So what? We expect GoodRx’s IPO to serve as a launching point for deeper strategic expansion into telehealth and secondary revenue opportunities (e.g., the $30B TAM for pharmaceutical manufacturer solutions). GoodRx’s 2019 acquisition of HeyDoctor began enabling virtual consultations, prescription refills and patient self-education regarding medications. We expect GoodRx to use its IPO tailwinds to continue carving out its lane in telehealth. The Google and IPO cash infusions for Amwell are expected to fuel strategic development and help remain competitive with Teladoc’s rapidly evolving platform, with Amwell’s recent Google Cloud partnership perhaps offering a glimpse into the company’s nearest-term goals. The partnership aims to migrate video capabilities and leverage Google’s AI/ML and natural language processing capabilities to transform patient intake / management and patient experience. For reference, we’ve summarized Amwell vs. Teladoc head-to-head below. 

TLDR: Last week, Amazon unveiled its multi-sensor, screenless Halo Band wearable, set to enter the market at ~$70 including a 6-month subscription to Amazon Halo services. Halo Band is currently a consumer-grade wearable, as opposed to Apple and Samsung’s watches with FDA-cleared ECG capabilities (Fitbit still awaiting clearance). While Halo Band will incorporate core existing wearables features like activity and sleep tracking, Amazon consciously sought out a few points of differentiation. Halo Band will uniquely feature body fat percentage (BFP) scanning, vocal tone analysis for emotional health monitoring, and intensity and duration-weighted activity goals (e.g. compare to other wearables’ step-counting).    

So what? The historically consumer health-oriented wearables space has transformed into an arms race between tech giants aiming to offer medical-grade wearables. In the past year, Apple and Samsung successfully received clearance for the space’s “foothold” medical application — passive ECG monitoring for a-fib detection. While Fitbit awaits clearance and Amazon is newly entering the space, it’s undeniably that all of these giants have their sights set well beyond ECGs, including digital biomarker signatures for presymptomatic and asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 diagnosis, passive mental health monitoring a la Mindstrong Health (e.g., Amazon Halo tone analysis + activity / sleep monitoring), and pre- / post-surgical behavior monitoring and modification. These applications may represent just the tip of the iceberg for what we may see roll out in the coming years, catalyzed by heightened firsthand consumer experience and adoption of digital health technologies during COVID.      

TLDR: After Pear’s landmark FDA pre-cert clearance in March, the company launched an open-label clinical trial for patients with insomnia and comorbid insomnia-depression, along with two studies on the precursor solution before Somryst’s clearance. New data from one study (N=1,149) on that precursor shows validating efficacy after 9-week treatment, including improvement in sleep-onset latency, wake after sleep onset, total times woken, sleep efficiency, sleep quality, and total sleep time. The second study (N=151) focused on measuring longitudinal patient engagement, from which researchers were able to develop an algorithm for predicting treatment dropout with an AUC of up to 0.9.       

So what? The post-clearance (technically, “post-certification”) validation data corroborating Somryst’s efficacy and safety serves as a positive initial indicator for the FDA’s pre-cert program, which has drawn a fair deal of skepticism. Pear’s continued prospective data collection and validation additionally shows commitment to agile development / iteration of its “cleared” therapeutic based on novel patient-level data. Researchers identified several key indicators of intervention dropout, including average time to complete a treatment module, number of email support messages sent, and time to get out of bed after waking. These type of proactive, post-clearance real-world data studies focused on efficacy, safety, and engagement / utilization are key success factors for the FDA’s pre-cert program that may continue generating confidence in fast-tracked SaMD solutions.