Estee Goldschmidt

Huge news today out of the federal government: CMS announced its vision for a Digital Health Ecosystem, asking industry stakeholders to help make it real before YE 2025. Kristen Valdes has taken the pledge on behalf of b.well Connected Health to become a CMS-Aligned Network, and support its partners with patient facing apps to go live with two high-impact use cases: "Kill the Clipboard" and "Conversational AI". With Kill the Clipboard, we will not only integrate app developers to CLEAR digital identity services and help their consumer end users access and manage all their health data, we will help deliver a more seamless appointment check-in experience, sharing updates about their health and getting their appointment summary after they leave. With Conversational AI, app developers can leverage their users' semantically interoperable longitudinal health summary to help them interrogate their own data and make better health decisions, securely. We are thrilled to do this with our customers, many of whom took the pledge too. You can join this movement too. Read our press release, and see how to join b.well's CMS-Aligned Network.

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$835 million. That's what it took for Talkspace to find its exit. UHS announced it's officially acquiring the teletherapy company. On the surface, this looks like another digital health acquisition. But the structure tells a different story. UHS operates 340+ inpatient behavioral health facilities across 40 states. $17.4 billion in revenue last year. They own the bricks-and-mortar side of psychiatric care. Talkspace built the opposite: a purely digital outpatient therapy platform. $229 million in revenue. ~$7.8 million in profit. No facilities. Just screens. What's happening here is vertical integration across the behavioral health care continuum. Inpatient. Outpatient. Digital. Physical. The same patient who needs crisis stabilization in a UHS facility might need ongoing therapy through Talkspace six weeks later. Until now, those handoffs were fragmented; different systems, different providers, different workflows. This acquisition attempts to close that loop. This signals a broader pattern emerging in behavioral health tech. We spent the last decade building point solutions; teletherapy platforms, EHR overlays, billing tools, intake systems. Each solved a piece of the puzzle. But the cumulative effect was fragmentation. Now we're watching consolidation happen from multiple angles. Platforms are emerging that integrate functions into coherent systems rather than isolated tools. For operators in this space, the question shifts from "which tool should we adopt?" to "which system should we join?" And for the rest of healthtech, this raises a question worth sitting with: What would healthcare delivery look like if we stopped building pieces and started building systems, long term? 💭

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Looking back at 10 years of episodic care—how did it work out? Worth the read from Becker's Healthcare “No improvement in outcomes, no improvement in access, no improvement in equity, and paying out more money than the savings … it just does not seem to me to be worth it, though conceptually it makes good sense,” Karen Joynt Maddox, MD, MPH, a professor at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, said. "That dynamic created a problem for academic medical centers and safety-net hospitals treating more complex patients. A University of Florida study published in 2023 found that its CJR participation saved Medicare an estimated $16.4 million over five years while dramatically improving quality. Length of stay dropped 56%, readmissions fell from 17.7% to 5.1%, and complications decreased from 6.5% to 2%. Despite those results, the hospital was penalized more than $300,000 at the end of its participation. The authors attributed the penalty to benchmark changes and the removal of healthier patients from the CJR-eligible pool as joint replacements moved to outpatient settings."

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Has any Digital Health company in history hit 2M lives in 3 years or less in market? "You have to establish trust."↗↗↗↗ Hear Elan Adler 🩻 CEO and Founder of OneImaging walk us through their explosive growth over the last 3 years. Learn all about their mission, impact, how they help employees, while also saying money for employers! 💥 "It went from outbound, to getting inbound." Watch Here: https://lnkd.in/d5AnVx8n Listen here: https://lnkd.in/ga_TNNnZ

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