Cloud unicorn: Health Catalyst reaches $1 billion valuation sifting through hospitals' data
Health Catalyst, a data analytics provider to hospitals, has raised $100 million in debt and equity financing, tipping the Salt Lake City startup’s valuation to more than $1 billion, the company announced Thursday.
Hospitals use Health Catalyst’s software to link the data that they already have housed in a number of siloed databases, like the ones used to track insurance claims, patient satisfaction and, of course, the electronic health record. Once that data is linked, it’s analyzed to help hospitals find new insights into how their patients are receiving care and how much money they’re spending to do it.
“One of the parts of the secret sauce of Health Catalyst is we’re all very focused on making sure that data and analytics are a means—not an end—but a means to the end of a measurable improvement,” says Health Catalyst CEO Dan Burton. Read more from Michela Tindera on Forbes.
MAKING THE ROUNDS
A looming meeting with the Food and Drug Administration regarding retailer tobacco sales to young people is the latest pressure on Walgreens Boots Alliance to stop sales of cigarettes and other tobacco products altogether.
Verily, the healthcare company of Google’s parent Alphabet, is adding a nonprofit opioid addiction treatment initiative in Dayton, Ohio to its varied basket of programs that range from robotic surgery to diabetes care.
Value-based payment models now account for more than half of Cigna's reimbursements to medical care providers in its top 40 markets, the health insurer said Thursday. Rivals including Aetna and UnitedHealth Group say they’re also paying out more than half of their reimbursements to providers via value-based care models.
Humana says its joint venture with Walgreens Boots Alliance to put primary care clinics in drugstores is helping boost enrollment in Medicare Advantage, the fast-growing privately administered health coverage for U.S. seniors.
SLEEPER CELLS
Cancer is a disease of uncontrolled growth, as it’s popularly understood. The normal checks to cells’ proliferation are gone, and they grow into a tumor.
But over the past few decades scientists have been learning more about cancer cells that behave in a very uncancerlike way: They go “dormant” and hide in the body after the original tumor is removed until they reawaken, causing the cancer to come back and metastasize in other organs.
“It’s very antidogmatic,” says Julio Aguirre-Ghiso, director of solid tumor and metastasis research at New York City’s Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Standard cancer treatments target cells that are growing and dividing rapidly like typical cancer cells, but they miss dormant cells. Aguirre-Ghiso is the scientific founder of a new company, HiberCell, with its sights set on dormancy. Read more.
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