Rock Weekly – NEW

What a difference a decade makes. In 2011, we recorded $1.1B in funding. Fast forward to Q1 2021, and we’re seeing $1B+ in a week. With $6.7B across 147 deals, Q1 2021 just closed as the biggest funding quarter ever. Average deal size ballooned to $45.9M (up from $31.7M in 2020), and SPACs continue to offer a path to liquidity, with 10 announced or closed SPAC deals. With growing deal sizes, an accelerated pace of funding rounds, and new exit pathways—we’re in a unique moment for digital health. Read our Q1 funding recap for more on how digital health is all grown up.

Amazon Prime conditioned us to on-demand everything. And spurred by the pandemic, healthcare at large has followed suit. Uber Health’s new deal with ScriptDrop will now enable prescription delivery in 37 states; Everlywell announced two acquisitions to expand their at-home lab testing services; and food delivery company DoorDash is partnering with Everlywell and Vault Health to deliver at-home COVID tests to consumers in major cities. Not to be outdone, following this news Amazon announced authorization of its own at-home COVID-19 test. Cue the battle for delivery domination—it's hard to bet against Amazon, but with the quick growth and partnerships of nimble startups, let's hope the real winners are consumers. 

A year ago last week, the pandemic was declared a national emergency. 365 days later, the explosion of digital health funding that ultimately followed shows little sign of abating. With four mega deals announced within 48 hours last week—equating to a total of $805M in funding—Clarify Health, Unite Us, Strive Health, and Insitro’s fresh rounds represent a healthy proportion of the total funding raised so far this year. All told, the first quarter of 2021 is on track to close with more than double the number of mega deals compared to Q1 and Q2 of 2020 combined.

Even as vaccination numbers accelerate and the US edges closer to a more hopeful chapter in the pandemic saga, the psychological effects of 2020 won’t soon be forgotten. Investors were not lost to this realization—which resulted in $2.4B of funding poured into the digital behavioral health market last year. Our latest piece explores four trends underpinning this market's momentum, plus opportunities for entrepreneurs and investors alike to consider as the industry moves forward.

Who isn’t vying to own the home healthcare market? An array of major players—including Amazon Care, Intermountain, and Ascension—are teaming up to advocate for policy changes to designate the home as a site of clinical service. Policy changes could open new reimbursement and access opportunities, but in the meantime, enterprises and startups alike are rapidly expanding their at-home offerings: Best Buy Health is partnering with Apple Watch to offer on-demand health assistance, Walgreens expanded its Find Care platform to connect consumers with digital health services, online pharmacy Ro is now vaccinating seniors in their homes, and a recent study showed reduced lower back pain from home-based therapeutic VR.

Since 2015, Rock Health has annually surveyed thousands of US adults to understand consumer use of digital health technologies. Over the five years prior to 2020, adoption steadily climbed. Then came a global pandemic—and for the first time, digital health solutions were not simply an enhancement, but a necessity in healthcare access and delivery. As COVID-19 kicked the digital health ecosystem into high gear, consumer adoption of live video telemedicine, wearables, and digital health metric tracking grew by 10+ percentage points each from 2019 to 2020. But adoption was not equal across all technologies and survey respondent subgroups—check out how the data broke down and implications for innovators, enterprises, and consumers alike. Special thanks to Stanford’s Center for Digital Health for their partnership on this work.

The Watson Health hype cycle may soon come to a close for IBM. Executives are exploring a sale of the six-year-old business that, despite a handful of acquisitions (Merge Healthcare and Truven), never quite hit its stride. The logic of a successful platform is that it attracts large scale networks of users with its simplicity and that its whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Amidst digital health’s raging platform wars, this potential exit could be seen as a cautionary tale that bundling a wide range of assets around one tech stack is not the same as platform building.

The stated goal of the newly-announced Truveta—a data aggregation startup rolling deep with 14 of the largest U.S. health systems on board—is to liberate meaningful health data from medical records to drive treatment discovery research and improve patient care. This exciting new venture offers promise and peril: there’s an opportunity to unleash the largest trove of real world clinical data ever. But doing so without compromising patient privacy—and ensuring the data is used to advance outcomes that actually matter to patients—will require clear intention and sustained focus. Success will require collectively taking advantage of all the second Machine Age has to offer—cloud computing, Big Data, the IoT, AI—in ways that no health system could tackle alone. Here's hoping for all the breakthrough, with none of the distraction.

Digital health solutions are popping up left and right to support vaccine rollout and distribution. Just a few days ago, Google announced a new solution to help governments with vaccine scheduling, analytics, and even COVID-19 case forecasting; Buoy began offering vaccine education modules and workforce interest surveys to employers; and data privacy startup Skyflow got into the mix with a digital passport offering. All of this recent activity got us thinking—where is the innovation headed and which gaps remain? Check out our take on the growing space of vaccine wraparound tech.

Groundhog Day is nearly upon us and lately, digital health news has us reminded of the eponymous cinematic classic. Last week, the platform wars heated up with DarioHealth's $31M acquisition of musculoskeletal solution Upright; Sharecare, Ro, and 23andMe joined the ever-growing list of companies throwing their hats into the SPAC ring; insurance startup Sidecar Health was dubbed the latest unicorn; and behavioral health solution Lyra snagged another ginormous $187M Series E raise. Same story, different day—but regardless of whether the groundhog sees his shadow tomorrow, spring has come early for digital health.