So what? The Roche-PicnicHealth partnership is one of a growing string of investments by pharma in the real-world data space, and aligns with Roche / Genentech’s first digital health moves in multiple sclerosis with Floodlight Open. Roche’s $2B acquisition of Flatiron in 2018 set an industry standard for the tremendous value associated with real-world data in the eyes of big pharma. Several pharma partnerships (e.g., Amgen-Syapse, Novartis-Cota, Sanofi-Aetion, BMS-Concerto HealthAI) have emerged over the past few years, aiming to leverage real-world data across the drug lifecycle, from discovery to clinical trials to label expansion. Existing partnerships and the Roche-PicnicHealth engagement point to longitudinal data capture and analysis of unstructured data fields as key differentiators of RWE players. These differentiators will likely continue to drive pharma partnerships, based on pharma’s vested interest in discovering valuable insights around disease progression, treatment history and clinical outcomes. 

TLDR: Vitls, a Houston-based start-up launched by a husband-wife duo looking for an improved RPM solution for their son with febrile seizures, received FDA approval for its Tégo vitals monitoring patch. The disposable adhesive patch measures heart and respiration rates,  heart rate variability, body temperature, and blood oxygenation (SpO2) and has a 6-day battery life. Vitls plans to commercialize their technology in Q3. 

So what? A growing number of RPM players are riding the wave of attention, funding, and eased regulatory scrutiny for RPM technologies to meet the COVID-generated need. As simple digitized / remote reporting of biometrics has won trust and broader acceptance from the public, RPM players have begun increasingly looking to incorporate multiple RPM / wearables-based biomarkers into digital signatures that may also be able to predict or detect early disease or add prognostic or monitoring value beyond simply enabling remote measurement of markers that could be read non-digitally.  Accordingly, the RPM space, traditionally dominated by device manufacturers, has begun evolving to require applied analytics and multi-source integration capabilities to capture the larger share of the total addressable market. Among these emerging innovators are “integrated signals” companies like VivifyHealth, Validic, and Human API, which may look to bring device companies like Vitls into their platforms. 

TLDR: Leveraging technology partner CloudMedx’s AI capabilities, Anthem has launched its C19 Explorer, C19 Privileged, and C19 Navigator COVID tracking and decision-making solutions for the public, government policy-makers, and Anthem employer groups, respectively. The solutions leverage aggregated public data (e.g., cases, test volumes, hospital bed / ICU utilization, economic performance) and proprietary data (e.g., Anthem claims / member data, level of “social mobility” / adherence to stay-at-home orders, scenario-based modeling outputs for staff and public testing thresholds required for public or workplace re-opening). See here for Anthem’s full webinar walkthrough of the tool.

So what? As COVID cases rapidly climb in states and locales attempting soft re-openings, local and state governments and employers have expressed urgent need for a broad toolkit of solutions that help aggregate, predictively model, and support decision-making for best-practices in managing future attempts at public and workplace re-openings. The Anthem tool provides open-source public information and education while opening a commercial revenue stream for the payor and opportunity to harvest utilization data to prospectively monitor government and employer decision-making.