Deals, deals, and more deals. After a long, quiet stretch on the fundraising front, I’m seeing a lot more companies getting funded, and even pre-empted. AI continues to be extremely hot and investors are moving to lead rounds earlier and earlier just to get in at valuations they can afford. With all this activity, very few people are stopping to discuss important questions, such as the steps that we need to take from a regulatory perspective to roll out AI in healthcare or the payment model. I plan to spend a good amount of time in the coming weeks writing about and thinking about this very topic, particularly related to the topic of AI, and I welcome your feedback. Candidly, one of my big fears is that the first wave of AI companies does very little to strip out unnecessary healthcare costs.
In other news, I’m fascinated to see growing adoption of various health and wellness interventions that would have seemed fringe even a year ago, including testosterone supplementation and micro-dosing GLP-1s. I do wonder we’re moving into a world with two distinct health systems. One is cash pay, and the other is connected to insurance (and includes insurance, billing complexity, and so forth). There’s still a major disconnect between these two worlds, and I suspect we’ll see that bubble up in the next few months as more primary care doctors find out their patients are taking medications via direct-to-consumer health apps and websites.
The Trump Administration is also continuing to push unproven theories, such as linking Tylenol use amongst pregnant women to autism (there is no evidence of that). I’ve been saying this for a long time, and it is more needed than ever. The scientific and medical has got to step up and communicate in ways that are accessible to the public, or we will have a very hard time gaining ground in the battle against misinformation. And yes, that means TikTok and Instagram.
Speaking of communication and storytelling, today is the day that my book is finally hitting the proverbial shelves! I first wrote the proposal for this book nearly five years ago, so it’s been a wild experience today to get texts from friends who say their book has arrived. If yours arrives today, I’d so appreciate hearing what you think!
Wild…
You can grab a copy of the book here.
Lastly, another big trend I’m seeing start to take off is the rise of partnerships. Digital health companies have finally stopped considering themselves islands, and are instead teaming up with each other to share distribution. As an Oura ring user, I was intrigued to see the company team up with both Maven and Evernow to offer women access to medical visits. Oura could in theory build out virtual visits, but it makes far more sense to partner — at least in the near-term. Just with this one use-case with wearables, I see so many opportunities for the device to trigger an opportunity for a deeper medical intervention. Between the Oura ring, the Apple Watch and the Whoop, there’s opportunities to monitor sleep, stress levels, blood pressure, and more. Think of the possibilities here for prevention. After years of questioning whether wearables are worth the investment, I’m now starting to see them move from “nice to have” to “must have.”
So let’s walk through the news of the week, plus a smattering of health-tech deals that got done in H2!
Upcoming Webinars:
October 2nd @ 3pm ET, Hosted by Inkhouse, I’ll be doing an AMA Session about my book, The Storyteller’s Advantage. Register here, and submit your questions beforehand here.
And on October 3rd @ 3pm ET, the brilliant Stephanie Davis and I will be discussing the recent happenings in Digital Health IPOs. Stephanie has a long career in equities research, and is the go-to advisor for companies thinking about going public. You can register for this webinar here or by clicking down below.
