugs that have already been approved.
The ultimate goal is accelerating access to treatments, Srivastava said.
“Drug development is massively expensive, and on average, takes $1 billion to $2 billion to develop a new drug,” he said. “From the pharma company’s perspective, when their drug is now approved, the mission is to get it to patients as quickly as possible. For us, that also means as affordably as possible with access to good real-world data.”
Now with $2 million pre-seed funding, Century Health will run three to five pilots over the next several months. The goal is to validate the initial technology that collects the data and, most importantly, to see the impact the insights from those data sets can bring, Srivastava said.
He sees these pilots as design partnerships and a way to get feedback on the benefits of drugs, for example, which patient subpopulation might be underrepresented. In addition to the validated technology, another milestone will be to secure early revenue from the pilots, which Century Health can leverage to go after another round of venture capital.
The investment was led by 2048 Ventures with participation from LifeX, Everywhere, Alumni Ventures and a group of angel investors, including Datavant founder Travis May and Evidation founder and CEO Christine Lemke.
Alex Iskold, managing partner of 2048 Ventures, said in a statement, “At 2048 Ventures we have a strong thesis around real-time data, in healthcare and beyond. Vish and Sanjay have a vision to leverage AI and real world patient data to unlock a better feedback loop and ultimately faster and more efficient drug development and commercialization.”
Hinge Health, a nine-year-old company that offers a digital solution to treat chronic musculoskeletal (MSK) conditions, cut approximately 10% of its workforce on Thursday, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.
The company said people who were laid off worked across various functions; according to employees posting on LinkedIn, some were engineers. Before the layoffs, Hinge had more than 1,700 employees, according to a LinkedIn estimate.
“As we continue to reimagine musculoskeletal care, we are also committed to building a long-term sustainable business,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. “To accelerate our path to profitability, speed up decision making, and better focus our investments, we have made the decision to realign our organization. We are incredibly grateful for all our departing team members’ contributions and are focused on supporting them through this transition.”
The layoffs come as the company prepares for an IPO and aims to reach profitability.
The company didn’t comment on the timing for its IPO, but Hinge has said previously that it is not under pressure to hit the public markets this year since it still has $400 million of cash on its balance sheet.
Hinge was last valued at $6.2 billion in October 2021 when it raised a $400 Series E from Tiger Global and Coatue Management. The company has raised a total of $828 million, according to PitchBook data.
The company’s main competitor is General Catalyst and Khosla Ventures-backed Sword Health, which was last valued at $2 billion in November 2021.
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