Lantern, a digital mental health company that became part of Rock Health’s portfolio in 2013, wound down its customer operations in July 2018. The startup had raised over $20M in its lifetime, and supported individuals experiencing anxiety, depression, and disordered eating. “The biggest reason we were unable to scale our services was we didn’t focus on one market,” explains Lantern co-founder and former CEO Alejandro Foung.
Our conviction that innovation requires elevating both digital health entrepreneurs and enterprise leaders is a key reason we’re thrilled to announce our newest corporate partner, Google Cloud.
Digital therapeutic and pharmaceutical companies are partnering to build, validate, and expand access to new, software-based solutions that improve patient outcomes. This is new territory with few precedents, and the strategies for building successful alliances remain uncertain. Drawing from numerous interviews with digital therapeutic, pharma, and health plan leaders, this research outlines how to overcome execution risks and build successful pharma-digital therapeutic alliances.
Coming off a record-smashing year for digital health funding in 2018, we see funding leveling off in the first quarter of 2019. Meanwhile, after a two-and-a-half-year drought, the digital health IPO market is heating up. Here’s the data and our take on how 2019 is shaking out so far for digital health.
The future of American healthcare is tightly bound to what happens within government. But there’s too little participation by the healthcare innovation community on national policy and regulatory issues. Without a seat at the table, incredibly important decisions are being made everyday with minimal input from entrepreneurs and innovators.
Will artificial intelligence help humanize healthcare and get medicine back on track? Signs point to yes—with a few caveats. Rock Health Managing Director and CEO Bill Evans spoke with leading cardiologist and digital medicine researcher Dr. Eric Topol about his new book, Deep Medicine, which provides a wide-ranging overview of the current state of AI in healthcare. Together with Dr. Topol, we explore the fundamental shift from “shallow medicine” to “deep medicine,” the data and privacy issues at hand, and why there has never been a more urgent window of opportunity to fix healthcare with the transformative potential of AI.
To ultimately serve patients, most digital health solutions go to market via large enterprises, whether through payers, providers, biopharma, or employers. The size and complexity of these organizations mean a startup’s technology alone is rarely enough to drive a sale and broad adoption. That’s why effective digital health companies build expertise not just in their product, but in cultivating relationships with large enterprises and implementing solutions across them to reach patient populations at scale.
To equip startups with an understanding of what it takes to make it in the employer market, we interviewed our portfolio companies alongside a group of experts who represent the investor and health benefits consultant perspectives. Here’s what we learned—and how a few Rock Health companies are providing meaningful value to employers and employees.
Results from our fourth national consumer survey (2018 data) on digital health adoption and sentiments. Adoption continues to rise while consumers leverage digital health tools to address concrete health needs.
In a banner year for digital health funding, AI/ML companies raced to the top in dollars raised, investors showed excitement about on-demand healthcare services, and more women CEOs closed rounds than ever before—though they still represent a small sliver of the pie.