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Prime to your prescriptions
This morning, Amazon introduced its newest play within the pharmacy enterprise: a subscription service referred to as RxPass. Clients with Prime memberships will be capable of pay $5 a month to fill as many prescriptions as they want from a listing of fifty generic medicine, together with antibiotics and drugs to deal with hypertension and acid reflux disease. It’s not clear how a lot of an affect a service like RxPass may have on treatment entry, as a result of most of the medicine in query are already low-cost, and this system doesn’t settle for insurance coverage.
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The trouble builds on final November’s launch of Amazon Clinic, a brand new enterprise line to compete with direct-to-consumer telehealth firms like Hims and Ro. That service permits sufferers to message with a third-party physician and get prescriptions for widespread circumstances like zits, allergy symptoms, and hair loss that may then be crammed via Amazon Pharmacy.
Maternal well being tech misses the individuals who want it probably the most
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I’ve been monitoring well being tech for underserved populations as a part of a sequence I’m doing for a USC’s Heart for Well being Journalism fellowship for a couple of months, and I’m excited to share the newest piece within the venture: a have a look at how distant affected person monitoring and telehealth will help flag harmful circumstances like gestational hypertension and preeclampsia earlier — and the way resistance from insurers and state Medicaid packages make it exhausting for sufferers to entry these companies.
Kathryn Marko of the George Washington well being system in D.C. instructed me that underserved maternal sufferers should overcome enormous boundaries attending to the dozen-or-so appointments they’re normally scheduled for — like discovering transportation, little one care, and protection at work. A lot of these sufferers stay in medical deserts, that means they need to usually journey nice distances. She’s working with Babyscripts, a D.C. startup, to supply digital blood strain cuffs and distant monitoring apps to these sufferers to cut back their burden.
These kind of companies give medical doctors extra touchpoints with sufferers, not much less, as a result of they’ll take their very own measurements each time’s most handy for them, Marko and different clinicians instructed me. Learn the complete story right here.
Mixing AI with human assist: What are the bounds in psychological well being?
There’s a fierce debate unfolding on-line about ChatGPT, GPT-3, and the position automation ought to have — if any — in psychological well being care assist. The dialogue revealed to me simply how little consultants agree in regards to the know-how’s prices and advantages, and tips on how to experiment on it: Whereas automation may probably offset main psychological well being supplier shortages by probably making peer-to-peer assist seem extra empathetic, the idea simply makes some individuals uncomfortable.
So I spoke to a few consultants, together with Rob Morris, whose Tweet thread describing an experiment on peer-to-peer assist platform Koko sparked the preliminary outcry. They instructed me we’re within the very early levels of exploring how AI could be responsibly utilized in psychological well being, and that there’ll possible be extra experimentation in coming years. Learn the entire story right here.
Ro delves deeper into weight reduction
As direct-to-consumer telehealth firms try and differentiate themselves from opponents in an more and more saturated market, price noting is Ro’s entry into weight reduction medicine — a area that’s successfully a ‘Wild West’ of on-line prescribers. The surging reputation for these weight reduction medicine — which additionally deal with diabetes — has led to nationwide shortages.
Final week Ro introduced plans to supply GLP-1 drugs together with at-home diagnostic testing and customized teaching as a part of its weight problems therapy, an effort to diversify past the ED, hair loss and fertility companies it initially provided.
Additionally in direct-to-consumer digital care, girls’s well being telehealth firm Favor — previously Tablet Membership — is returning to its earlier title following a trademark lawsuit, the Wall Road Journal experiences.
The most recent launches and funding
- Psychological well being assist chatbot firm Woebot Well beinghas enrolled its first affected person in a medical trial evaluating a device for postpartum despair. That device, referred to as WB001, obtained FDA breakthrough gadget designation in 2021.
- Wolters Kluwer Well beingandLaerdal Medical have a brand new virtual-reality product that simulates a hospital surroundings for nursing coaching.
- Medical gadget cybersecurity firm MedCrypthas raised a Collection B funding spherical led by Dexcom Ventures, bringing whole funding to $36.4 million. Johnson & Johnson Improvementshas additionally backed the corporate.
- Medi-Cal members on Blue Protect of California Promise Well being Planscan now entry psychological well being assist, power situation and illness prevention teaching, and smoking cessation companies via an all referred to as Wellvolution.
- The HLTH Basishas fashioned a brand new Techquity for Well being Coalition, which is operating a survey on well being tech fairness and whose outcomes shall be introduced on the ViVE convention in March.
- Toby Cosgrove,who previously led Cleveland Clinic, is becoming a member of digital care know-how firmMemora Well being as a strategic advisor, together with UC Davis Well being’s present CEO David Lubarsky.
